Zapier vs Make vs n8n, or custom built?
It depends on your experience. The visual tools look easy, but changing them is not, self-hosting has real costs, and hosted plans add up fast. Andrei on when n8n or Zapier is the right call and when custom wins.
This depends a lot on how much experience someone has with programming and automation.
For most people, even n8n, Zapier and Power Automate are out of reach if they don't understand how HTML works, how authentication works, how information gets passed from one step to the next, and the different file types. Without that, it isn't simple.
They do look nice, though. n8n and Zapier give you a really good visual picture of the flow. That gives you something to anchor on, compared with a pile of code spread across different lines and files, so in that sense it does make things easier.
If you have some office experience, you're tech-savvy and you understand the basics, the gap isn't that big, especially if you're happy to Google and research what you want to do. The trouble comes when you want to change something. It's often not as simple as swapping one node for another. The tools have improved a lot, though. There are things now that make it easier, like an MCP for Claude or Codex, and AI assistance built into n8n itself.
The other question is where it runs. If you look at it as paying per automation, and each one costs cents, it looks very attractive. Run it on your own hardware and you keep your data and your data residency, which helps you meet data residency requirements. But then you have to think about encryption in transit, encryption at rest, storage, equipment, networking and internet uptime. What happens when the server needs an update? What happens when there's a security update and you don't even know about it? You pay for the server upfront and have to work out what it costs to run each year. Do you have an uninterrupted power supply? I wouldn't recommend it for a small business. If you're really in a pinch, you could run it on a small computer like a Mac Mini, but that isn't ideal. It depends on what you're running and how critical it is.
Then there are the integrations. In my experience, some of the nodes have issues and don't let you do everything as smoothly as you'd expect. There can be limitations, and you end up with odd workarounds and checking community nodes. It's not as simple as it looks. That's if you self-host n8n.
Then there's hosted. You don't need your own equipment, because they run it for you. But it starts costing quite a lot per month or per automation. If your business relies heavily on automations, the costs add up fast. A freight forwarder I know needs to extract around 700,000 transactions a month, and that's just one of his workflows. At that point it's easier to run your own hardware, or to develop custom software to do it.
Custom software will always win out in the end, and even small changes to it are easier if the person knows what they're doing. The only time I'd recommend n8n or Zapier is when someone already has experience with tools like Power Automate, has an intermediate level of computer literacy, and refuses to dabble in software development or hire someone to do it.
