n8n vs Make.com — A Practical Comparison After 50+ Workflows

Clients ask me this constantly: should we use n8n or Make? Both work. Both cost money. The difference is in the details. I've built 50+ production workflows on each — CRM syncs, lead routing, e-commerce notifications, reporting pipelines. Here's the honest comparison, not the marketing-page version.

The TL;DR

• A few workflows, non-technical team, fast start → Make.com
• Many workflows, want to self-host, comfortable with code → n8n
• Data has to stay in Europe (GDPR) or contains trade secrets → n8n self-hosted
• Just 5-10 simple Zapier-style flows → Make (or Zapier honestly)

Pricing — where it gets confusing

Make charges per operation. One run of one workflow can use anywhere from 5 to 50 operations. The Pro plan is $16/month for 10,000 ops. A CRM sync running every 15 minutes can chew through that in two days. Then you bump up to Teams at $29 (40,000), then Enterprise-flavoured pricing at $99 (150,000). The bill grows with usage.

n8n's cloud version is $20/month for 5,000 executions. Crucially, an execution is not an operation — a workflow with 100 steps still counts as a single execution. In practice, for the same workload, n8n cloud comes out 30-40% cheaper than Make.

But the real gap is self-hosting. You can put n8n on a $5/month Hetzner VPS and run unlimited workflows. Make has no self-hosted option, full stop. I have a client doing roughly 200,000 executions a month — on Make that would cost $400-500. On self-hosted n8n it costs $7.

User experience — both are great, in different ways

Make's UI is genuinely beautiful — colourful nodes, smooth animations, errors that don't scare anyone. Sitting next to a non-technical client, they get excited just looking at it. I worked with an HR director who was building her own flows after two hours.

n8n looks more technical — clean lines, JSON-friendly, less polish. But that polish-free UI is a feature. You can drop JavaScript into any node, run Python now too, and the debugger feels like a real IDE. A transformation that takes 5 nodes in Make is one Code node in n8n.

Integrations count

Make claims 1,800+ integrations, n8n has around 500 native plus an HTTP node that hits any REST API. In reality, both cover 99% of services you'll touch: HubSpot, Salesforce, Bitrix24, Google Sheets, Notion, Slack, Telegram, WhatsApp Business, Stripe, OpenAI, you name it. Anything missing you build with the HTTP node.

Error handling and debugging

Make uses Error Handler routes — you wire one in, route retries, fallbacks or notifications through it. Fine, but it gets messy in complex flows. n8n has an On Error setting on every node — Continue, Stop Workflow, Continue (using error output). More flexible. You can also set a single Error Workflow that fires whenever anything breaks anywhere.

Version control and team collaboration

Make's version history is shallow and there's no GitHub sync. When a team is working on the same flows, you can't tell who changed what. In n8n every workflow is JSON — commit it to GitHub, branch off to test, merge back to production. For any project with more than one engineer, this difference is decisive.

How I actually choose

When a new project lands, I ask three questions. One: will the client manage workflows themselves? Yes → Make. Two: will this exceed 50,000 executions a month? Yes → n8n self-hosted. Three: do they need GDPR, on-prem data, or custom integrations? Yes → n8n. Those three questions handle 90% of the calls.

These aren't mutually exclusive — each has its sweet spot. If you're stuck deciding for a real workflow, get in touch with the specific use case and we'll figure it out in 15 minutes.