n8n vs Zapier: Which Should You Actually Use? (2026)

n8n vs Zapier comes down to one trade. n8n bills per workflow execution and can run on your own servers under a source-available license; Zapier bills per task and publishes no self-hosted option. Pick n8n if you have an engineer who wants self-hosted control. Pick Zapier if a non-technical team runs two-step automations. Disclosure: Viktor, an AI employee who works in this category, publishes this page.

n8n vs Zapier at a glance

Search n8n vs Zapier or Zapier vs n8n and the questions are the same eight, with the billing unit first because it decides everything downstream.

Pricing checked October 2026.

Pricing: tasks vs executions

Zapier counts work in tasks: “When Zapier performs an action successfully, it counts as a task.” Three things follow. Polling for new data is free. Failures are free: “If the action isn’t successfully completed, it doesn’t count against your task limit.” And built-in steps are free: the rates page lists Formatter, Paths, Filters, Delay, Looping, Sub-Zaps, Digests, Zapier Manager, Storage, Tables and Forms as steps that “never use tasks”.

So a Zap with a trigger, a Filter, a Formatter and three app actions uses three tasks per run when all three actions succeed, and one task if the first succeeds and the second fails. Not every step is one task, either: the rates page prices AI by Zapier steps at 1 task for Standard models, 3 for Advanced and 5 for Premium, bills Code steps 1 task per 30 seconds beyond the plan’s runtime allowance, and adds: “Rates may change over time as we introduce new capabilities or update how tasks are measured.”

Plans are tiered by tasks: Free has 100 tasks a month and two-step Zaps; Professional starts at $19.99 a month billed annually with 750 tasks and multi-step Zaps; Team starts at $69 a month billed annually with 2,000 tasks and 25 seats; Enterprise is priced by sales. Polling runs every 15 minutes on Free, 2 minutes on Professional and 1 minute on Team and Enterprise. On paid plans, past the plan limit Zapier switches you to pay-per-task billing at “a higher per-task rate than your base subscription tasks”; the pay-per-task article points you to your Billing settings for the exact rate, caps usage at “3 times your plan’s task limit”, and can be turned off so Zaps pause at the plan limit.

n8n counts work in executions: “It doesn’t matter how many steps are in the workflow or how much data it processes. It’s still a single execution.” The same five-step workflow is one execution per run whether every action succeeds or fails. What n8n meters instead is concurrency and features. Starter at 20 euros a month billed annually gives 2.5K executions, 5 concurrent executions and 1 shared project; Pro at 50 euros gives 10K executions, up to 50 concurrent executions, 3 shared projects and admin roles; Business at 667 euros gives 40K executions, SSO and LDAP, multiple environments and queue mode, but is self-hosted only, with a waitlist for a Cloud version. The Cloud trial needs no credit card; the Business trial does.

Two n8n limits do not show up as executions. Cloud Starter keeps at most 2,500 saved executions and 7 days of execution logs, Pro at most 25,000 and 30 days. And the Community Edition has no execution charge at all; what it costs is your server and the engineer’s time.

Self-hosting and data residency

n8n’s free tier is a download, not a plan. The Community Edition is on GitHub under the Sustainable Use License, which n8n describes as fair-code and is careful not to call open source: “according to the Open Source Initiative (OSI), open source licenses can’t include limitations on use, so we do not call ourselves open source.” The license allows use and modification “only for your own internal business purposes or for non-commercial or personal use” and distribution “only if you do so free of charge for non-commercial purposes”. That rules out reselling a hosted n8n; running it for your own company is allowed.

The Community Edition feature list says it “includes almost the complete feature set of n8n” and then names what it leaves out: custom variables, environments, external secrets, external storage for binary data, log streaming, multi-main mode, projects, SSO (SAML, LDAP), sharing of workflows and credentials beyond the owner and creator, and version control using Git. Registering with an email adds folders, debug in editor and custom execution data. The rest sits in the paid Business and Enterprise plans, some of it also on n8n Cloud.

n8n is blunt about what self-hosting asks. Its Docker install guide lists server, container, scaling and security work, then says: “n8n recommends self-hosting for expert users. Mistakes can lead to data loss, security issues, and downtime. If you aren’t experienced at managing servers, n8n recommends n8n Cloud.” The comparison page puts it in a table: Cloud is “Fully hosted by n8n”, maintenance “Handled by n8n”; self-hosted “Requires setup (npm, Docker, or server)”, maintenance “Your responsibility”.

Self-hosted n8n keeps data wherever you run it. n8n Cloud, per the security page, “uses Microsoft Azure for hosting”, and “the data stored by the platform, is currently hosted in the European Union”, with n8n “preparing to host in additional locations too”. n8n aligns its security program to SOC 2, gives enterprise customers its SOC 2 report, and publishes a SOC 3 report.

Zapier publishes no self-hosted option. Its data privacy page is direct: “Zapier hosts data in AWS servers located in the United States”, and to “Is there an option to have my data stored only within the EU?” the answer is “Zapier does not support this option.” EU customers can still transfer data under Zapier’s EU-US Data Privacy Framework certification. Zapier holds SOC 2 Type 2 and SOC 3 reports. Two stated limits: healthcare data under HIPAA “isn’t supported on Zapier” and Zapier does not sign BAAs; custom data retention of 7 to 30 days is available on Company or Enterprise plans.

Branching, code and error handling

Zapier branches with Paths. “The Paths app lets you perform different actions in your Zap based on rules that you define.” You can add up to 10 path branches within the same path group, nest a path group inside a branch, and Paths and Filter steps do not count toward task usage. For reuse, the Sub-Zap app “allows you to create a set of actions that you can reuse in multiple Zap workflows”; the help page labels it a beta feature “still in active development and may change”.

Code by Zapier runs JavaScript or Python inside a step. The Python step runs Python 3.13 with the standard library, requests and BeautifulSoup, and “You cannot install additional libraries or pip modules directly.” Runtime per step is set by plan on the pricing page: 1 second on Free, 30 seconds on Professional and Team, 2 minutes on Enterprise.

Zapier’s failure model is replay: you replay failed runs by hand after fixing the cause. With Autoreplay, “available as an account-wide setting to Professional Plans and higher” per Zapier’s error settings page, Zapier retries a failed step up to 5 times at growing intervals, 5 minutes, then 30 minutes, 1 hour, 3 hours and 6 hours, so the last attempt lands about 10 hours and 35 minutes after the first error. “Zapier will not send any error notification emails until the final autoreplay attempt fails.” Separately, “Your Zap will automatically turn off if 95% of its runs result in errors in the last 7 days”; Team accounts get a 24-hour grace period and Enterprise accounts 72 hours, and Enterprise can override the ratio per Zap.

n8n branches with nodes. “Splitting uses the IF or Switch nodes. It turns a single-branch workflow into a multi-branch workflow.” The Switch node is “similar to the IF node, but supports multiple output routes”, with either one rule per output or an expression that returns the output index for a Number of Outputs you set, and branches can be merged back together afterwards.

The Code node “lets you run your own JavaScript or Python inside a workflow”, once for all items or once per item. Its limits are about where you run it: “If you use n8n Cloud, you can’t import external npm modules”, only the crypto module and the moment package; self-hosted instances can enable modules. The same page adds: “On n8n cloud, the Python option for the Code node doesn’t allow users to import any Python libraries.” Python changed in version 2.0: the legacy Pyodide runtime “is removed from n8n 2.0”, and native Python runs through task runners, available from n8n 1.111.0.

For failures, n8n works at the node level and the workflow level. Each node has Retry On Fail (“When an execution fails, the node reruns until it succeeds”) and an On Error choice: Stop Workflow, Continue “using the last valid data”, or Continue (using error output), which passes the error to the next node. Above that, “For each workflow, you can set an error workflow in Workflow Settings. It runs if an execution fails.” The error workflow starts with the Error Trigger node, which “gets details about the failed workflow and the errors”, with one caveat: “The Error Trigger only runs when an automatic workflow errors”, so you cannot test it from a manual run. The Stop And Error node lets you fail an execution on purpose and “send custom error information to error workflows”.

The difference in one line: Zapier retries and replays for you on a fixed schedule; n8n hands you the retry and routing controls and expects you to wire the alerting.

App catalogue and community

The vendors count differently, so compare units, not numbers. Zapier’s pricing FAQ says “Zapier offers integrations for more than 9,000 apps”, premium apps are “exclusively available to users on paid Zapier plans”, Webhooks sit in Professional’s key features, and internal tools go through a developer platform for private integrations; the directory is at zapier.com/apps. Zapier also publishes Zap templates and runs a community forum.

n8n’s homepage says “over 500 integrations” with “Custom API connections for everything else”; its integrations directory showed 2,299 integrations in October 2026. The gap is covered by the HTTP Request node, which calls “any app or service with a REST API” and can import a curl command, and by community nodes installed from the npm registry, with the limit that “Unverified community nodes aren’t available on n8n cloud and require self-hosting n8n.” The template library listed 13,055 workflow templates in October 2026, and n8n’s pricing page describes its forum as “home to over 170,000 AI and automation enthusiasts, professionals, and community engineers”.

For a niche or internal API, n8n’s HTTP Request node and self-hosted community nodes are the shorter route; on Zapier the equivalent is Webhooks on a paid plan or a private integration.

Who maintains it when it breaks

Automations break in three places: a credential expires, the platform changes version, or an app changes its API.

On Zapier, credentials live on the App Connections page, which lets you “test, reconnect, rename, transfer ownership of, and delete connections”. Connections expire, and “You must reconnect your app connection if your password changed recently or if your organization enforced additional security controls.” Team plans add shared app connections. Platform versions are Zapier’s job. When an app’s API changes there is no code of yours to patch; your signal is errors in Zap history and the automatic turn-off at 95% errors. Zap export as JSON is documented for Team and Enterprise accounts, and after an import you must “Turn on your Zap workflows”, test connections and reconnect any that are no longer active.

On n8n Cloud, you choose the version: from Updates & maintenance “you choose which n8n version your workspace runs”, on a Beta or a Stable track, and “n8n always applies security and stability updates automatically, whichever cadence you choose”, per n8n’s Cloud update guide. Self-hosted, the update guide says “Try to update at least once a month”, “Check the Release notes for breaking changes”, and test on an Environment first, which is a paid feature. When a node breaks after an API change, you wait for a release and apply it, or rebuild the call in an HTTP Request node yourself.

Support follows the plan on both sides. Zapier’s Professional plan lists email support, with live chat from the 2,000-task tier up; Team lists priority support, and Enterprise priority support with screen sharing. n8n’s Starter plan lists forum support, and “The Business Plan is a self-serve option and dedicated support is supported only in our Enterprise plan.” In the Community Edition, “Only the instance owner and the user who creates them can access workflows and credentials”, so a departing builder’s workflows are reachable only through the owner account.

Pick n8n if, pick Zapier if

Pick n8n if you have an engineer who will own it. You want workflows and credentials on infrastructure you control, data in a region you choose, long multi-step workflows priced per run rather than per action, code with real modules, and retry and error routing you shape per node. Accept the price: you run the updates, you read the release notes, Business features are self-hosted only, and n8n itself says mistakes can lead to data loss, security issues and downtime. If nobody on the team wants that job, take n8n Cloud or do not take n8n.

Pick Zapier if your team is not technical and your automations are short. Two-step and three-step Zaps between mainstream apps, built by the people who use them, with Autoreplay, polling and hosting handled by Zapier, and expired connections fixed with a Reconnect button. Accept the price too: every successful action is a task, data lives in the United States with no EU-only option, Code steps run 1 second to 2 minutes with no extra libraries, export is Team and Enterprise only, and a busy multi-step Zap climbs the task tiers because every successful action counts.

Zapier vs n8n is the same question read from the other side.

A third option: an AI employee

Disclosure, again: Viktor publishes this page, and Viktor is an AI employee who works in the same category as both tools above.

n8n and Zapier share one assumption. You take a job, break it into a trigger and a chain of actions, map the fields, decide the branches and retries, and then maintain the result when a credential expires or an API changes. The sections above compare how well each tool supports that work; the work itself stays with you either way.

An AI employee skips the decomposition. You describe the job in plain language in Slack or Microsoft Teams, and he does it across the tools the workspace already uses. Viktor connects to 3,200+ tools, most through one-click OAuth, and builds custom integrations for tools not in the catalogue. Sensitive actions such as moving money, pushing code or emailing customers wait for explicit approval in Slack before they run, and admins choose which other actions need a sign-off. For the one-on-one with n8n, read Viktor vs n8n.

See the tools Viktor connects to →

The fit is the same split, read differently. A stable two-step hand-off: Zapier. A job that needs an engineer’s control over infrastructure: n8n. A job you would hand to a colleague in one sentence, “chase the three overdue invoices and post what you find in #finance”: an AI employee takes it as described, asks before anything sensitive, and finishes it.

Describe one workflow to Viktor: get started for free →

Bring the workflow that neither platform handled cleanly: the one with approvals, exceptions and a person in the loop.

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FAQ

Is n8n better than Zapier?

Neither is better outright; they are priced and hosted differently. n8n bills per execution, can be self-hosted under the Sustainable Use License, and gives per-node retry and error routing. Zapier bills per successful action, publishes no self-hosted option, hosts data in the United States, and automates retries through Autoreplay. n8n fits a team with an engineer who wants control; Zapier fits a non-technical team running short automations.

Is n8n really free?

The self-hosted Community Edition is free and includes “almost the complete feature set of n8n”, but not SSO, environments, Git version control, log streaming, projects or sharing of workflows and credentials. You pay for the server, and n8n recommends self-hosting only for expert users. n8n Cloud is not free beyond the 14-day trial capped at 1,000 executions; paid Cloud plans start at 20 euros a month billed annually.

Which is cheaper at volume, n8n or Zapier?

It depends on the shape of the workflow, not only the volume. Zapier charges one task per successful action step, so one run of a five-action Zap uses five tasks, and AI steps use 1 to 5 tasks each. n8n charges one execution per run however many steps it has, so long workflows get relatively cheaper on n8n and the binding limit becomes the execution count or the concurrency cap. Compare your own run and step counts against each vendor’s published tiers.

Can you migrate Zaps to n8n?

Not with a vendor tool. Zapier exports Zaps as JSON on Team and Enterprise accounts and includes a Zapfile.json in its account data export, which “contains an export of all undeleted Zap workflows, focusing on the data needed to run each Zap”. Zapier documents no import of that file into another platform, so a migration means rebuilding each Zap as an n8n workflow and reconnecting every credential. Zap history exports separately, up to 5,000 runs at a time as CSV or JSON.

Which is easier for non-technical teams?

Zapier. The Free plan starts with two-step Zaps, Paths and Filters are rule-based and available from the Professional plan up, Zapier hosts, polls and replays for you, and reconnecting an expired app is a button. n8n Cloud removes the server work, and n8n’s docs steer anyone not experienced at managing servers to Cloud; the node graph, expressions and Code node still assume someone comfortable with data structures.

Does either tool offer EU data residency?

n8n does, in two ways: self-host in the region you choose, or use n8n Cloud, which is hosted on Microsoft Azure in the European Union according to n8n’s security page. Zapier hosts data on AWS in the United States and states that storing data only within the EU is not supported, relying instead on its EU-US Data Privacy Framework certification for transfers.