Four Zapier alternatives on published facts. And the case for not moving at all.
Zapier bills per successful action from US$19.99 a month and polls for free. The four alternatives Australian small businesses actually weigh — Make, n8n Cloud, self-hosted n8n and Microsoft Power Automate — bill by operation, by workflow run, by server and by user respectively. For low-volume, rare-event automation that somebody else will maintain, Zapier is still the right answer.
Why people go looking, and which reasons are good ones
Three complaints. The bill grows with success: Zapier charges a task for every successful action step, so the workflow that finally works is the one that costs most (Zapier help centre, fetched 3 September 2026). The overage is unknowable in advance: above your plan limit Zapier switches to pay-per-task at “a higher per-task rate” it does not publish, and stops workflows at three times the limit (Zapier, fetched 3 September 2026). And the data goes through the United States: “Zapier hosts data in AWS servers located in the United States” (Zapier data privacy overview, fetched 3 September 2026).
The first is a good reason once volume is real, and the arithmetic below shows where. The second is a good reason to know your volume before you build, on any platform. The third matters to a small number of businesses and is irrelevant to most; we cover which below rather than pretending it is universal.
The bad reason is complexity. A Zap with fifteen steps and error handling bolted on is not a Zapier problem, it is a sign the workflow has outgrown a visual builder, and moving it to Make or n8n moves the problem. Zapier versus a custom build is the page for that case.
When to stay on the incumbent
Stay if your automations wait for rare events. A Zap watching for a new customer, a failed payment or a form that gets filled in twice a week costs nothing between events, because “trigger, filter, and certain built-in tool steps do not count as tasks” (Zapier, fetched 3 September 2026). On Make the same watch costs an operation every interval whether anything happened or not. On Zapier, idle is free, and most small-business automation is mostly idle.
Stay if somebody who is not a developer will maintain it. Zapier’s failure modes show up in a UI a business owner can read and fix. That legibility is worth more than a lower list price when the person carrying the automation after we leave is you. It is the main reason Zapier is one of the nine systems in production at Kindra, and the reasoning is on the Zapier integration page.
Stay if your volume is under the plan. Professional is US$19.99 a month for 750 tasks with two-minute polling (Zapier pricing, fetched 3 September 2026). Forty invoices a month through a three-step Zap is about 40 to 80 tasks. You are a tenth of the way to the ceiling and the alternatives below will save you, at most, the price of a coffee a week while costing you a migration. Do not move a working automation to save US$8.
The four alternatives, on what each publishes
Two of these we run in production — Zapier itself and n8n, both cloud and self-hosted. Make and Power Automate we have not run, and their columns are their own published pages. Three vendors publish in US dollars or euros; Microsoft publishes Australian prices. We quote what each publishes rather than converting.
| Zapier | Make | n8n Cloud | n8n self-hosted | Power Automate | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Billing unit | Partly A task: one successful action step. Polling free. | Partly An operation: any module run, including the check for new data. | Yes An execution: one run of the whole workflow, however many steps. | Yes None. Community edition is free; you pay for the server. | Partly Per user (cloud flows) or per bot (unattended desktop flows). |
| Entry paid price | Partly US$19.99 a month, 750 tasks, 2-minute polling. | Yes US$12 a month, 10,000 operations, 1-minute interval. | Partly €20 a month billed annually, 2,500 executions, 5 concurrent. | Yes Licence US$0. A small server, plus somebody to run it. | Yes AU$22.40 per user a month ex GST, paid yearly. |
| Free tier | Partly 100 tasks, two-step Zaps, 15-minute polling. | Yes 1,000 operations, two active scenarios, 15-minute interval. | No No free cloud tier on the pricing page as fetched. | Yes Community edition, indefinitely, under the sustainable use licence. | Not assessed Not assessed. Depends on your Microsoft 365 licence. |
| Where it runs | No AWS, United States. No other region. | No AWS, “EU/North America”. No Australian region. | Not assessed Not assessed here; region choice not on the pricing page we fetched. | Yes Wherever you put it. Ours run in Singapore and Helsinki, or NextDC Australia on request. | Not assessed Not assessed. Microsoft region depends on tenant. |
| Who carries uptime | Yes Zapier. | Yes Make. | Yes n8n. | No You, or whoever you pay to. Patching, backups, monitoring. | Yes Microsoft. |
| Assessed by us | Yes In production. | No Documentation only. | Yes In production. | Yes In production. | No Documentation only. |
Make, if the bill is the problem and the workflow fires often
Make’s unit is cheaper and its plans are bigger: Core is US$12 a month for 10,000 operations against Zapier Professional at US$19.99 for 750 tasks, with a one-minute interval where Zapier gives you two (Make and Zapier, fetched 3 September 2026). For a workflow that genuinely fires hundreds of times a month, that is not a close comparison.
The catch is in the definition. “An operation is a single module run to process data or check for new data” (Make, fetched 3 September 2026). The check counts. A scenario polling every fifteen minutes spends about 2,900 operations a month finding nothing; every minute, about 43,000. Webhook triggers avoid it where the source system can send one, and many small-business systems cannot. Zapier versus Make does the arithmetic on one real workflow.
We have not run Make in production. Its column is two pages of its own documentation, and its overage behaviour is not described on the page we worked from. If you move to it, know your polling schedule before you know anything else.
n8n, if volume is high or the data has to stay put
n8n bills per workflow run, not per step: “An execution is a single run of your entire workflow. It doesn’t matter how many steps are in the workflow or how much data it processes.” Cloud Starter is €20 a month billed annually for 2,500 executions, Pro €50 for 10,000, Business €667 for 40,000 (n8n pricing, fetched 3 September 2026). A ten-step workflow costs the same as a two-step one, which inverts both Zapier’s and Make’s models.
Self-hosted, the licence cost is nil. The Community edition is free indefinitely under n8n’s sustainable use licence with, in n8n’s words, almost the complete feature set (n8n, fetched 3 September 2026). What you pay instead is a server and attention — patching, backups, monitoring. If that attention is yours and you did not budget for it, the free option is the expensive one. If it is ours, it is a recurring line in the quote, stated before work starts.
And it runs where you put it. Ours run in Singapore and Helsinki by default, with NextDC Australia available for engagements that need Australian residency — ownership and security has the detail. For the small number of businesses where the United States is a problem, self-hosted n8n is the only option on this page that solves it, and we would rather say “small number” than sell residency to a business that does not need it.
Power Automate, if you are already paying Microsoft
Microsoft is the only vendor on this page that publishes Australian prices. Power Automate Premium is AU$22.40 per user a month; Power Automate Process, for an unattended desktop bot, is AU$224.50 per bot a month; Hosted Process is AU$321.80 per bot a month. All are “paid yearly” and “do not include GST” (Microsoft, fetched 3 September 2026).
The case for it is that a business already on Microsoft 365 has the identity, the data and the admin console in one place, and a per-user price is easy to reason about for a small team. The case against is that per-user pricing punishes a workflow that many people touch, and that the unattended bot price is a different order of magnitude from anything else on this page — it is an RPA product, not a Zapier competitor, and it belongs in that comparison rather than this one.
We have not run Power Automate in production. Its column is Microsoft’s Australian pricing page. Which Microsoft region your tenant sits in, and therefore where the flows run, depends on your tenant and is not something we have assessed here.
When the answer is none of these
Past a certain complexity, every platform on this page stops being cheaper than a small purpose-built service you own, running against the systems’ APIs with the logic in tested code. It costs more up front and almost nothing per run. Where that line sits is its own page; most small businesses are nowhere near it. The signs that you are:
- #1Fifteen chained stepsWith error handling bolted on as more steps. Moving that from Zapier to Make moves the problem and changes the currency.
- #2Only one person can read itA workflow nobody but its builder understands is a liability on any platform. Code with tests and a repository you hold is easier to hand over than a diagram with forty modules.
- #3The platform bill exceeds a small serverWhen the monthly subscription on any of the five would pay for hosting a purpose-built service, the subscription is no longer the cheap option.
- #4A process that changes every monthNo platform or custom build fixes this. What not to automate is the page to read before any pricing page on this list.
What we have not assessed
Make and Power Automate as products. We have not built on either, hit their limits, or restored a failed run. Their columns are their own published pages, fetched on one day and linked, and their overage and region behaviour are marked not assessed rather than guessed.
Per-connector reliability at scale on any of the five. The capability register publishes what each vendor documents; observed reliability is the column of it still empty, for Zapier and n8n included.
Pipedream, Workato, Tray, Activepieces and the rest. Their absence means we have not assessed them, not that they lost. Currency, too: Zapier will bill in AUD if you choose it and the others will not; we have not quoted converted figures because a converted figure is wrong by the time you read it.
The questions people actually ask.
01So which one should we move to?
Probably none, if your volume is under Zapier’s plan and someone non-technical maintains it. Make if the workflow fires constantly and you have checked your polling schedule. n8n Cloud if you want per-run pricing on someone else’s server. Self-hosted n8n if volume is high or the data cannot leave a country you choose, and you have someone to run the server. Power Automate if you are already deep in Microsoft 365 and the per-user price suits a small team.
02Does moving off Zapier keep our data in Australia?
Only self-hosted n8n does, and only if you host it in Australia. Make is EU or North America; Zapier is the United States; n8n Cloud and Power Automate depend on region choices we have not assessed here. For most trade businesses under the $3 million Privacy Act threshold none of this is an obligation, and we would rather say that than sell residency you do not need.
03You run Zapier and n8n. Is this page just steering us to those?
We have said Make is cheaper per unit for a busy workflow and that Microsoft is the only one publishing Australian prices — both from their own pages. We have also said the most common right answer is to stay on Zapier, which earns us nothing. Where we cannot verify something about Make or Power Automate, the table says so.
Stop bending.
Start shipping.
Bring the one flow that keeps costing you a Tuesday afternoon. We map it live and tell you what we'd build, what we wouldn't, and what it costs.