n8n Alternatives: n8n Competitors and Alternatives to n8n Compared by Price per Workflow Run

The main paid n8n alternatives are Zapier, Make, Activepieces, Pipedream, Gumloop, Lindy, Relevance AI and Workato. On a workflow of a trigger plus five actions running 2,000 times a month, Activepieces is the cheapest at $20 a month, Make and n8n land near $28, and Zapier costs $193.50, because Zapier bills every action as a task while n8n and Activepieces bill the whole run once. Relevance AI and Workato publish no self-serve price at all. Every figure below comes from the vendor's own pricing page, read on September 11, 2026.

Most lists of n8n competitors rank tools by features or by how friendly the editor feels. For a buyer, the question that decides the bill is simpler: what does the vendor count? Get that wrong and a tool that looks cheaper on the pricing page ends up several times more expensive once your workflows have ten steps instead of two.

n8n alternatives compared by price and billing unit

Prices are per month in US dollars. Where a vendor shows both, the first figure is billed annually and the second billed monthly.

Two notes on reading it. n8n is the only vendor on the list that prices in euros; the dollar figures use the European Central Bank rate of $1.1616 on September 10, 2026, and we convert every n8n plan and plan size in our n8n pricing breakdown in US dollars. And the headline prices of both Zapier and Make are annual-billed: the same 750 Zapier tasks cost $29.99 on monthly billing, and Make's $12 Core plan is $16 month to month.

The same workflow, priced on each platform

Take an ordinary business workflow: a new form submission triggers it, then five actions run (enrich the lead, score it, create the CRM record, post to a sales channel, send a confirmation). It runs 2,000 times a month. Here is what each vendor's counting rule makes of that, using only plan sizes each vendor publishes:

The gap is the counting rule, not the list price. Zapier's own help text says "each successful action in a Zap counts as a separate task," so every step you add multiplies the bill. n8n, Activepieces and Pipedream charge once per run, so adding a step costs nothing. Make sits in between: it charges per module, but its credits are cheap enough that short scenarios stay close to n8n.

Scale the same workflow to 10,000 runs a month and the pattern holds. n8n Pro covers it at 60 EUR, about $69.70, and Activepieces Plus still covers it at $20. On Zapier the same volume is 50,000 tasks a month, five times the largest Professional size quoted above.

Gumloop and Lindy do not fit this table, and that is by design. Both bill on the AI work a run does rather than on steps, which is the right unit for agent workflows and makes a plain automation hard to price in advance.

When each n8n competitor is the better buy

Zapier is the right answer when the people building workflows are not technical and the workflows are short. Its connector catalog is the largest in the category, the editor is linear and hard to get wrong, and a two-step Zap costs two tasks at most. It gets expensive exactly where n8n gets cheap: long workflows at volume. If you are already paying for Zapier and looking at its newer agent product, our page on AI agents for Zapier covers the separate activities meter that Zapier Agents runs on.

Make is the closest like-for-like hosted alternative. Its visual builder handles branching and iterators well, routers and error handlers are free modules, and its Core plan undercuts n8n Starter on annual billing. Watch code steps, which Make bills at 2 credits per second of execution time.

Activepieces is the cheapest per run on this list and the one most similar to n8n in pricing philosophy: one credit covers a whole run, however many steps. AI steps are the exception at 2, 10 or 20 credits depending on the model tier, or 1 credit with your own API key. It lists in US dollars and charges the same for cloud and self-hosted.

Pipedream suits engineers who would rather write JavaScript or Python than drag boxes. It bills compute time, not steps, so a workflow that waits on a slow API costs more than one that finishes quickly.

Gumloop and Lindy are built for AI agents first. Gumloop passes through the list cost of model tokens and tool calls plus an 8% orchestration fee, 16% if you bring your own API key. Lindy charges per user, $29.99 to $199.99 a month, with a credit allowance that scales with the size of the job rather than the number of steps.

Relevance AI and Workato are enterprise sales motions. Relevance AI's pricing page now says "Talk to sales" with no self-serve tier, so the $19 and $199 plans quoted in older comparisons are no longer on its site. Workato publishes plan names and no prices.

Where n8n still wins

Be fair to n8n before switching away from it. It combines per-run pricing, unlimited users on every plan and a mature self-hosted option with a paid license path; Activepieces is the only other tool here that offers both per-run pricing and self-hosting. Its Cloud Pro plan at 50,000 executions costs 145 EUR a month, which works out to less than a third of a cent per run. And the Community Edition can run internal business workflows on your own servers with no license fee, which none of the hosted-only rivals can match.

The honest reasons to leave are narrower than most alternative lists suggest: your builders are not technical, you need US dollar card billing, your security team needs SSO on a hosted plan without an Enterprise contract (n8n puts SSO on the self-hosted Business plan and on Enterprise only), or your data has to stay in the United States when n8n's hosted plans store it in Frankfurt.

Before you rebuild the workflow somewhere else

Moving between workflow builders swaps one bill for another, and the build work comes with you. It is worth asking first whether the job needs a builder at all. A surprising share of automation workflows exist to do one narrow thing, such as reading incoming order or lead emails and pulling fields out of them, and a dedicated email parser that extracts the data straight to a spreadsheet does that without a canvas to maintain.

The same logic applies to agent workflows. If what you are building in n8n is a lead qualifier, a support triage agent or an invoice chaser, other companies already run that exact job, and a ready-made agent is priced on the job instead of on the runs and the engineering time. Our AI agent platforms comparison lays out the enterprise vendors' published rates, Copilot Studio vs Power Automate pricing covers the Microsoft side of the same decision, and the full n8n price list in dollars shows what staying put costs at every plan size.