n8n or Make: which automation tool suits your business?

Automatically adding a new enquiry from your website form to your customer records, sending a confirmation and giving a colleague a heads-up: that is the kind of connection you build with an automation tool such as n8n or Make. Both are popular with small businesses and look alike at first glance. But there are differences in their set-up that decide which one suits you best.

What they both do

n8n and Make work on the same idea. An event starts the automation (a new form, a payment, an email) and the tool then carries out steps in other systems. You line those steps up visually on a canvas. n8n calls such an automation a workflow, Make calls it a scenario.

• Ready-made connections: both have a large library of connections to well-known software for email, calendars, accounting, forms and online shops.
• Your own connections: if a system has an API, you can reach it in either with a general HTTP step.
• Logic: conditions, branches, loops and transforming data are possible in both.
• AI steps: both can call a language model, for example to sort an incoming email.

Where they differ

Set-up and hosting

You can install n8n on your own server or use it as a hosted cloud service from n8n itself. The source code is public under its own licence, which n8n calls ‘fair-code’: you may use it freely within your own business, with restrictions if you want to offer it to others as a service. Make, formerly Integromat, is only available as a hosted service. You build your scenarios in the browser and Make runs them on its own platform.

That difference matters if you do not want your data to pass through a third party. With n8n on your own server you keep control of that, but you are then also responsible for that server.

Pricing structure

The unit of charge differs. In its cloud version, n8n charges per workflow execution: running through the whole automation once counts as one execution, regardless of the number of steps. Make charges per operation (now in credits): every step that does something counts. A long automation that runs often therefore adds up faster with Make than a short one. On your own server, the free version of n8n has no licence fee, but you do pay for hosting and the time spent on management. Current prices and bundles are on the pricing pages of n8n and Make themselves; they change regularly.

Learning curve

Many people without a technical background find Make more approachable: the modules are clear and you can see visually which data passes from step to step. n8n is just as visual, but leans sooner on technical concepts such as expressions and data in JSON form. On the other hand, in n8n you can add your own code in JavaScript or Python when a standard step is not enough.

Error handling

Both offer ways to deal with errors. In Make you attach error handlers to a module, which decide whether the scenario continues, skips or stops, and you can store incomplete executions to run them again later. In n8n you set per step whether it should retry or carry on after an error, and you can trigger a separate error workflow that, for example, sends you a notification. Either way, someone has to actually read those notifications.

Who maintains it

This is the question that often comes too late. An automation is not a one-off job. Software changes its connections, fields get renamed and a password expires. Then the automation stops, sometimes without anyone noticing.

• Owner: appoint one person who knows which automations are running and what they do.
• Documentation: write down for each automation what it does, which systems it touches and what happens if it stops.
• Monitoring: make sure error messages reach someone who will act on them.

When a no-code connection is no longer enough

n8n and Make are strong at linking separate pieces of software. They become awkward when the automations form the heart of your business. Signs that you have reached that point:

• You have dozens of connections between diary, till, accounting and customer records, and nobody has an overview any more.
• The same data sits in several places and drifts apart when a connection falters.
• Errors affect customers directly: a reminder that is not sent, a payment that is not processed.
• You pay for many separate subscriptions plus the automation tool that holds them together.

At that point it is often better to stop laying connections between separate programs and use one system that does the work itself. A hair salon then has its diary, reminders, till and loyalty card in one place; an installer has quotes, scheduling and invoices together. That is what our software per industry does: the processes you now tie together with n8n or Make are already built in. To explore the trade-off further, also read when to have software built or buy it off the shelf.