Make vs n8n: Which Should a One-Person Business Pick?

ComparisonOctober 6, 2026 · 8 min read

Disclosure: Some links in this article are affiliate links. If you sign up through one, Solo Automate may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Prices and limits quoted were read from each vendor's own pages on the date shown and may have changed since.

Make and n8n both let a non-programmer wire apps together into automated workflows, and both now sell AI agents on top. The real difference for a one-person business is how each one charges. Make bills per action inside a workflow; n8n bills per run of the whole workflow. For some jobs that makes Make several times cheaper, and for others it makes n8n several times cheaper.

Every price and limit below was read from the vendors' own pages on October 6, 2026 and is linked to the page it came from. Prices change; check the linked page before buying.

The short answer

Pick Make if you want a hosted tool with a free plan that runs real workflows, a low entry price, and no server to look after. Pick n8n if you can run a server yourself, or if your workflows process many records per run, because n8n charges the same for a run that touches one record as for a run that touches a thousand.

If the budget is zero and the jobs are simple two-step hand-offs between apps, Zapier's free plan may be enough; that comparison is on this site under Zapier vs Make.

What you pay for: credits versus executions

Make bills in credits. Its pricing page states that since August 27, credits are the billing unit, that each action a scenario performs consumes credits, and that most actions consume 1 credit. An action is one run of one module. Make's help page on operations gives the example that matters: a trigger that returns 10 form responses costs 1 operation, and each of the three modules after it runs 10 times, for 31 operations per scenario run.

n8n bills in executions. Its pricing page states that all plans include unlimited users, workflows and every integration, that pricing is based on monthly workflow executions regardless of complexity, and that an execution is a single run of the entire workflow no matter how many steps it has or how much data it processes.

The same ten-row job therefore costs 31 Make credits and 1 n8n execution. A workflow that runs often on small batches favours Make's lower entry price. A workflow that runs less often on large batches favours n8n.

Plans and prices as shown today

	Make	n8n Cloud
Free	$0 a month, up to 1,000 credits a month	A 14-day trial of Pro features capped at 1,000 executions, no credit card required; after that, the free Community edition on your own server
Cheapest paid plan	Core: $9 a month billed annually, or $10.59 billed monthly, for 10,000 credits a month	Starter: 20€ a month billed annually, for 2.5K executions with unlimited steps
Next tier	Pro: $16 a month billed annually, or $18.82 billed monthly, for 10,000 credits a month	Pro: 50€ a month billed annually, for 10K executions with unlimited steps
Above that	Teams: $29 a month billed annually, or $34.12 billed monthly; Enterprise on custom pricing	Business: 667€ a month billed annually for 40K executions, self-hosted only; Enterprise on request

Make's headline prices are the annual-billing rates. The pricing page's own data lists the monthly-billing price beside each: $10.59, $18.82 and $34.12 for the same 10,000 credits, which is what the Save 15% or more label on the billing toggle refers to. n8n prints only its billed-annually prices, with an Annually (Save 17%) switch, so paying monthly costs more there too, but the monthly figure is not printed on the page.

The two vendors also price in different currencies, dollars for Make and euros for n8n, so the gap between them moves with the exchange rate.

Free tiers

Make Free: $0 a month, up to 1,000 credits a month, 2 active scenarios, a 15-minute minimum interval between scheduled runs, a 5-minute maximum run time, a 5 MB maximum file size and 512MB of data transfer.
n8n Cloud trial: 14 days of Pro features, capped at 1,000 executions, with 5 concurrent executions, a 180-second execution timeout and 1 team project. No credit card is required, and the workspace is deleted if you do not upgrade.
n8n Community edition: free indefinitely when you host it yourself, with almost the complete feature set.

Make's free plan runs a small real workload for free, inside those limits. n8n's free options are a two-week trial or a server of your own.

Self-hosting: only n8n offers it

Make's pricing page lists no self-hosted option. n8n's documentation describes a one-line setup that requires Docker on Linux or macOS, or WSL on Windows, and states that without a licence key n8n runs as the free Community edition. From n8n 3.0, which the one-line setup guide says is launching in October 2026, n8n is distributed only through Docker and the old npm install route no longer works; existing npm installs keep working for now, but new installs and future upgrades should use the one-line setup instead.

The Community edition leaves out custom variables, environments, external secrets, external storage for binary data, log streaming, multi-main mode, projects, SSO, sharing of workflows and credentials, and Git version control. For one person running their own workflows, none of those is likely to matter at first. Sharing and projects become relevant the day a second person joins.

Self-hosting also comes with a licence condition. Under n8n's Sustainable Use License you may use or modify the software only for your own internal business purposes or for non-commercial or personal use. The licence FAQ confirms that workflows created or modified only by you or people in your organisation can run free, and that an agency may serve any number of clients from one instance as long as the clients cannot access it. What you may not do is host n8n as a service and let clients build their own workflows.

AI features

Make advertises AI Agents, labelled beta, on all plans using Make's own AI Provider; connecting your own LLM key (a custom AI provider connection) is available on paid plans only. Its help page on credits notes that when AI modules use Make's AI Provider, credits are based on tokens as well as operations, so an AI step can cost more than one credit.

n8n lists agents, MCP and AI nodes on its Starter plan and gives its Starter and Pro cloud plans a monthly allowance of Assistant credits: 1,600 on Starter and 4,000 or 9,600 on Pro depending on plan size; Enterprise gets the Assistant preview on request and no credit allowance. Its gateway credits, which let you call AI models without your own API keys, are available only on n8n Cloud Starter and Pro, not on Enterprise or self-hosted n8n.

Limits a one-person business hits first

Make: when credits run out, scenarios stop until credits are added, and unused credits expire at the end of the term. On the Free plan the 15-minute minimum interval means a scheduled trigger can wait a quarter of an hour.
Make: every 10,000 monthly credits comes with 5 GB of data transfer, 10 MB of data storage, a 10 MB incomplete-executions store and a webhook queue of 667.
n8n Cloud: a single execution may run at most 5 minutes on Starter and 40 minutes on Pro, and Starter allows 5 concurrent executions and 1 shared project.
n8n Business: exceeding the quota does not stop workflows; if you do not upgrade to the next tier, overage may be invoiced at 4,000 EUR per extra bucket of 300,000 executions.

Verdict

For a one-person business with no server and modest volumes, Make is the simpler buy: $9 a month billed annually for 10,000 credits, a free plan that runs real workflows, and nothing to maintain. For anyone comfortable with Docker, or whose workflows handle hundreds of records per run, n8n's execution-based billing and free Community edition cost less as volume grows. Neither free option is unlimited, and both vendors change these figures, so check the linked pages before committing. A new Make account opened through this site's links gets its first month on the Pro plan free, under Make's affiliate terms as sent to this site on October 6, 2026.