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Zapier counts tasks, n8n counts workflow executions regardless of complexity, and only one of them can be self-hosted. Model your own step count at 1,000 and 20,000 runs before you pick either.
Loistrofi Editorial — Aug 24, 2026 — 9 min read
If your automations are multi-step and run at volume, n8n's model is the one that holds still: it bills workflow executions regardless of complexity, and its Community Edition is self-hostable. Zapier bills tasks, so each extra action step multiplies your consumption. The catch: n8n's pricing page gave us no dollar figures today. Zapier's did — $0, from $19.99, and from $69 a month.
The two vendors do not meter the same thing, and this is where most cost comparisons go wrong. n8n's pricing page states it plainly: "Pricing based on monthly workflow executions, regardless of complexity." One run of a workflow is one execution whether it has three nodes or thirty. Zapier's page counts in tasks — its Free plan is described as "100 tasks per month," and its non-profit discount explicitly excludes "pay-per-task charges." Tasks and runs are not the same unit, and the gap between them is your step count.
So open your workflow and count the action steps that do work — the create-record, the send-message, the enrich-lead, the branch that fires. Then multiply by how often the workflow triggers. A six-step workflow triggered 1,000 times a month is 1,000 executions on the n8n side of the ledger and 6,000 units of the thing Zapier meters. At 20,000 triggers it is 20,000 versus 120,000. Same automation, same business outcome, twentyfold difference in what one of the two counters registers.
n8n's own page gives you a useful way to estimate the run count. A daily scheduled workflow is 30 or 31 executions a month. One that runs every five minutes is "about 8,600–8,900 executions monthly." Two five-minute schedules put you at roughly 17,200–17,800 executions before a single webhook fires. If you are planning a 20,000-run month, that is probably how you get there — polling schedules, not customer events.
| Zapier | n8n | |
|---|---|---|
| Unit metered | Tasks | Workflow executions, "regardless of complexity" |
| Free option | $0/mo, 100 tasks per month | Community Edition (self-hosted); no price in the page text today |
| Entry paid plan | Professional, starting from $19.99/mo | Starter; no price in the page text today |
| Next tier | Team, starting from $69/mo | Business; no price in the page text today |
| Annual discount | Pay yearly, save 33% | Annually, save 17% |
| Discount for small teams | 15% for non-profits, excluding pay-per-task charges | Start-up Plan: under 20 employees, 50% off Business |
| Self-hosting | Not offered on the pricing page | Community Edition |
| Overage behaviour | "pay-per-task charges" referenced | Not stated in the text we read |
Two gaps in that table are the reason you cannot finish this decision from a comparison article. Zapier's plan cards say "Starting from," which means each plan has a task-volume selector whose tiers were not in the page text we read — so $19.99 buys an unstated number of tasks. And n8n's plan cards rendered without prices at all. Both of those you check on the vendor page in under two minutes; neither should be guessed at.
Take the six-step workflow: 6,000 tasks a month. The Free plan is out immediately — 100 tasks per month covers roughly sixteen runs of that workflow, or one run every other day. You are on Professional or Team. Professional starts from $19.99 a month, Team from $69 a month. If $19.99 is the monthly-billing rate, twelve months of it is $239.88 before any task overage; Team at $69 is $828 for the year on the same assumption. What neither figure tells you is whether the lowest task tier of Professional includes 6,000 tasks or a fraction of that.
That is the number to hunt for. Zapier's own FAQ says you can upgrade or downgrade at any time, with an immediate prorated charge on upgrade and a downgrade that lands at the end of the billing cycle. That asymmetry is worth knowing at 1,000 runs a month: buying a task tier that is too small costs you a mid-cycle upgrade, buying one that is too large costs you a full cycle you cannot exit early. At this volume, guess low and let the proration fix it.
Twenty thousand runs of the same six-step workflow is 120,000 tasks. Nothing on the pricing page in front of us tells you what that costs — the plan cards top out at "Team, starting from $69" with a Contact Sales option, and the task tiers behind "Starting from" were not in the readable text. What the page does confirm is that pay-per-task charges exist as a distinct line item, because the non-profit discount is explicitly carved out from them. At 120,000 tasks, that line item is the whole conversation.
The practical move at this volume is to stop optimising the plan and start optimising the step count, because on a task meter every step you delete is 20,000 units a month. Merge two API calls into one. Move filtering into the trigger rather than a downstream step. Then re-run the multiplication. A six-step workflow cut to four is a 33% reduction in metered volume with no change in plan.
Zapier prices its Agents and Chatbots products separately, and those meters are tighter than they look. Agents has a free tier at 400 activities per month, and Agents Pro at $400 billed annually — $33.33 a month — covering 1,500 activities per month. That ceiling matters: 1,500 activities is roughly 50 a day. If you were planning to route 20,000 monthly runs through an agent, the published Agents tiers do not reach, and you are into the Contact Sales tier with a custom activity count.
Chatbots Pro is $160 billed annually, $13.33 a month, for 5 chatbots with 10 custom knowledge sources each. Chatbots Advanced is $800 billed annually, $66.67 a month, for up to 20 chatbots with 20 knowledge sources each and the Zapier logo removed. Those are capacity limits, not volume limits — the page states no conversation cap on either. If your AI spend is one embedded support bot, that is a different and much smaller purchase than a task-metered Zap fleet.
One thousand executions is one thousand executions, whether your workflow has three nodes or thirty. That is the entire pitch, and at this volume it usually lands you on Starter or the self-hosted Community Edition. The one thing to watch is not the execution count but the retention: n8n keeps your most recent executions for debugging, with each plan limited by number of saved executions, total storage in Cloud, and a retention window in days. It removes the oldest first. Critically, the page states that reaching a limit "does not stop your workflows from running" — you lose history, not uptime.
Here the model earns its keep, because your step count never enters the calculation. Twenty thousand runs of a thirty-node workflow bills the same as twenty thousand runs of a three-node one. You track consumption in the Insights Dashboard, and on Business plans n8n emails a weekly production-execution count across every instance carrying your licence key; annual Business subscribers get contacted at 80% of the annual quota. That 80% warning is the signal you are meant to act on — it is the vendor telling you a tier change is coming before the month it lands.
Community Edition removes the vendor invoice and replaces it with three costs nobody prints on a pricing page: a server, a backup and restore routine, and the hours you spend upgrading it. At 1,000 runs a month that trade is usually bad — you are spending engineering time to avoid a small subscription. At 20,000 runs of a heavy multi-step workflow, it starts to look sensible, because the metered alternative scales with your step count and a box does not. Price your own server and your own hourly rate; do not take a generic number from anyone, including us.
- If your workflows are two or three steps and you run them a few hundred times a month, pick Zapier and start on Free at 100 tasks a month, then move to Professional from $19.99 when you exceed it — the step multiplier barely bites at low complexity and you get the larger app catalogue.
- If you have a workflow with eight or more action steps running thousands of times a month, pick n8n, because per-execution billing charges you once for work Zapier charges you eight times for. Confirm the Starter and Business figures on the pricing page first, since they did not render for us.
- If your monthly volume comes from polling schedules — anything on a five-minute timer, roughly 8,600–8,900 executions a month by n8n's own estimate — pick n8n and consider self-hosting, because schedule-driven volume is predictable, unbounded by seats, and exactly the shape that punishes a task meter.
- If you have under 20 employees, ask n8n about the Start-up Plan before you buy anything: the page advertises 50% off Business for teams that qualify, which can invert the whole comparison against a Zapier plan you were about to sign.
- If the automation is an embedded support chatbot rather than a data pipeline, pick Zapier Chatbots — $160 a year for five bots is a smaller and more predictable commitment than any execution-metered plan, and the page states no per-conversation charge.
- Open Zapier's "About task usage rates" link and confirm what consumes a task in a multi-step Zap, then re-run your runs-times-steps multiplication against the real definition.
- Move the task-volume selector on the Professional and Team cards until it covers your calculated monthly tasks, and write down that price — not the "starting from" price.
- Toggle Zapier's monthly/yearly switch and check whether $19.99 and $69 move; the page advertises a 33% yearly saving, and you need to know which side of that toggle your quote came from.
- Read n8n's Starter and Business cards directly for the included execution counts and the price, and check the saved-execution and retention limits on the tier you want — you keep running past them, but you lose the logs you debug with.
- If you need to pay by invoice or wire, confirm eligibility first: Zapier's FAQ restricts it to the latest annual Team or Enterprise plan, which forces a plan decision before a payment decision.
- If you are a non-profit, apply for Zapier's 15% discount before subscribing, and note it does not apply to pay-per-task charges — so it discounts the part of your bill that stays flat, not the part that grows.
At 1,000 runs a month, we'd stay on Zapier Professional from $19.99 and not think about it again — the step multiplier is affordable at that volume and the integration coverage saves you more hours than the price difference costs. At 20,000 runs of anything more than four steps, we'd move to n8n, because paying once per execution instead of once per step is a structural advantage that no discount tier reverses. And we would not sign the n8n contract until we had seen the Starter and Business numbers on the page ourselves, because a model that bills the right unit is still capable of billing too much for it.
Loistrofi does not take vendor briefings or speak to sales teams. Every figure here comes from a page the vendor publishes itself, checked on Aug 24, 2026. Where a number could not be confirmed at source, it is marked rather than smoothed over.
