Zapier vs n8n: Per Action or Per Workflow Run
Zapier bills every successful action step; n8n bills one execution per workflow run no matter how many steps it holds. The meters match only at a single-action workflow, and the gap widens in a straight line with length, so a twelve-step job flips the answer entirely.
Zapier bills you for every successful action step. n8n bills you once for the whole workflow run, however many steps it contains. That one structural difference decides which platform is cheaper for you, and the answer flips as your workflows get longer — a two-step job and a twelve-step job land on opposite sides of the line.
Everything below comes from each vendor's own pricing pages and documentation, checked September 2026. Prices move, so the date is there to tell you how stale this is.
What Zapier charges for
Zapier's billing unit is the task. From Zapier's help article on task usage, as of September 2026, a task is charged for "all successful action steps," plus any successful step inside an error handler path, plus previously successful steps that run again when you replay a whole Zap run.
What Zapier does not charge for is nearly as important. The page states that "all trigger steps" are free, along with "any Filter or Paths step," "all action steps that error or halt," and, in full, "All steps that do not run, either because of a previous filter or path condition, or because the Zap errored." That last clause matters: a Zap that fails halfway does not bill the steps it never reached. Formatter, Delay, Looping, Digest, Storage and Zapier Manager steps are free too.
Polling is also free. Zapier states that polling triggers "will poll an app or check for new trigger events at a regular interval, but these polls never use tasks." A Zap that watches a mailbox every two minutes and finds nothing all week costs nothing.
What n8n charges for
n8n's unit is the execution, and the definition is blunt. n8n's documentation on executions says "an execution is a single run of a workflow." Its pricing announcement spells out the consequence: "it does not matter how many nodes or steps the workflow has," or how much data it processes, or how long it runs. One run, one execution.
The exemptions are generous and worth knowing before you budget. Per the same documentation page, only production executions count — runs started by triggers, schedules or polling. Manual runs from the editor while you are building and testing do not count. Error workflow runs do not count. And when one workflow calls another with the Execute Sub-workflow node, "only the parent (top-level) execution counts."
Neither platform bills a poll that finds nothing. Zapier states polls never use tasks. n8n states that polling nodes "count one execution only when new data is found." On the specific fear that an always-on automation quietly drains your allowance while idle, this is a tie.
The same job, counted twice
Take one workflow that fires 1,000 times a month and vary only its length. The action count is the number of steps that actually do something — write a record, send a message, call an API. Filters and routing are free on Zapier and irrelevant to n8n's count.
| Workflow shape | Zapier tasks / month | n8n executions / month | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 action per run | 1,000 | 1,000 | 1× |
| 2 actions per run | 2,000 | 1,000 | 2× |
| 5 actions per run | 5,000 | 1,000 | 5× |
| 12 actions per run | 12,000 | 1,000 | 12× |
That is arithmetic from the published rules, not a benchmark. The ratio column is the whole article: your billable-unit multiplier on Zapier is the number of successful actions in the Zap. On n8n it is always one.
The break-even is a single-action workflow. At exactly one action per run the two meters read the same number. Everything above that favors n8n's counting, in a straight line with workflow length. Nothing above one action ever favors Zapier's.
If your automations are one trigger and one action, the meters are equivalent and you should pick on other grounds entirely. If they are five or twelve steps long, the counting is not close, and no amount of plan-shopping on Zapier fixes it.
The published prices, dated
From Zapier's pricing page, as of September 2026: Free is $0 for 100 tasks a month. Professional starts from $19.99 a month. Team starts from $69 a month. Enterprise is custom. Zapier advertises a 33% saving on annual billing.
One honest caveat about that page. Zapier offers a task-volume selector with eighteen published stops — 100, 750, 1.5K, 2K, 5K, 10K, 20K, 50K, 100K, 200K, 300K, 400K, 500K, 750K, 1M, 1.5M, 1.75M and 2M — plus a custom limit, but the printed prices are only the "starting from" figures for each plan's lowest tier. The price for a higher volume appears only when you move the selector yourself, so a plain fetch of the page cannot read it. It can be read in a browser, and we publish the full ladder in what workflow automation costs.
From n8n's pricing page, as of September 2026, on annual billing: Starter is 20€ a month for 2,500 workflow executions. Pro is 50€ a month for 10,000 executions. Business is 667€ a month for 40,000 executions. Enterprise is custom. On monthly billing the same plans read €24, €60 and €800, which is where the page's advertised 17% annual discount comes from. All tiers include unlimited workflows, steps and users. One label on that page is worth more than any of the prices: Starter and Pro are marked "Hosted by n8n", but Business is marked "Self-hosted" — it is a licence, not a hosted service, so its €667 buys you no server.
Note the currency. n8n's public pricing page quotes euros, not dollars, so a US buyer faces a conversion and possibly a card foreign-transaction fee. The sticker number is not the number on your statement.
Set the entry plans side by side and the counting difference shows up as allowance, not price. Zapier Professional's entry tier is 750 tasks; n8n Starter is 2,500 executions at a similar nominal figure. A one-action workflow buys 750 runs on one and 2,500 on the other. A five-action workflow buys 150 runs on Zapier and still 2,500 on n8n.
The licence, stated accurately
n8n is frequently called open source. It is not, in the sense the Open Source Initiative uses the term. The licence file in the n8n repository is the Sustainable Use License, version 1.0. It grants you the right to use, copy, distribute and modify the software for your own internal business purposes or non-commercial purposes, and it forbids providing the software to others for charge and hosting it as a service for third parties.
For a small business running n8n to automate its own operations, that licence is not a constraint you will ever notice. For an agency planning to host n8n for clients and bill them for it, it is a hard stop, and you need a commercial arrangement instead. n8n describes itself as fair-code, which is a category, not a synonym for open source. Read it before you build a business model on top of it.
Self-hosting, honestly
The Community Edition is free to download and run yourself, and it removes the execution meter entirely — nobody is counting. That is the reason most people arrive at n8n.
It is free of licence fee, not of cost. You need a server. DigitalOcean's Basic Droplet pricing, September 2026, starts at $4.00 a month for 512 MiB and 1 vCPU, $12.00 a month for 2 GiB, and $24.00 a month for 4 GiB and 2 vCPUs. The 512 MiB box is not a serious home for a production automation server.
Then add the parts nobody prices: upgrades, database backups, TLS certificates, monitoring so you learn a workflow died before your customer does, and someone who cares when the box stops responding on a Saturday. At a US small-business labour cost of $37.36 an hour worked (private establishments with 1–49 workers, March 2026, BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, Table 6), two hours of maintenance a month costs more than the Droplet. That is an argument for counting it, not against doing it. More of this arithmetic is in the hidden costs of automation platforms.
Where Zapier still wins
Connector coverage. Zapier's apps directory states 9,000+ integrations, though the same page also says 10,000+ in one place, so treat it as an order of magnitude rather than a precise count. n8n's integrations directory lists 2,131. If the obscure vertical tool your business runs on has a connector anywhere, the odds are better on Zapier.
A permanent free tier. Zapier Free is $0 for 100 tasks a month, indefinitely. n8n Cloud does not publish a permanent free plan — the free offering is a trial. If you want three tiny automations running for nothing forever and you do not want to run a server, Zapier is the only one of the two that does that.
Nothing to operate. On Zapier there is no server, no upgrade path and no database. For a business with no technical staff, that is not a convenience, it is the product.
Short workflows. At one or two actions per run the counting advantage is small or nil, and Zapier's app coverage and zero-ops model usually decide it.
Where it is a tie
Below roughly 100 workflow runs a month with short workflows, this comparison does not matter. Neither meter will bite. Pick on which builder you can tolerate and whether your apps are supported.
Idle cost is also a tie, as noted above: neither vendor bills a poll that finds nothing.
What to check before you switch
Count the successful actions in your three busiest Zaps and multiply by their monthly run count. That number is your Zapier task bill in units. Then count the runs alone — that is your n8n number. If the two are within a factor of two, the platforms are close enough that pricing should not decide it. If the first is five or ten times the second, you have found a real saving and it is worth the migration work.
Check your apps against both directories before anything else. A platform that is 60% cheaper and missing your CRM connector costs infinitely more. If you are also weighing Make, the n8n and Make comparison covers the third corner.