Power Automate vs Zapier vs Make vs n8n. Pick based on what you already pay for.

The question "which connector tool is best" is usually already answered by whatever you're paying for. If you're on Microsoft 365 Business Premium or above, Power Automate covers a lot of ground at no extra cost. If your stack lives in Xero, Shopify, Google Workspace or a hundred other non-Microsoft tools, Zapier or Make will get you further, faster. A technical team that wants to self-host should look at n8n as a fourth option.

I get asked "should we use Power Automate or Zapier" a fair bit, usually by someone comparing logos rather than checking what's already sitting in their subscription list. Power Automate rides on a Microsoft 365 licence most of my clients already hold. Zapier and Make don't care what licence you hold, they just want an API key, and between them they reach thousands of apps Microsoft's connector library doesn't touch.

What each one is built for

Power Automate is Microsoft's own automation layer, built to sit inside the Microsoft 365 tenant you already run. It moves data between SharePoint, Outlook, Teams, Excel, Dataverse and a long list of other services, using the same connector model that powers Power Apps and Copilot Studio. Its natural home is a business already living inside the Microsoft stack, where the automation shares login, permissions and data governance with everything else your IT admin already manages.

Zapier is the oldest of the three, built around a simpler idea: watch for a trigger in one app, do something in another. It doesn't assume you're on any particular platform, and its connector library reflects that, thousands of small SaaS tools sitting alongside the big names. It's the one most likely to already have a ready-made connector for whatever slightly obscure app your business runs.

Make (formerly Integromat) does a similar job to Zapier but exposes more of the machinery: branching paths, loops, error handling, a visual canvas you build workflows on rather than a straight step list. It rewards someone willing to spend an hour learning the canvas, and pays that back with workflows Zapier's simpler builder can't express without bolting on extra apps and steps.

Where Power Automate wins by default

As at July 2026, an eligible Microsoft 365 subscription already includes Power Automate for flows built entirely on standard connectors, SharePoint, Outlook, Teams, OneDrive and Excel Online among them, running against a shared daily action allowance at tenant level. If your firm already pays for those licences, a flow that never leaves the Microsoft stack costs nothing extra to build or run.

There's a governance reason to prefer it as well as a pricing one. A flow built on Power Automate inherits the same conditional access, data loss prevention policies and admin centre visibility as the rest of your tenant. For a professional services firm already managing that layer for security or compliance reasons, that decides whether IT approves a build in a day or it sits in a security review for a month while nobody can see what a third-party tool is doing with client data.

This is also where it plugs into the rest of the Power Platform: a flow can hand off to Copilot Studio for the parts that genuinely need judgement, or write into Dataverse alongside a Power App your team already opens on a phone. Zapier and Make can't do that handoff, because they're outside the tenant looking in.

Where Zapier and Make win: reach outside Microsoft

Flip the stack and the advantage flips with it. Zapier connects to something in the region of 7,000 apps as at July 2026, and Make to roughly 3,000, against Power Automate's low thousands, and a good chunk of those are premium on Microsoft's side regardless. If your business runs Xero for accounts, Shopify for sales, Google Workspace for email and a handful of smaller SaaS tools with no Microsoft 365 estate anywhere in sight, Power Automate has nothing to plug into. There's no tenant for it to live in.

Setup is also faster for a small business without an IT admin. Zapier and Make both assume you'll connect an account with an API key or an OAuth login and start building straight away, no tenant configuration, no admin consent screen, no conditional access policy to check first. For a five-person trades business or a small retailer, that's the difference between having a working automation this afternoon and waiting on someone in IT.

n8n: the one you can host yourself

n8n is a workflow tool in the same visual-canvas family as Make, with branching, loops and code steps, and one difference that matters: you can run it yourself. n8n publishes a self-hosted Community edition on GitHub, and its cloud plans are priced in euros by workflow executions rather than by app or by user. As at 3 October 2026 its pricing page shows Starter at €20 a month billed annually for 2,500 executions, Pro at €50 a month for 10,000, and a Business plan at €667 a month for 40,000 that is self-hosted. Every plan lists unlimited users, unlimited workflows and every integration, so there is no premium connector gate to trip over.

Who it suits: a technical person, or a consultant, who is happy with a canvas and, if self-hosting, with patching and backing up a server. It is the wrong pick for an owner who wants no admin at all, and for a firm already inside Microsoft 365, where Power Automate shares your tenant's governance for nothing extra. One licence point before you offer it to clients: n8n's Sustainable Use License allows the free self-hosted edition for your own internal business use, not for reselling it or hosting it for others.

The premium connector cost that changes the maths

This is the part that trips people up, because the three tools charge for "going outside the basics" in three different ways, and they don't map onto each other cleanly.

Power Automate splits its connector library into standard and premium tiers. Premium connectors, Salesforce, SQL Server, HTTP, ServiceNow, SAP, DocuSign, Dataverse and hundreds more, need either the Power Automate Premium plan at roughly USD 15 per user per month, or a Power Apps per-user or per-app licence. The catch is that it's licensed per person who touches the flow, not per flow. One automation that needs a single premium connector can mean licensing every staff member who's a maker or approver on it, which is where the "it's basically free" story falls over fast. I've written more on what counts as a premium connector and what it costs to turn one on if this is the part you're trying to budget for.

Zapier doesn't split connectors by a licence tier the same way, but a specific list of its apps, Salesforce, HubSpot, Jira, NetSuite and others, are marked Premium and require at least a paid plan to use at all, regardless of how few tasks you're running. A business on the free plan that needs exactly one of those apps has to upgrade immediately, even if their total automation volume is tiny.

Make mostly skips this problem. Aside from a short list of Enterprise-reserved apps and custom-built connectors, nearly every app in Make's library runs on every paid plan. The cost lever is volume, credits consumed per month, not which specific app you're connecting to. That makes Make's pricing easier to predict once you know your rough monthly volume, and harder to predict up front if you don't.

Tool	Free tier	Entry paid tier	Premium connector policy
Power Automate	Standard connectors included with an eligible M365 licence, shared 25,000 actions/day at tenant level	Premium plan, around USD 15/user/month	Premium connectors locked to the paid plan, licensed per user who touches the flow
Zapier	100 tasks/month, two-step Zaps only	Professional, from around USD 20-30/month, entry tier 750 tasks/month	A named set of apps (Salesforce, HubSpot, Jira, NetSuite and others) require a paid plan regardless of task volume
Make	1,000 credits/month, 2 active scenarios	Core, from around USD 9-12/month, 10,000 credits/month, unlimited scenarios	Nearly all apps run on every paid plan, only a short Enterprise-reserved list and custom apps are gated
n8n	Self-hosted Community edition is free; you run the server	Cloud Starter, €20/month billed annually, 2,500 executions	No premium connector gate: every plan lists every integration, priced by executions instead

Pricing across all three moves often enough that a specific figure here will drift within a quarter or two. Treat these as indicative as at July 2026 (n8n as at 3 October 2026, in euros as published) and check the vendor's current pricing page before you budget against them.

A decision path based on what you already pay for

Run through this before comparing feature lists.

• List what you're already paying for. Your Microsoft 365 plan level, and every piece of software that needs to talk to it. This list decides more than any feature comparison will.
• Mostly Microsoft, and Business Premium or above? Start with Power Automate's standard connectors. You already own it, and it shares governance with the rest of your tenant.
• Need even one non-Microsoft connector, Salesforce, DocuSign, SQL Server? Price the Premium plan per person who'll touch the flow before you commit. That per-seat cost is where the "it's free" story stops being true.
• No Microsoft 365 estate at all, living in Xero, Shopify and Google Workspace instead? Skip Power Automate. Prototype on Zapier's free plan, and move to Make if the workflow needs branching, loops or more steps than a linear Zap can hold.
• Cost predictability matters more than raw connector count? Run the numbers on Make's credit pricing against Zapier's premium app gate. They fail in different places, and which one bites depends on your own usage pattern.

I build on Power Platform for a living, so take that into account, but plenty of the businesses I talk to are better off on Zapier or Make, and I'll say so on the call rather than steer everyone towards the tool I know best. If you're already leaning Microsoft and want the wider picture, what Power Platform and Copilot agents cover for M365 firms sets out the rest. And if none of the three connector tools are the right shape for the job, that's a different conversation, covered in when Power Platform is the wrong answer.

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