Make vs n8n: which automation platform in 2026?
Make is the better first platform for most teams: $9 a month covers 10,000 operations, the visual builder is friendly, and everything runs managed in the EU. n8n wins on economics and control the moment volume grows or data gets sensitive: self-hosted, it runs unlimited executions for the price of a small server.
Data checked:
TL;DR verdict
Pick Make for managed simplicity under roughly 10,000 operations a month. Pick n8n when you run high volume, need data on your own servers, or build AI-heavy workflows: one execution covers a whole run, however many steps it has.
| Make | n8n | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry paid plan | $9/mo (Core) | €20/mo (Cloud Starter) |
| What it includes | 10,000 credits (1 credit ≈ 1 module operation) | 2,500 workflow executions, unlimited steps per run |
| Free option | 1,000 credits/mo, 2 active scenarios, 15-min interval | Community Edition: self-hosted, unlimited executions |
| Self-hosted cost | Not available | From ~€5/mo for a VPS, executions unlimited |
| Billing unit | Per module operation | Per workflow execution |
| Data location | Managed EU cloud (Czechia, Germany) | Wherever you host it |
| Learning curve | Visual canvas, gentle | Steeper; JS/Python code nodes when needed |
| AI workflows | AI modules available | Native LangChain and agent nodes |
| License | Proprietary SaaS | Fair-code (source-available) |
Sources: Make pricing · n8n pricing · data checked: Jul 18, 2026
Which we'd pick, scenario by scenario
A 5-person services firm, ~3,000 ops a month
Make. The Core plan covers it with headroom, there is nothing to maintain, and the visual canvas means a non-developer can fix a broken scenario on a Friday afternoon.
E-commerce doing 50,000+ operations a month
n8n, self-hosted. On Make this volume means climbing credit tiers every quarter; on n8n it is the same flat server bill whether you run 50,000 or 500,000.
AI agents touching customer data
n8n. Its LangChain nodes are the most mature of the mainstream platforms, and self-hosting keeps prompts and customer data inside your infrastructure, which makes GDPR reviews shorter.
Our take
The honest version of this choice is about who fixes things at 9pm. Make is a managed product: when a scenario fails, you re-run it from a clean UI and move on. Self-hosted n8n is your server: updates, backups and monitoring are on you, and more than one team discovers that mid-incident. So our default recommendation cuts by team, not by feature list. If nobody on staff runs servers, Make’s fee is cheaper than learning DevOps under pressure. If you have that person, or an agency running the instance for you, n8n’s flat cost compounds as volume grows: past a certain scale Make would cost multiples of the n8n server bill without adding a feature you would notice. Migration between them is real work but not a rewrite: triggers and HTTP calls map one to one, and we move the highest-volume workflows first. The three-way maths, including Zapier, is in our Make vs n8n vs Zapier guide.