n8n vs Make (2026): Pick by How You're Billed, Not How It Looks

n8n vs Make is the automation decision solo marketers actually face in 2026 — Zapier increasingly prices itself into the enterprise conversation, and these two are what everyone migrates toward. Both give you a visual canvas, both connect your stack, both undercut Zapier. The interfaces look similar enough that people choose on vibes.

Choose on billing instead. The two tools charge for fundamentally different things, and that difference — not the UI — determines what your automations cost as they grow more capable. (Both tools' full solo profiles: our n8n review for marketers; Make's numbers below.)

The one difference that decides it

Make bills per module call. Every step that fires consumes a credit (Make renamed "operations" to credits in August 2025). A 20-step workflow costs 20 credits per run.

n8n bills per execution. One run = one execution, whether it contains 5 steps or 500.

Everything else about this comparison is commentary on that fact.

The numbers side by side

Prices checked 2026-09:

	Make	n8n
Free tier	1,000 credits/mo, 2 active scenarios	Self-hosted Community Edition: unlimited, your server
Entry paid	Core $16/mo (≈$12 annual) — 10,000 credits	Starter $20/mo (annual) — 2,500 executions, unlimited steps
Next tier	Pro $28/mo (≈$21 annual)	Pro $50/mo — 10k executions
Billing unit	Credit per module call	One execution per run, any length
Integrations	~2,000+ apps, very polished	~400+ native, plus a code/HTTP escape hatch
G2	~4.7	~4.7

Run your own workflows through the math

Take a realistic solo-marketer automation: new lead → enrich → score → draft a personalized email with an LLM → add to CRM → notify you. Call it 12 steps, 300 runs a month.

• Make: 3,600 credits — a third of the Core plan for one workflow.
• n8n: 300 executions — an eighth of Starter.

Now the two-step version — form fill → add row to a sheet, 1,000 runs:

• Make: 2,000 credits. Trivial.
• n8n: 1,000 executions — nearly half of Starter for gruntwork.

Same tools, opposite winners. Short and shallow favors Make; long and smart favors n8n. And "long and smart" is the direction everything is moving — AI-agent workflows chain many steps per run by nature, which is why the agent-builder community has settled on n8n.

What the billing math doesn't capture

Make is genuinely easier. The builder is more polished, error handling is friendlier, and 2,000+ native integrations mean the thing you use probably has a tile. For a non-technical marketer, that's worth real money. n8n asks more of you — expressions, data mapping, the occasional JSON stare-down — and repays the investment in flexibility, code nodes, and the option to self-host the whole thing for free once your volume justifies playing sysadmin.

The verdict

Pick Make if your automations are simple, numerous and short — connect-this-to-that housekeeping — and you value polish over power. It's the better convenience purchase. Try Make →

Pick n8n if you're building the multi-step, AI-assisted workflows that let one marketer operate like a team, or if you ever want automation to be a service you sell. The learning curve is the price; the billing model is the payoff. Try n8n →

Both slot into the automation layer of our one-person department stack; everything else in the category lives on the Email, CRM & Automation shelf.