A UK agency running 50,000 automation tasks per month pays Zapier £940. The same workload on a self-hosted n8n instance costs about £20 in server fees. That is not a typo. That is the cost of picking the wrong automation platform and never revisiting the decision.
The workflow automation market in 2026 is a three-horse race between Make (formerly Integromat), Zapier, and n8n. Each one has a legitimate claim to being the best, and each one will happily take your money while you figure out which claim applies to your situation. This comparison cuts through the marketing and lays out what actually matters: pricing at your real task volume, the learning curve your team will actually tolerate, and the compliance requirements your clients actually enforce.
The pricing cliff nobody talks about
Zapier charges per task. Every action step in a Zap counts as one task, regardless of complexity. A five-step workflow that runs 1,000 times costs 5,000 tasks. At low volumes this is fine — the Starter plan is about £20 per month and covers most side projects and small teams. But the pricing scales linearly, and it scales fast. At 50,000 tasks per month you are looking at £940. At 100,000 tasks the number gets uncomfortable to put in writing.
Make uses an operations-based model where each action in a scenario counts as one operation. The distinction sounds pedantic until you see the bill. Make's pricing for most small and mid-sized businesses lands between £9 and £29 per month. The key difference is that Make's plan structures give you more operations per pound at every tier, and complex multi-step workflows do not punish you the way Zapier's task counting does.
n8n is the outlier. The cloud version costs about £20 per month, but the self-hosted version — which is fully open source — costs only whatever you pay for a VPS. A basic DigitalOcean or Hetzner box at £15 to £25 per month handles tens of thousands of executions. The catch is that you are your own sysadmin. You handle updates, backups, uptime, and security patches. For a technical team, this is trivial. For a solo business owner who just wants invoices to sync, it is a non-starter.
The real learning curve
Zapier's interface is a linear step-by-step builder. You pick a trigger, add actions, and configure each one in sequence. A non-technical employee can build a working Zap in twenty minutes. This is Zapier's genuine competitive advantage: it is the only automation tool that does not require you to think like a developer. The tradeoff is that this simplicity breaks down when you need branching logic, error handling, or data transformation between steps. You can do those things in Zapier, but the workarounds feel like duct tape.
Make gives you a visual canvas where you can see the entire data flow at once. Modules connect with lines, routers split paths, and error handlers sit alongside the main flow. It is more powerful than Zapier's linear model without being dramatically harder to learn. Most people who have used a flowchart tool can get comfortable with Make in a few hours. The documentation is solid, and the community has published thousands of scenario templates.
n8n is the most technical of the three. You work with nodes and JSON data flows, and building complex automations requires comfort with data structures, API authentication, and sometimes debugging raw HTTP responses. The interface has improved significantly in 2026, but it is still a tool built by developers for developers. If your team does not have someone who reads JSON without flinching, n8n will create more problems than it solves.
Data residency and compliance
This is where the comparison gets interesting for anyone handling client data in regulated industries. Zapier's infrastructure is primarily US-based. If you are a UK business subject to GDPR, your automation data transiting through US servers introduces a compliance question that your DPO will need to answer.
Make offers EU and UK data regions on paid plans. Your scenario data stays in the region you select. For most UK businesses this is sufficient, and it is one of the reasons Make has become the default recommendation for UK agencies.
n8n self-hosted is the nuclear option for compliance: your data never leaves your own infrastructure. You choose the server location, you control the access logs, and you can point to a specific machine in a specific data center when a client asks where their data lives. For healthcare, legal, and financial services businesses, this is not a nice-to-have. It is a procurement requirement.
So which one should you pick
If you are a non-technical team that needs simple integrations running today, start with Zapier. You will pay a premium for the simplicity, but your team will actually use it, which is worth more than a cheaper tool that sits unused.
If you are an agency or a small business running complex multi-step workflows, Make is the sweet spot. The pricing is fair, the visual builder handles real-world complexity, and the UK data region keeps your compliance team quiet.
If you have a technical team, care about cost at scale, or operate in a regulated industry where data residency is non-negotiable, n8n self-hosted wins on every axis except the one where you need someone to maintain it.
The wrong answer is the one you picked two years ago and never reconsidered. The automation landscape moves fast, and the tool that was cheapest at 1,000 tasks might be the most expensive at 50,000. Check your current task volume. Do the math. Switch if the math says switch.