Quick verdicts
You need simple SaaS-to-SaaS handoffs, minimal branching, and want the fastest DIY start. Great for marketing teams under 5 users with light volume.
You want visual data mapping, mid-to-advanced branching, and friendlier pricing at higher volumes. Ideal for ops teams who want power without self-hosting.
You need self-hosting, private cloud, custom nodes, or deep control over retries, logging, and secrets. Best for regulated, complex, or high-scale builds.
Pricing snapshots (as of 2026)
| Platform | Model | Best for | Watch outs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zapier | Tasks/month | Low-volume, simple flows | Costs spike with loops; limited control over retries |
| Make | Operations/month | Medium complexity, higher volume | Rate limits on some apps; need discipline on scenario design |
| n8n (self-host) | Infra + time | High control, data residency, extensibility | Requires DevOps; must own monitoring and backups |
Security and data residency
Zapier and Make are SaaS. That’s fine for most marketing and light ops use cases, but regulated teams often need more control. With n8n, we deploy inside your VPC, wire to your KMS, and ship audit logs to your SIEM. For Make enterprise, we negotiate data residency and DPA terms before launch. For Zapier, we minimize PII, redact payloads, and lean on their regional processing when available.
Scenario matrix: what we actually deploy
Lead routing with enrichment
We favor n8n or Make because we can chain enrichment (Clearbit, Apollo), validate emails, dedupe in CRM, and branch by score. Zapier can handle a light version but struggles with complex scoring or bulk ops.
Weekly reporting and data sync
Make excels here with its data mapping UI. n8n is great if you need on-prem DB access or want to self-host for cost. Zapier is fine for small Google Sheets to Slack alerts.
Customer support deflection
We rarely use Zapier. Make for Zendesk/Freshdesk scenarios with moderate logic; n8n when we integrate private chatbots or need private cloud.
Compliance-heavy workflows
n8n wins. Self-hosted, VPC peering, secrets in KMS, detailed logs, and private AI endpoints. Make enterprise is second if the legal team approves.
Guardrails we apply regardless of platform
- Secrets in vaults or env vars—never hard-coded.
- Retries with backoff, dead-letter queues for failed runs.
- Alerting to Slack/Email for error rates over 2% in 30 minutes.
- Version control of prompts and templates in Git, not the platform UI.
Replatforming playbook
When costs spike or governance tightens, we lift flows by exporting trigger/action contracts, rewriting them as modular nodes, and migrating content to a shared repo. Typical replatform: 2–3 weeks for 10–15 flows, with parallel runs for QA.
Recommendations by team size
- 1–10 person teams: Zapier or Make starter. Keep flows simple; upgrade when volume or complexity grows.
- 10–200 person teams: Make for most ops; n8n for sensitive data and custom logic.
- 200+ or regulated: n8n self-hosted with observability, or Make enterprise with clear DPAs.
What success looks like
Success isn’t “we shipped a flow.” It’s: SLA hit, error rate under 1%, cost per run forecasted, logs searchable, and a rollback path. That’s how we measure platform fit.
FAQ
Yes. You need someone to manage infra, security, and upgrades. We often bundle a managed service if you don’t have that in-house.
Make holds SOC 2 Type II; still review their DPA and region availability for your data.
For light traffic, yes. For bursty or mission-critical webhooks, we prefer n8n/Make with queues.
We model daily run volume, branching rates, retries, and enrichment calls. Then we compare SaaS pricing vs. self-hosted infra before committing.