n8n vs Zapier for AI Agents in 2026: A Workflow That Costs a Small Business $193.50 a Month on Zapier Costs $24 on n8n, or $0 in Licence Fees Self-Hosted

The short answer

Short answer, prices read on 30 September 2026: if you run a small business on Zapier and your workflows have several action steps, n8n bills the same work for a fraction of the price, because the two count different things. Zapier bills every action step as a task. n8n bills a whole workflow run as one execution. A trigger with 5 actions, run 2,000 times a month, is 10,000 Zapier tasks: $193.50 a month on Professional billed monthly. On n8n it is 2,000 executions, which fits n8n Cloud Starter at $24 a month, or costs $0 in licence fees on the self-hosted Community Edition. That is $2,034 a year saved against n8n Cloud, before you add an AI agent, which Zapier meters on a second bill.

Where it runs	2,000 runs x 5 actions costs	Billed monthly	Billed annually
Zapier Professional	10,000 tasks	$193.50 a month	$129 a month
n8n Cloud Starter	2,000 executions	$24 a month	$20 a month
n8n Community Edition, self-hosted	2,000 executions	$0 licence, plus your server	$0 licence, plus your server

Self-hosting has a catch that the headline number hides: n8n’s licence lets you run it for your own business, not resell it as a service. The licence section below spells it out, and hosting is a line you add yourself, because we did not price a server for this page.

Why the two bills differ: tasks against executions

Both vendors define their unit in their own words. Zapier’s help center: “A task is any successful action that runs in Zapier.” Its pricing page says it never charges a task to check for new data, and the help center lists the steps that are free: all trigger steps, Filter and Paths steps, failed or halted steps, Formatter, Delay, Looping, Digest, Storage, Zapier Tables and Forms. So a Zap with 1 trigger and 5 successful app actions uses 5 tasks every time it runs.

n8n’s pricing page: “Pricing based on monthly workflow executions, regardless of complexity.” Every plan card lists “workflow executions with unlimited steps”, and n8n says you “only pay when a workflow runs from start to finish”. The same 5-action workflow is 1 execution per run, and so is a 20-action one.

That is the whole difference. The more steps a workflow has, the further apart the two bills get. With 1 action per run the meters count the same number, and the first row below shows the two prices $0.01 apart on annual billing.

What four workloads cost on each

We took each vendor’s smallest plan that covers the workload. Zapier rows use Professional; n8n rows use n8n Cloud. Savings are Zapier minus n8n Cloud, on the same billing cycle. Self-hosted n8n would remove the n8n price and add your server.

Workload	Zapier Professional, billed monthly	n8n Cloud, billed monthly	Zapier minus n8n
A form or email trigger with 1 action, 750 runs a month	750 tasks: $29.99 ($19.99 annual)	750 executions, Starter: $24 ($20 annual)	$5.99 a month (Zapier $0.01 lower annual)
A trigger with 5 app actions, such as enrich a lead, update the CRM, email the rep, post to Slack, log a row, 2,000 runs a month	10,000 tasks: $193.50 ($129 annual)	2,000 executions, Starter: $24 ($20 annual)	$169.50 a month ($109 annual)
A trigger with 10 actions, 2,000 runs a month	20,000 tasks: $283.50 ($189 annual)	2,000 executions, Starter: $24 ($20 annual)	$259.50 a month ($169 annual)
A trigger with 5 actions at higher volume, 8,000 runs a month	40,000 tasks: $433.50 ($289 annual)	8,000 executions, Pro: $60 ($50 annual)	$373.50 a month ($239 annual)

Read the first row before you migrate. A one-action workflow at 750 runs costs $19.99 a month on Zapier and $20 on n8n Cloud, both billed annually: a $0.01 difference in Zapier’s favour. The saving only appears once workflows have several actions, and it grows with every action you add. At 8,000 runs of 5 actions, Zapier needs its 50,000-task tier at $433.50 a month while n8n Cloud Pro covers it at $60.

Zapier’s prices, tier by tier

Zapier Free is $0 for 100 tasks a month, limited to two-step Zaps: one trigger and one action. Paid plans are sold by task volume, and annual billing carries a “Save 33%” badge; at 10,000 tasks the annual rate is 33.3% below monthly. Team adds shared Zaps and app connections for up to 25 users.

Tasks a month	Professional, monthly billing	Professional, annual billing	Team, monthly billing	Team, annual billing
750	$29.99	$19.99	Team starts at 2,000	Team starts at 2,000
1,500	$58.50	$39	Team starts at 2,000	Team starts at 2,000
2,000	$73.50	$49	$103.50	$69
5,000	$133.50	$89	$178.50	$119
10,000	$193.50	$129	$253.50	$169
20,000	$283.50	$189	$373.50	$249
50,000	$433.50	$289	$598.50	$399

One more Zapier meter matters if you drive Zapier from an AI assistant: its help center rates Zapier MCP at 2 tasks per successful tool call.

n8n’s prices, and what free means

n8n sells three hosted or licensed plans with published prices and an Enterprise tier on quote. Annual billing shows a “Save 17%” badge. A US browser is shown dollars; the same page served euros to our 28 September read, so check the currency you are quoted.

Plan	Executions a month	Billed monthly	Billed annually	Where it runs
Starter	2,500	$24 a month	$20 a month	Hosted by n8n
Pro	10,000	$60 a month	$50 a month	Hosted by n8n
Business	40,000	$960 a month	$800 a month	Self-hosted only
Community Edition	No plan limit	$0	$0	Self-hosted, from GitHub

The free option is the Community Edition. In n8n’s words: “A standard, self-hosted version of n8n is available on GitHub.” The cloud plans start with a trial that needs no credit card. On GitHub the n8n repository had 206,364 stars and a push on 30 September 2026, so it is actively maintained.

The licence: source available, free to self-host for your own business

n8n is not open source in the sense most buyers mean. Its code is published under the Sustainable Use License 1.0, which lets you use or modify it “only for your own internal business purposes or for non-commercial or personal use”. Running your own automations on your own server is inside that. Selling n8n itself as a hosted service to customers is not, and source files with .ee. in the name need a separate n8n Enterprise License. GitHub’s licence detector shows NOASSERTION for the repository, which is why we read the file itself. Our audit of open source alternatives found the same pattern across other tools.

Adding an AI agent: a second meter on Zapier, the same meter on n8n

Zapier Agents does not spend tasks. Zapier’s help center: “An activity is any billable action that your agent takes.” One activity is a trigger, an answer from a knowledge source, an action, a web browsing or scraping request, a web search, or a message sent from the Chrome extension. Activities are a separate monthly quota with a separate price, and a cap on how many one run can use.

Zapier Agents plan	Activities a month	Cap per run	Billed monthly	Billed annually
Free	400	10	$0	$0
Pro	1,500	40	$50 a month	$33.33 a month ($400 a year)
Enterprise	Custom	40	Quote	Quote

When the quota runs out, Zapier’s agents stop running actions, searches and triggers until the billing date; chat still works, and Zapier emails at 80% and 100% of the limit.

n8n has no second meter. Its AI Agent node connects a chat model and tools, and “the agent decides which tools to call to complete a task”. n8n’s plan table says “Each agent turn counts as one execution”, and Starter includes agents, MCP and AI nodes. Two limits apply on n8n Cloud: Starter stops any single execution after 5 minutes and runs 5 at once, against 40 minutes and 20 on Pro 10k. Self-hosted, n8n’s plan table says you set the duration limit yourself. The agent still needs a chat model, and we did not price model usage on either platform; our break-even for self-hosting a model covers running that part yourself.

Worked example. Add an agent to the 2,000-run workflow above that answers 300 requests a month, each using 5 activities on Zapier, say 1 knowledge lookup, 3 actions and 1 web search. That is 1,500 activities, exactly Agents Pro. If each request is one agent turn on n8n, it adds 300 executions.

	Zapier	n8n Cloud
Workflow	Professional 10,000 tasks: $193.50	2,000 executions
Agent	Agents Pro 1,500 activities: $50	300 more executions
Total, billed monthly	$243.50 a month	2,300 executions, Starter: $24 a month
Total, billed annually	$162.33 a month	$20 a month

When Zapier is still the right bill

• Short workflows at low volume. With 1 action per run the meters count alike, and 750 runs cost $19.99 on Zapier against $20 on n8n Cloud, annual billing.
• No one to run a server. The $0 n8n figure assumes someone installs, updates and backs up the Community Edition. n8n Cloud removes that job and keeps 87.6% of the saving on the 2,000-run workload, billed monthly.
• An app n8n does not reach. Zapier says it connects 9,000+ apps. Check that each app in your workflow has a node in n8n before you price the move.
• You want to offer n8n itself to customers. The Sustainable Use License allows giving the software to others only free of charge for non-commercial purposes, so talk to n8n before you build a paid service on it.

Where Make fits

Make is the third name in Google’s questions for this search. It meters per step, like Zapier: “Each module action in your scenario … counts as one credit.” But each step costs far less. 10,000 Make credits cost $16 a month on Core billed monthly ($12 annually), against $193.50 for 10,000 Zapier tasks, so on short scenarios Make can come in under n8n Cloud Starter at $24. Free gives 1,000 credits with a 15-minute minimum between runs. We did not price a Make workload here, because its pricing page does not say whether the trigger module uses a credit on each run.

Make plan, 10,000 credits	Billed monthly	Billed annually
Core	$16 a month	$12 a month
Pro	$28 a month	$21 a month
Teams	$51 a month	$38 a month

How we priced this

Every price was read on 30 September 2026 on the vendor’s own page in a rendered browser set to a US visitor, with the monthly and annual toggles flipped, and cross-checked against the plan data in the page source. Definitions of a task, an execution and an activity are quoted from each vendor. Workload totals are arithmetic on those prices, not a bill we paid. We did not price hosting, model tokens or any plan the workloads do not need, and we quote no third-party cost tables. Scores in the boxes above come from our desk review rubric and do not change with this article.

Related reading on this site

• Open source alternatives to paid AI tools: the same licence test applied to other paid AI tools.
• Self-hosting an LLM against paying per token: when running your own model beats paying per token.
• Open source AI tools you can self-host: what self-hostable repositories replace, tool by tool.

Questions people ask about n8n and Zapier

Can Zapier replace n8n?

It runs the same kind of trigger and action workflows, at a higher price once they have several steps. Zapier charges a task per action; n8n charges one execution per run. A trigger with 5 actions run 2,000 times a month costs $193.50 a month on Zapier Professional and $24 on n8n Cloud Starter, both billed monthly, at prices read on 30 September 2026. What Zapier gives back for the difference is a managed service with nothing to install.

Which is better, n8n or Make or Zapier?

They meter different things. Zapier counts each successful action as a task, Make counts each module action as a credit, and n8n counts a whole run as one execution. Per step, Zapier costs more: 10,000 tasks are $193.50 a month on Professional billed monthly, 10,000 Make credits $16 on Core. n8n Cloud Starter is $24 for 2,500 runs of any length, so the more steps per run, the more n8n’s meter favours you. Prices read on 30 September 2026.

Is anything better than n8n?

For long workflows, not on the meter: of the 3 platforms priced here on 30 September 2026, n8n is the one that bills a run of any length as 1 unit. For short scenarios Make can cost less, at $16 a month for 10,000 credits on Core billed monthly. Zapier is simpler if nobody on the team will run a server, and it says it connects 9,000+ apps. n8n’s licence also limits you to internal business use.

Is n8n outdated?

No. The n8n repository on GitHub had 206,364 stars and was pushed on 30 September 2026, and n8n’s Starter plan includes agents, MCP and AI nodes. Its AI Agent node lets a chat model pick which connected tools to call.

Is n8n free?

The self-hosted Community Edition is free to download and run for your own business, under the Sustainable Use License 1.0, which limits use to internal business, non-commercial or personal purposes. n8n Cloud starts at $24 a month billed monthly or $20 billed annually for 2,500 executions, as of 30 September 2026.

How much do Zapier Agents cost?

Agents Free includes 400 activities a month. Agents Pro is $50 a month billed monthly or $400 a year ($33.33 a month) for 1,500 activities, capped at 40 per run. That is on top of any Zapier plan: agent activities do not use tasks. Prices read on 30 September 2026.

Does an AI agent in n8n use executions?

Yes. n8n’s plan table says each agent turn counts as one execution, and its plans count executions with unlimited steps, so tool calls inside a turn are not billed one by one. On Starter a single execution stops after 5 minutes; on Pro the limit is 40 minutes, and self-hosted you set it. Read on 30 September 2026.

Sources

1. Zapier plans and pricing, read 30 September 2026.
2. Zapier help center: How is task usage measured in Zapier?, read 30 September 2026.
3. Zapier help center: How is Zapier Agents usage measured?, read 30 September 2026.
4. n8n plans and pricing, read 30 September 2026.
5. n8n LICENSE.md on GitHub (Sustainable Use License), read 30 September 2026.
6. GitHub REST API, n8n-io/n8n repository, read 30 September 2026.
7. n8n docs: AI Agent node, read 30 September 2026.
8. Make plans and pricing, read 30 September 2026.