Zapier Alternatives: Compare Them by How They Bill

Zapier's competitors are not cheaper Zapiers. They meter the work differently, and the meter is what lands on the invoice. Work out which billing model each candidate uses before you compare features, because the same three-step workflow can cost nothing on one platform, $19.99 a month on another and $180 a year on a third.

Every figure below was checked against the vendor's own pricing page in September 2026. Prices move; the date tells you how stale this is.

Meter 1: per successful action step (Zapier)

Zapier bills a task for each successful action. Triggers are free, and so are Filter, Paths, Formatter, Delay, Looping, Digest, Storage, Zapier Manager, Tables and Forms steps. A trigger plus two actions is two tasks.

From Zapier's pricing page, September 2026, billed annually: Free is $0 for 100 tasks and two-step Zaps. Professional starts at $19.99 a month at the 750-task tier, with multi-step Zaps and unlimited premium apps. Team starts at $69 a month at the 2,000-task tier, with 25 users. Billed monthly those same tiers are $29.99 and $103.50 — the page advertises "Pay yearly (Save 33%)", so the headline figures are the annual-commitment ones. The page notes that Zaps, AI steps, code, MCP and SDK all draw from the same task allocation.

Meter 2: per module run (Make)

Make counts a credit for every module run, trigger included, and processes each bundle separately, so a step handling five records runs five times — the mechanics are set out in Make's help documentation on operations, not on the pricing page, which covers prices only. The workflow that costs Zapier two tasks costs Make three credits — each a small fraction as much, which is why the arithmetic still favors Make. Mechanics in Zapier vs Make.

From Make's pricing page, September 2026, monthly billing at the 10,000-credit tier: Free is $0 for 1,000 credits, capped at two active scenarios and a 15-minute interval. Core is $12, Pro $21, Teams $38, all with unlimited scenarios and a 1-minute interval.

Meter 3: per whole workflow run (n8n, Activepieces)

This is the model that changes budgets most, because step count stops mattering. n8n's pricing page states it plainly: "An execution is a single run of your entire workflow. It doesn't matter how many steps are in the workflow or how much data it processes. It's still a single execution."

n8n prices in euros, not dollars. In September 2026 the page shows Starter at €20 a month billed annually for 2,500 executions, Pro at €50 for 10,000 and Business at €667 for 40,000 — those are already the annual-commitment prices. Billed monthly the same plans read €24, €60 and €800, which is 20% more — n8n advertises the same gap the other way round, as a 17% saving for paying annually. Unlimited workflows and users come with every plan. There is no free cloud tier; the no-cost route is self-hosting. Note also that only Starter and Pro are cloud plans: n8n's page labels Business "Self-hosted", so its €667 is a licence to run n8n on your own infrastructure, with the server on top. We work that through in what self-hosting n8n really costs.

Activepieces uses the same shape: one credit is one full flow run regardless of steps. The free plan gives 100 credits a day, refreshed each morning. Plus is $16 a month billed yearly for 10,000 credits; Team is $166 a month billed yearly for 50,000. AI actions cost more — the page lists 2 credits for a fast model, 10 for a smart model, 20 for a frontier model, or 1 if you bring your own key.

Meter 4: per second of compute (Pipedream)

Pipedream counts neither steps nor runs. Its documentation states that Pipedream "charges one credit per 30 seconds of compute time at 256MB megabytes of memory (the default) per workflow segment" (the doubled unit is Pipedream's own wording, quoted here as printed), and that raising memory raises consumption proportionally — the docs give the example that going from 256MB to 512MB "will double the cost of credits in the same execution time". That makes it cheap for lots of very fast workflows and expensive for anything that waits on a slow API, and it makes forecasting harder, because your bill moves with somebody else's response times.

The prices themselves only exist in a rendered browser — Pipedream's pricing page builds its table client-side, so a plain fetch of the URL returns no plan names and no figures at all. Read in a browser on 4 September 2026 it shows four published tiers plus a custom one. Billed monthly: Basic $45, Advanced $74, Connect $150. Billed annually the same plans list at $29, $49 and $99 a month, invoiced as $348, $588 and $1,188 for the year. Basic and Advanced both include 2,000 credits a month and Connect includes 10,000; Business is "Custom". Free includes 100 credits a month, and the plan comparison table on the same page gives Free a usage cap of 100 a month as well, so on Free there is no overage to buy — the workspace simply stops. On the pricing page, at least: Pipedream's docs describe the free allowance as "a daily limit of free credits that cannot be exceeded", a different period from the pricing page's monthly one. We work that discrepancy through in the free tiers comparison.

Two things that matter more than the headline price on this meter. Duration limits differ by plan: the comparison table lists up to 300 seconds per execution on Free against up to 750 on every paid plan, which is the ceiling that bites first when a workflow waits on a slow API. And the minimum schedule interval tightens as you pay: the comparison table publishes three values across the plans — 5 minutes, 1 minute and 1 second — without printing one against every tier, so if you are on this meter because your workflows are fast, confirm the interval your plan actually allows before comparing credits.

Meter 5: per user seat (Power Automate)

Microsoft does not meter runs. It meters people. From the Power Automate pricing page, September 2026: Premium is $15.00 per user per month paid yearly, Process is $150.00 per bot per month, and Hosted Process is $215.00 per bot per month. There is a 30-day trial. Microsoft notes these are U.S. marketing rates that may differ at checkout.

The catch is the seeded licence. Microsoft's licensing documentation states that those licences "entitle the user to create and run cloud flows with standard connectors," and its table marks premium and custom connectors as not included for Microsoft 365, with a daily action limit of 6,000 per user. The flows you get free with an existing Microsoft 365 subscription are real, but they stop at the standard connector list. Need a premium connector or a desktop flow and you are buying Premium at $15 a seat. More in Power Automate vs Zapier.

Meter 6: per automation, not per run (IFTTT)

IFTTT charges for how many Applets you have, not how often they fire. From IFTTT's plans page, September 2026: Free is $0 for 2 Applets, Pro is $2.99 a month or $35.88 a year for 20, and Pro+ is $8.99 a month or $107.88 a year for unlimited.

For a few simple two-step automations that fire constantly, nothing else here is close on price. IFTTT is not a business workflow tool — no real branching, no error queue — but if your requirement is "post this to that, thousands of times a month," $35.88 a year is the answer.

The prices, side by side

Where Zapier still wins

Connector catalogue, and it is not close. Zapier's app directory states 9,000+ apps. Make's integrations page says over 3,000 and shows 3,603 in its catalogue. n8n's shows 2,131. If your stack includes one niche vertical product — a dental practice system, a regional payroll bureau — Zapier is the only one here likely to have it, and no pricing advantage helps if the connector does not exist.

Predictability. Successful actions map to something you can picture. Make's bundle multiplication and Pipedream's compute metering both mean a bad day upstream quietly raises the bill.

It loses on three things. Long workflows, because anything past about five action steps is taxed per step on Zapier and taxed once per run under meter 3. High volume, because Make's unit price is a fraction of Zapier's and n8n ignores complexity entirely. And self-hosting, which Zapier does not offer at all.

Self-hosting: read the licence before you plan around it

Two of these are self-hostable, under very different terms. Activepieces is the permissive one: its repository README states that "Activepieces' Community Edition is released as open source under the MIT license and enterprise features are released under Commercial License." The community edition leaves out projects, SSO, user roles, audit logs and Git Sync; agents and API access are included (Activepieces pricing, September 2026).

n8n is not open source in the usual sense, which matters if you planned to resell automation to clients. Its LICENSE.md puts the code under the Sustainable Use License: "You may use or modify the software only for your own internal business purposes or for non-commercial or personal use. You may distribute the software or provide it to others only if you do so free of charge for non-commercial purposes." Files with ".ee." in the name need an enterprise licence. Running n8n for your own company is permitted. Running it as a paid service for others is not.

Where it is a tie

Below roughly 100 workflow runs a month, none of this matters. Make's free tier, Activepieces' 100 credits a day and Zapier's 100 tasks all cover it, and $12 versus $19.99 is not worth a migration weekend. Pick the builder you can stand looking at.

It is a tie on reliability too. None of these vendors publishes a comparable audited uptime figure for its runtime, so anyone ranking them on reliability is guessing.

What the migration actually costs

Rebuilding automations is unbilled work, and it is the number people leave out. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts US small-business employer compensation costs at $37.36 per hour worked for private establishments with 1 to 49 workers, March 2026. Twenty automations at an hour each to rebuild and test is about $747 of staff time. Against a Zapier Professional bill of $19.99 a month, that never pays back. Against a Team bill of $69 moving to Make Core at $12, it clears in about thirteen months. Do the division before you start, and count the line items that never appear on a pricing page: server time if you self-host, and the hours somebody spends learning a second builder.

What to check before you commit

• Look up every connector you use, by name, in the new vendor's directory. Do this first; it disqualifies candidates fastest.
• Count the action steps in your three busiest workflows. That decides whether meter 3 saves you anything.
• If self-hosting, read the licence against your intended use and add server time to the comparison.
• Re-check every price on the vendor's page. These figures carry a September 2026 date for a reason.