What the three tools do
All three build automations from ready-made steps: receive a form, fetch an order, add a row, send a message. You connect the steps into a workflow that runs when something happens or on a schedule.
Zapier and Make run only in the vendor cloud. n8n has a cloud version and a version you can host yourself, and it lets you add your own code at any point in a workflow.
How to choose
Start from who will operate the workflow in a year, not from the feature list.
- A few simple connections and a small team: Zapier or Make.
- Data that must stay inside the company: self-hosted n8n.
- Many runs per day or unusual logic: n8n.
- Nobody to look after a server: a vendor cloud, or outside care for the self-hosted setup.
What self-hosting n8n really costs
Self-hosting removes the per-run bill and keeps the data on your infrastructure. It adds work: updates, backups, access control and someone who notices when the service stops.
A skipped update is the usual way a self-hosted automation tool becomes a security problem. If nobody owns that work, the vendor cloud is the safer choice.
What no tool solves
None of the three decides what happens when a vendor returns an error, who repairs the workflow when it stops, or whether the same record arrived twice. Those are design decisions, and they belong before the build.
Before picking a tool, list the manual work: what repeats, how often, in which systems, and who does it. The tool follows from that list.