n8n vs Zapier Pricing: The Real Cost Math (2026)
Zapier bills per step, n8n bills per workflow run. That single difference decides your bill — here's the worked math, current prices, and where each one wins.
By Ali Ilyas · · Updated August 25, 2026
Comparing these two on headline price gets you the wrong answer, because they don't sell the same unit.
Zapier bills you per task — roughly, per action step that succeeds. n8n bills you per execution — one whole workflow run, however many steps it contains. Two plans can look similar on the pricing page and differ by 10× on your actual bill, in either direction, depending entirely on the shape of your workflows.
This page does the math properly with current published prices, then covers the parts that don't show up in a spreadsheet.
What's on this page
- The one difference that decides everything
- Current prices, side by side
- What Zapier counts as a task
- What n8n counts as an execution
- Worked example: 1,000 orders a month
- Where the crossover sits
- The self-hosted option changes the question
- Costs that aren't on either pricing page
- Migrating, realistically
- Which one is actually cheaper for you
- Frequently asked questions
The one difference that decides everything
Take a single automation: an order arrives, you look up the customer, format an address, write a row to a spreadsheet, send a confirmation email, and post to Slack.
On Zapier, each successful action consumes a task. The lookup, the spreadsheet write, the email, the Slack post — four tasks per order. (Formatting via Zapier's own built-in tools is free, which we'll get to.)
On n8n, that entire chain is one execution. Four steps or forty, the count is the same.
So the ratio you care about is actions per workflow. A one-action Zap and a one-action n8n workflow are priced comparably. A twelve-action workflow is not remotely comparable — and complex workflows are exactly what people build once automation starts carrying real weight.
That's the whole comparison. Everything below is detail.
Current prices, side by side
Published rates as of 2026-08-25. n8n quotes in euros and Zapier in dollars, which is itself worth noting — these are not directly convertible comparisons, and both change.
n8n Cloud (billed annually):
| Plan | Price | Executions/mo | Concurrent |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | €20/mo | 2,500 | 5 |
| Pro | €50/mo | 10,000 | 20 |
| Business | €667/mo | 40,000 | — |
| Enterprise | Contact sales | Custom | 200+ |
Steps per execution are unlimited on every plan.
Zapier (annual billing, monthly is roughly 50% higher):
| Plan | Price | Tasks/mo | Multi-step |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 100 | No — two-step Zaps only |
| Professional | $19.99/mo | 750 | Yes |
| Professional | $49/mo | 2,000 | Yes |
| Team | $69/mo | 2,000 | Yes, up to 25 users |
Zapier's Professional and Team tiers scale continuously by task volume rather than sitting at fixed points; the rows above are the entry rungs.
Note the free tiers. Zapier's free plan is 100 tasks and two-step Zaps only — meaning trigger plus one action, so anything with a condition or a second destination is off the table. n8n's Community edition, self-hosted, is free with no execution cap at all. Those are not comparable offerings, and the difference matters more than any paid tier.
What Zapier counts as a task
This is where the headline numbers get misleading in Zapier's favour, so it's worth being precise.
A task is counted "whenever Zapier successfully completes a unit of work". What that includes and excludes:
Counted: each successful action step, AI operations, Code steps, and programmatic access through Zapier MCP.
Not counted: triggers, polling for new data, and Zapier's own built-in tools — Formatter, Paths, Filter, Delay, Looping, Sub-Zap, Digest, Zapier Manager, Storage, Tables, and Forms.
Failed actions are not counted, which is a genuinely fair policy and better than it sounds.
That exclusion list is substantial. A Zap that triggers, filters, formats a date, branches on a path, and then writes one row costs one task, not five. If your automations are mostly routing and reshaping with a single write at the end, Zapier's per-task model is much kinder than the raw arithmetic suggests.
The flip side: any step that touches an external service counts. Five API calls is five tasks, every time the Zap runs.
What n8n counts as an execution
Simpler, and n8n states it plainly: "An execution is a single run of your entire workflow. It doesn't matter how many steps are in the workflow or how much data it processes."
Two consequences worth internalising.
Item count doesn't matter either. A workflow that processes 500 spreadsheet rows in one run is one execution — even though, because nodes iterate over items automatically, the nodes inside it ran 500 times each. Batch-shaped work is dramatically cheaper here.
But each run of a sub-workflow counts. If you've split logic into a sub-workflow called by a parent, each call is its own execution. Splitting for tidiness has a billing consequence on Cloud that it doesn't have when self-hosted.
The thing you're constrained by on n8n Cloud isn't usually the execution count — it's concurrency. Five simultaneous executions on Starter is a real ceiling if you have a webhook receiving bursts, and it's the limit people hit first.
Worked example: 1,000 orders a month
Same automation on both platforms. An order webhook fires, the workflow looks up the customer in a CRM, writes a row to Sheets, sends a confirmation email, and posts to Slack. One condition in the middle skips the Slack post for small orders.
Zapier: the trigger is free, the filter is free. The CRM lookup, the Sheets write, the email, and (for 60% of orders) the Slack post are billed.
- 1,000 × 3 always-run actions = 3,000 tasks
- 600 × 1 conditional action = 600 tasks
- 3,600 tasks/month
At 2,000 tasks for $49/mo, 3,600 puts you on the next rung up — call it the ~5,000-task tier, in the region of $80–100/mo annually billed.
n8n Cloud: 1,000 webhook events = 1,000 executions. That fits inside Starter at €20/mo with 1,500 executions to spare.
The gap is roughly 4–5× for this workload, and it widens with every action you add. Add two more integrations and Zapier's number goes to 5,600 tasks while n8n's stays at exactly 1,000.
Now invert it. A daily workflow that pulls 5,000 rows and updates a database:
- n8n: 30 executions/month. Trivially inside the free self-hosted tier or the cheapest Cloud plan.
- Zapier: each row is an action. 150,000 tasks/month, which is enterprise-tier pricing.
And the case where Zapier wins:
- A single-action Zap firing 700 times a month — trigger, one write, nothing else — sits inside Zapier's $19.99 tier. The equivalent 700 executions also fit inside n8n's €20 Starter. Roughly a wash, and at that point you should pick on other grounds entirely.
The pattern: Zapier is competitive for simple, low-volume automations, and gets expensive fast as workflows get either more complex or higher-volume. There isn't really a workload where Zapier is dramatically cheaper — its advantage is elsewhere.
Where the crossover sits
A rough rule from the math above: multiply your monthly runs by your billable actions per run. If that number exceeds your monthly run count by more than about 2×, Zapier's model is working against you.
Concretely, on Zapier's $49/2,000-task tier:
| Actions per run | Runs you get |
|---|---|
| 1 | 2,000 |
| 3 | 666 |
| 5 | 400 |
| 10 | 200 |
n8n's €50 Pro plan gives you 10,000 runs in every one of those rows.
The self-hosted option changes the question
Everything above compares n8n Cloud to Zapier. But n8n's Community edition, self-hosted, is free indefinitely with no execution limit — and Zapier has no equivalent at all.
A small VPS runs it for roughly $5–12/month, and at that point execution count stops being a line item. If you're weighing a $100+/month Zapier bill, this is the comparison that actually matters, not Starter vs Professional.
What you give up is real, though, and it isn't just convenience:
You maintain it. Updates, backups, the database, uptime. Budget an hour or two a month, plus the occasional bad afternoon when a version upgrade doesn't go cleanly.
Some features need a licence regardless. Custom variables, environments, external secrets, external binary storage, log streaming, multi-main mode, projects, SSO (SAML/LDAP), workflow and credential sharing, and Git version control are paid or Enterprise features even on self-hosted. If you need SSO for compliance reasons, self-hosting doesn't get you out of paying.
Nobody is on call but you. Zapier's price includes someone else caring when it breaks at 2am.
Our self-hosting guide and Docker setup cover doing it properly, and is n8n free goes deeper on exactly where the free line falls.
Costs that aren't on either pricing page
AI tokens are yours on both. Wiring OpenAI into n8n means you pay OpenAI directly for tokens on top of your n8n plan. Zapier's AI steps consume tasks and you may pay for the underlying model. For anything with an LLM in it, the model bill often dwarfs the platform bill — an AI agent making several model calls per run is the usual culprit.
Build time. n8n asks more of you up front. If you're paying someone to build automations, a few extra hours of their time can outweigh a year of plan difference. This cuts strongly in Zapier's favour for simple work.
Retries. n8n retries within a workflow don't start new executions. On Zapier, a successful retried action counts as a task; failures don't.
Error-handling workflows. On n8n Cloud, a separate error workflow that runs on failure is its own execution.
Migrating, realistically
There is no official Zapier-to-n8n importer. n8n publishes none, and there's no open request for one in its issue tracker. Third-party converters exist but the two data models don't map cleanly — Zapier's step-by-step linear model doesn't express n8n's branching item flow, and the credentials have to be re-authorised by hand regardless.
So migration means rebuilding. The forum threads from people who've done it are consistent on the shape of it: the individual workflows are faster to rebuild than expected, and the whole project takes longer than expected, because the tail of rarely-used Zaps is longer than anyone remembers.
A sane order:
- Rebuild your highest-task-volume Zap first. It's where the money is, and it teaches you the platform on something you already understand.
- Run both in parallel for a week. Same inputs, compare outputs. Do not cut over on the strength of a single successful test run.
- Expect the auth to be the slow part. Every integration needs its credentials set up again, and the OAuth ones are the ones that eat the afternoon.
- Don't port your Zap structure literally. Three Zaps chained by webhooks are usually one n8n workflow with branches. Rebuilding shape-for-shape wastes n8n's actual advantage.
- Keep the Zapier account until a full billing cycle has passed. Something will only run monthly.
If you're new to n8n, the beginner tutorial is the faster on-ramp than reverse-engineering it from your Zaps.
Which one is actually cheaper for you
Zapier, if: your automations are one or two actions, volume is low and predictable, you need dozens of niche integrations working today, or nobody on your side wants to think about infrastructure. The free tier is genuinely useful for a couple of simple two-step automations.
n8n Cloud, if: your workflows have real logic in them, you process batches, or your Zapier bill has crept past $50 and keeps climbing. The execution model rewards exactly the complexity that punishes you on Zapier.
Self-hosted n8n, if: you're comfortable maintaining a server, your volume is high, or you need data to stay on infrastructure you control. This is the option with no real competitor in the comparison — and if you're already paying triple digits monthly to Zapier, it's very hard to argue against trying it.
The honest summary: for simple things, they cost about the same and Zapier is easier. For anything else, n8n's pricing model is structurally cheaper, and the gap grows with exactly the sophistication that makes automation worth doing.
Frequently asked questions
Is n8n cheaper than Zapier? For multi-step workflows, substantially — often 3–5× on comparable volume, because Zapier charges per action and n8n charges per workflow run. For single-action automations at low volume the two are close. Self-hosted n8n is free at any volume, which has no Zapier equivalent.
What exactly is a "task" in Zapier? Any successful action step. Triggers, polling, and Zapier's built-in tools (Formatter, Filter, Paths, Delay, Looping, Digest, Storage, Tables, Forms) don't count. Failed actions don't count either. So a five-step Zap can cost anywhere from one to five tasks depending on which steps talk to outside services.
What counts as an execution in n8n? One run of one workflow, regardless of how many nodes it contains or how many items it processes. Sub-workflows called by a parent each count separately, and so does a separate error workflow that runs on failure.
Does processing 1,000 records cost 1,000 executions in n8n? No — if they're processed in a single run, that's one execution. n8n's nodes iterate over items internally, and that iteration isn't billed. This is why batch workloads are so much cheaper on n8n than on Zapier.
Is n8n free if I self-host it? Yes, the Community edition is free indefinitely with no execution limit. You pay for the server, and a handful of features — SSO, environments, external secrets, Git version control, log streaming, projects — still need a paid licence.
Can I migrate my Zaps to n8n automatically? No. There's no official importer and the two models don't map cleanly. Plan to rebuild, starting with your highest-volume automation.
How much does a server to self-host n8n cost? A small VPS in the $5–12/month range handles moderate workloads. Memory is the constraint that bites first, particularly with workflows moving large files or binary data.
Does n8n limit how many workflows I can have active? Not on current plans — n8n moved away from active-workflow limits and now prices on executions. Concurrency is the practical ceiling instead: 5 simultaneous executions on Starter, 20 on Pro.
What happens when I run out of executions or tasks? Both platforms stop running your automations until the period resets or you upgrade, so the failure mode is silent non-delivery rather than an error you'll notice. Self-hosted n8n has nothing to run out of, which is one of the underrated arguments for it.
Is Zapier's free plan enough to get started? For one or two very simple automations, yes. The binding limit is usually not the 100 tasks but the two-step restriction — no filters, no branching, no second destination. Anything with a condition needs a paid plan.
Should I compare n8n to Make.com as well? If cost is your main driver, yes — Make bills per operation, which is closer to Zapier's model than to n8n's, so the same per-step math applies. The three-way comparison usually comes down to n8n if you want depth and self-hosting, Make if you want a visual middle ground, Zapier if you want the largest integration catalogue and the least setup.
Does n8n charge extra for AI or LLM steps? No — an AI node is part of the same single execution. But you pay the model provider directly for tokens, and that bill frequently exceeds the platform bill. Zapier's AI steps consume tasks on top of any model cost.
Which is better for a beginner? Zapier is faster to get one thing working. n8n teaches you the underlying data model, which transfers to everything else you'll ever automate. If automation is going to be part of your job rather than a one-off errand, the steeper start pays back — the beginner tutorial is the shortest path in.
Primary references: n8n's pricing page for plan tiers and the execution definition, Zapier's pricing page for task tiers and the task definition, and n8n's choose how to use n8n for the Community vs Enterprise feature split. Prices verified 2026-08-25 and change without notice — check both before committing.
Next steps: if self-hosting is the answer, start with the Docker setup guide or the fuller self-hosting walkthrough. If you're new to n8n entirely, the beginner tutorial covers the data model that makes the rest make sense, and is n8n free covers the licensing detail.