Head-to-head comparison
Make and n8n both give you a visual workflow canvas. The real difference is who runs the infrastructure — and what that does to your bill and your data.
For most businesses Make wins on time-to-value — no servers, more integrations, faster builds. Developers who want zero per-execution cost and full data control should take n8n.
Try MakeFrom $9/mo
Fully managed visual automation with 2,000+ integrations, routers, iterators and zero maintenance.
Free self-hosted
Open-source workflow automation you can self-host — unlimited executions, full JavaScript nodes and total data control.
| Feature | Make | n8n |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | From $9/mo (cloud) | Free self-hosted / paid cloud |
| Hosting | Managed by Make | Self-host or n8n cloud |
| Integrations | ~2,000 apps | ~400 nodes + HTTP |
| Custom code | Limited functions | Full JS/Python nodes |
| Data residency | Make's cloud | Your servers |
| AI / LLM workflows | Good | Excellent (agent nodes) |
| Maintenance burden | None | You own it |
You want automations working this afternoon without touching a server, and you value integration breadth over infrastructure control.
You have technical resources, care about data privacy or compliance, run very high execution volume, or you're building AI agent workflows with custom code.
Self-hosted n8n is free under its fair-code license — you pay only for the server. n8n Cloud is a paid managed service.
Setup is harder because you host it. Once running, the canvas is comparable, though n8n leans more technical and expects comfort with JSON.
n8n — it ships dedicated LLM and agent nodes and lets you drop in arbitrary code, which makes bespoke AI pipelines much easier.
Up to a point. Once you're running hundreds of thousands of operations a month, self-hosted n8n is almost always cheaper.
