Zapier vs Make vs n8n vs Lindy: which billing model wins?
Most automation platform comparisons lead with logo grids and feature checklists. That is the wrong frame. The real question is how many billing units your specific workflow will burn on each platform, because the same five-step automation can cost very different amounts depending on where you run it.
The five platforms covered here are Zapier, Make, n8n, Microsoft Power Automate, and Lindy. Each one models work differently, bills differently, and assumes a different type of builder. Getting that match right matters more than chasing the lowest headline price.
Why Billing Units Decide Your Real Cost
The sticker price comparison is almost useless on its own. Consider a lead-routing workflow that fires 2,000 times a month and has five steps: receive a form, enrich a contact, run an AI scoring step, update a CRM, and post to a chat channel. Here is what each billing model does to that workflow:
- Zapier charges one task per successful action. The trigger is free, so four actions run per cycle. That is roughly 8,000 tasks per month.
- Make charges one credit per module action. Five modules per run equals roughly 10,000 credits, though routers and some AI modules change that math.
- n8n charges one execution per full workflow run, regardless of step count. That same workflow costs 2,000 executions per month.
Those numbers land in very different plan tiers. n8n’s Starter allowance of 2,500 executions covers the workflow with headroom. Make’s 10,000 included credits on Core would just barely fit it, with nothing left for a second automation. Zapier’s free allowance of 100 tasks is nowhere near enough.
The point is not that one vendor is always cheaper. It is that your step count and run volume decide which billing model rewards you. Estimate your units before you pick a plan.
️ Platform by Platform
Zapier: fastest for non-technical teams
Zapier builds around Zaps, which are linear chains of a trigger followed by actions. Its pricing page lists a Free plan with 100 tasks per month and a Professional plan starting at $19.99 per month, which adds multi-step Zaps, webhooks, AI fields, and 2-minute polling. The Team plan starts at $69 per month and supports up to 25 users. Paying yearly saves 33 percent.
One important detail: built-in tools such as Filter, Formatter, Path, and Delay do not consume tasks. A Zap that filters spam and creates one CRM record may use only one task per run. Zapier also sells Agents separately at 400 activities per month free, with a Pro option at $400 per year for 1,500 activities. Chatbots are priced separately on top of that.
When you hit your task limit, Zapier either lets you switch to pay-per-task billing at a higher rate or pauses your Zaps until the next period. Budget a buffer.
Make: lowest entry price on the market
Make’s pricing page lists a Free plan with 1,000 credits and paid tiers. According to an independent price breakdown from Jetadmin, Core costs $9 per month billed yearly, Pro costs $16, and Teams costs $29, each with 10,000 credits. Higher tiers add features rather than credits, so you upgrade for capabilities and buy extra bundles for volume.
Loops are the billing trap to watch. An iterator that processes 50 line items makes every downstream module run 50 times, which can drain your monthly allowance fast. Some advanced AI features consume more than one credit, making the true cost of an AI-heavy scenario harder to predict than the plan price suggests. Make’s page also notes that organizations with fewer than 20 employees can ask about a startup program offering 50 percent off Business.
n8n: execution-based billing favors complex workflows
n8n’s pricing page lists a Starter plan at €20 per month on annual billing with 2,500 executions, and a Pro plan at €50 per month with 10,000 executions. Every plan includes unlimited users, unlimited workflows, and every integration, which removes the per-seat and per-connector surprises found on other platforms.
A thirty-step workflow costs the same execution as a three-step workflow. That structure strongly favors teams running complicated automations with many branches, enrichment calls, and AI steps per run. Saved-execution limits only affect how much history n8n stores; hitting them does not stop your workflows from running.
Self-hosting is available via the Community Edition on GitHub at no software cost, though you handle updates, backups, uptime, and security yourself. Business and Enterprise self-hosted features require a license key that checks in with n8n’s license server daily. Telemetry is collected by default and can be disabled.
Lindy: agent-first, billed per seat
Lindy starts from an AI teammate rather than a trigger-and-action chain. Its pricing page lists a Free plan with $50 in credits lasting seven days and a Team plan at $29.99 per user per month with 3,000 credits. Extra credits cost $10 per 1,000. Credits do not roll over; purchased top-up credits stay available until used. When credits run out, actions pause rather than generating a surprise bill.
Credit consumption scales with task complexity: everyday requests cost 2 to 250 credits, deep work costs 250 to 1,000 credits, and large builds cost 1,000 to 2,500 credits. Features include a Slack-native teammate, meeting notes, inbox management, reply drafting, and over 1,500 integrations with MCP support. Enterprise adds HIPAA support with a signed business associate agreement, single sign-on, and audit logs. Because billing is per seat, cost scales with headcount rather than workflow count.
Power Automate: the Microsoft ecosystem play
Power Automate makes sense primarily for offices already running on Microsoft 365. Microsoft’s pricing page lists a Premium plan at $15 per user per month on annual billing. The Process plan costs $150 per bot per month for unattended desktop automation, and the Hosted Process plan costs $215 per bot per month with a Microsoft-hosted virtual machine. Microsoft notes that displayed prices are for marketing purposes and your actual price appears at checkout.
The real advantage is desktop automation for legacy software with no modern API. A small business with three concurrent desktop processes would need three bots at $150 each. Copilot Studio agents are purchased separately through prepaid credit units and require an Azure subscription. For teams outside the Microsoft ecosystem, the licensing model and connector tiers are usually more complex than the alternatives.
Real Results: What the Case Studies Show
Vendor case studies are promotional documents. Read them for ideas, not as promises. That said, three published results point to the scale of savings that well-designed automations can produce.
Metal Potato (Zapier): invoicing automation
Metal Potato, a web design studio, built a Zap that fires on a new Stripe payment, finds or creates the matching FreshBooks contact, creates an invoice, and attaches the payment. Zapier’s write-up headlines the result as more than five hours saved every week, while the body describes over half a day returned. That discrepancy between headline and body is a good reminder to treat vendor figures as estimates. The workflow also covers only the happy path; a refund or an unknown client still needs manual attention.
Minimum (Make): lead qualification
Minimum, a no-code agency launched in 2020, built a Make scenario after inbound leads overwhelmed its sales team. A homepage form creates a Pipedrive lead, emails a requirements form, and alerts the team on Telegram and Slack. When a lead replies, the scenario creates a Google Drive folder, updates Pipedrive, and sends a Calendly link to qualified leads. Make’s customer story reports more than 400 hours saved per year, against about 32 hours monthly one team member had spent qualifying leads by hand. A human still reviews each submission and decides whether to proceed.
Delivery Hero (n8n): account lockout recovery
Delivery Hero, a delivery platform operating in over 70 countries with more than 53,000 employees, faced about 800 account lockout requests per month averaging 35 minutes each to resolve. The IT team shifted approval to the employee’s direct manager and built a single n8n workflow that calls Okta, Jira, and Google systems to carry out the recovery. According to n8n’s case study, the workflow took five hours to deploy and cut average lockout time from 35 minutes to 20 minutes, saving about 200 hours per month. The calculation method is not explained, and the numbers are vendor-published rather than independently verified.
Hidden Costs Beyond the Plan Price
The subscription fee is the smallest part of your true automation cost. Several other factors can change the math significantly.
- Loops multiply usage. A workflow that processes 50 line items per order can consume 50 times the units you expected on per-action billing models.
- AI steps carry separate costs. These show up as extra credits, higher task tiers, or separate model fees if you bring your own API key.
- Seat-based tools scale with headcount. Lindy and Power Automate grow more expensive as your team does.
- Build and maintenance time has a real cost. A self-hosted n8n server might save subscription money while consuming several hours monthly in maintenance. Count those hours.
- Silent failures are expensive. A trigger that stops firing, a duplicate record, or an AI step returning an unexpected format can cost more in missed leads or wrong invoices than a year of subscription fees.
The right measurement is net hours saved: gross time saved minus subscription fees, extra usage costs, and the hours spent building and maintaining the workflow. A workflow that saves ten hours but takes eight to maintain is a weak investment.
How to Pick a Platform Without Overcomplicating It
A few business profiles make the decision clearer.
- Solo consultant or small agency that values speed: Zapier’s linear editor or a Lindy assistant that handles email and scheduling.
- E-commerce store with many orders and tight margins: Make’s low entry price or n8n’s execution-based billing.
- Professional services firm already on Microsoft 365: Power Automate flows that touch Outlook, Teams, and SharePoint.
- Technical team running long, branching workflows: n8n, especially if you want to self-host and keep data on your own infrastructure.
The cheapest plan is rarely the best fit if the person who must maintain it cannot understand the workflow. Match the platform to the builder as much as to the workflow.
The practical shortcut is to build the same small workflow on two platforms. Choose a process that matters but carries low risk, such as routing website inquiries to a spreadsheet and sending a welcome email. Time how long each build takes, check how clear the error messages are, and count the billing units the test consumes. That one experiment teaches more than a month of reading comparisons, including this one.
⚠️ The Adoption Gap You Can Exploit
The Census Bureau found AI use among U.S. businesses hovering between 17 and 20 percent through May 2026, with little change among firms under 20 employees. A Salesforce survey of 3,350 small business leaders in late 2024 found that 75 percent were at least experimenting with AI and 91 percent of users reported a revenue boost. The Salesforce numbers come from a vendor survey of attitudes; the Census numbers track actual usage. Both together describe a market where interest is high and execution is uneven.
That gap is the opportunity. A five-person team that automates intake, follow-up, and reporting well can serve more customers than a slower competitor with twice the headcount. Entry plans on most platforms cost less per month than a single seat of many business software subscriptions. What they demand in return is a clear process, a named owner, and a willingness to test before trusting the output.
The Verdict
There is no single winner across all business types. Zapier is the fastest on-ramp for non-technical teams. Make is the budget pick for visual builders comfortable with credits. n8n is the execution-based choice for technical teams running long, complex workflows. Power Automate is the right answer only if you are already deep in the Microsoft ecosystem. Lindy is the agent-first option for founders who want an assistant rather than a pipeline.
The one rule that applies to all five: estimate your monthly billing units before you commit to a plan. The same workflow lands in a very different cost bracket depending on which model you are running it on.
I’m founder of BizStack at Cagri Sarigoz LLC and a passionate advocate for entrepreneurs.
With over 14 years in tech, marketing, and AI, including my role as Head of SEO at CitizenShipper and co-founder of TaleBot at Intale AI, I’m dedicated to sharing genuine, useful product insights and tips.
At BizStack, I aim to cut through the digital noise to provide clear, actionable advice.
And more than all else, I’m a father to a (always) little girl and a husband.
Contact me at [email protected] for assistance.
