Zapier vs Make vs n8n for Australian small businesses: which should you use?

Zapier, Make, and n8n are all automation platforms — they connect apps that don't naturally talk to each other, so an action in one (say, a contact form submission) can automatically trigger actions in others (creating a CRM record, sending an email, notifying your team). The underlying concept is identical across all three. The differences are in how you build automations, how much they cost, and where your data goes.

Zapier has the largest app library of the three — over 6,000 integrations — and the gentlest learning curve. If you need a simple automation and want to be running in an afternoon without reading documentation, Zapier is the right starting point. The interface is a linear step-by-step builder that most non-technical users find intuitive.

The catch is pricing. Zapier charges per "task" — each individual action that runs counts as one task, and that number adds up quickly once you're running multiple automations with any real volume. On the Professional plan (the tier most small businesses end up needing), costs in Australia include GST on top of the USD subscription price. What looks like a $49/month plan can land at $80+ AUD once you account for exchange rates and tax.

Make (formerly Integromat) uses a visual flowchart builder that shows your automation as a diagram of connected modules. That makes it significantly better for complex branching logic — "if this, do A; otherwise do B, then C" — which Zapier's linear format handles awkwardly.

Make prices around "operations" rather than tasks, and for equivalent workloads it's typically cheaper than Zapier at any meaningful scale. The Core plan starts lower, and the visual builder means you can pack more logic into fewer modules than you can in Zapier's step-by-step format. Like Zapier, Australian subscribers pay GST on top of the subscription price.

The trade-off is the learning curve. Make's visual builder rewards spending time with it, and the first few hours feel slower than Zapier. If you're handing automation maintenance to a non-technical team member, factor that in.

n8n is a different category of tool. It's open-source, and you can self-host it on your own server — which means your data never touches a third-party platform. For businesses handling sensitive information (medical records, legal documents, financial data), that distinction matters a great deal.

Self-hosting n8n is free. You pay for the server infrastructure to run it on, which is typically $10–$50/month on a basic cloud VPS. There's also a cloud-hosted version of n8n if you don't want to manage infrastructure yourself, though that costs more than self-hosting.

The requirement: you or someone you work with needs to be comfortable with basic server setup. It's not a code-heavy lift, but it's not a no-code tool either. If nobody in your business has touched a command line, factor in the cost of technical setup help.

• Zapier Free: 100 tasks/month, single-step automations only.
• Zapier Professional: ~$80–120 AUD/month (includes GST), 2,000 tasks, multi-step automations.
• Make Core: ~$15–25 AUD/month (includes GST), 10,000 operations.
• Make Pro: ~$35–55 AUD/month (includes GST), 10,000 operations with advanced features.
• n8n self-hosted: $0 software cost + $15–50 AUD/month server cost.
• n8n cloud: from ~$30 USD/month (~$50 AUD).

• Pick Zapier if: you want the simplest setup, have simple single-path automations, and cost at low volume isn't a concern.
• Pick Make if: you need branching logic or complex multi-step workflows, want better value at scale, and are willing to spend a few hours learning the visual builder.
• Pick n8n if: you handle sensitive client data (medical, legal, financial) and need it to stay on your own infrastructure, or you want to eliminate ongoing software subscription costs and have (or can hire) basic technical capability to set it up.