Automation

Zapier, Make, Power Automate or n8n: which suits a small business

All four connect your apps so that one thing happening in one of them makes something happen in another. They differ in what they charge for, where they run, and how much they expect you to know.

By Oscar CobbeCurrent as at 29 October 20262 minute read5 sources

Published prices, side by side

As each published them on 29 October 2026, in its own currency and on its own billing basis.

Tool	Free	Entry paid plan	What it counts
Zapier	100 tasks a month, two-step Zaps only	Pro: $19.99 a month billed annually ($29.99 monthly), from 750 tasks	Tasks: each action a Zap completes
Make	1,000 credits a month	Core, Pro and Teams; no prices shown on the page we read	Credits: most actions use one
n8n	Community Edition, self-hosted, free	Starter: €20 a month billed annually, 2,500 executions	Executions: one per workflow run, however many steps
Power Automate	A trial	Premium: €13.00 per user a month, paid yearly, excluding VAT	Users, or bots for unattended automation (€130.00 per bot a month)

What a price counts decides what it costs

A workflow with five steps that runs 200 times a month is 1,000 Zapier tasks (one for each action), around 1,000 Make credits, and 200 n8n executions. The cheapest tool depends on the shape of your workflows, not the headline price.

Which fits which business

Which one fits depends on the business. In short:

1Zapier: priced per task, so cheap to start and dearer as volume grows, because every action a Zap completes is a task.
2Make: a visual builder priced by credits, with a bigger free allowance than Zapier's: 1,000 credits a month against 100 tasks.
3n8n: priced per run, not per step, and free to run on your own server, which suits long workflows and businesses with someone technical. Self-hosted means you keep it running and secure.
4Power Automate: Microsoft's own, built around Microsoft 365, priced per user or per bot. Microsoft's pricing page points to its licensing guide for what other Microsoft licences already include.

What none of them does for you

Each tool runs what you build in it. None of them decides which system holds the master copy of the data or writes down what the automation does with personal data, and each has to be set up to tell the right person when a run fails. Those are the parts that decide whether an automation is still working in a year.

If an automation uses personal data, the GDPR treats it like any other use of that data: what has to be written down first. And if it makes decisions about people on its own, Article 22 of the GDPR adds rules of its own.

Before you pick a tool

Pick the task first. The automation savings calculator works out what a repeated task costs you a year and how long a build would take to pay for itself, and what to automate first is about choosing which one. The tool's monthly charge goes into the calculator as a cost against the saving.

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Your task, how long it takes and how often; the hours and money it costs a year, and how long an automation would take to pay back, with the tool's own charge counted.

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Build joins your systems and automates the jobs that repeat, in whichever tool suits them, and every automation retries and alerts a person when it fails. €1,500 for one connection, €3,000 for up to five workflows.

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Who wrote this

Oscar Cobbe · Founder, FourWinds Digital

Writes and maintains the legal explainers on this site, and does the compliance work behind them. Every date and article number here is checked against the legislation itself before it is published, and each article shows the date it was last checked.

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