As of 28 Oct 2026, the panel rates n8n 2.5/5 and Zapier 2.5/5 in Workflow Management. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 5 of the 6 judges pick n8n and 1 picks Zapier. n8n scores higher on 5 of 7 criteria (Hosting options & portability, Process design, forms & approvals, Governance, credentials & audit trail, plus 2 more). Zapier scores higher on 2 of 7 criteria (Connectors, API & on-premise reach and Execution, error handling & monitoring). Provenance — n8n: EU-Made; Zapier: Rest of world, United States. Ratings are the AI panel’s opinion, formed from public evidence: how scores are made.
n8n holds the higher mean on hosting and portability (6.5 to Zapier's 3.3), governance and audit (5.8 to 5.5), sovereignty (3.3 to 3.0), pricing transparency (5.5 to 5.3) and process design (4.7 to 4.0); Zapier holds it on integrations and connectors (5.8 to 5.2) and run reliability (6.0 to 5.8). On the leans, 5 of 6 judges pick n8n for run reliability, governance and audit, hosting and portability, sovereignty and pricing transparency; process design goes 4 n8n, 1 Zapier, 1 tie; integrations go 2 n8n, 1 Zapier, 3 ties. So run reliability's mean and leans point opposite ways. Weighted totals favor Zapier for the integrator (5.3 to 0) and n8n for the ops analyst (6.8 to 5.2), head of IT (6.6 to 4.6), data protection officer (6.1 to 4.1) and skeptic (6.4 to 5); the process owner's total is not listed. No overall winner — these splits are the answer.
Choose n8n if
You need to self-host, run workflows air-gapped, or keep automation under Git version control — hosting and portability leans n8n 5 judges to 1, means 6.5 to 3.3.
Your governance requirements name SAML SSO, audit logging, or SOC reports in a public trust center — governance and audit leans n8n 5 judges to 1, means 5.8 to 5.5.
You are buying as head of IT — the weighted total reads 6.6 for n8n versus 4.6 for Zapier.
Your data protection officer signs off on the purchase — the weighted total reads 6.1 for n8n versus 4.1 for Zapier.
You need pricing detail published across plans — pricing transparency leans n8n 5 judges to 1, means 5.5 to 5.3, while Zapier's captured pricing publishes the task allowance only for the Free tier's 100 tasks per month, with Professional shown as "Starting from $19.99 /month" and Team as "Starting from $69 /month" without task allowances.
Choose Zapier if
Your work depends on connector breadth — integrations and connectors means read 5.8 for Zapier versus 5.2, on a 9,000-plus app catalogue with webhooks to any API; note the leans split 2 for n8n, 1 for Zapier, 3 ties.
You are buying as the integrator — the weighted total reads 5.3 for Zapier versus 0 for n8n.
Your setup accepts US-default data residency and a US legal entity — Zapier's attributes list legal entity jurisdiction as US and data residency as US default.
You prioritize the higher run reliability mean (6.0 to 5.8), on documented automatic retries and step-level observability — noting that 5 of 6 judges lean n8n on that criterion.
Read this comparison as one judge. Each weighs the same scores by what they care about.
The Head of IT
Answers for every automation a department builds without asking. Wants SSO, separate test and production, an inventory of workflows with their owners — and an exit: definitions exportable as BPMN or documented JSON, a self-hosted edition, and an engine licence that will still apply in five years.
n8n
This judge's pick
Zapier
Criterion by criterion
Process design, forms & approvals
n8n
The templates show a visual designer with switch-node branching by department and role, plus real human approval steps: a Gmail send-and-wait-for-response with approve, reject and cancel, and a ClickUp sub-workflow with configurable poll interval, max attempts and a reminder threshold for the approval SLA. Workflow history with diff, two dev and prod instances and Git version control give me the versioning I insist on, though we found no public information on BPMN modelling, substitutes and escalation chains, or how running instances behave when a new version is published.
Zapier
The visual no-code editor with paths, filters, looping and scheduling, plus forms with conditional logic, gives a business owner genuine branching. I found no public information on approval steps assigned to roles or groups, substitutes, or deadlines and reminders for open human tasks, and no BPMN or equivalent documented notation — so it suits system-to-system handovers, not governed approval processes.
Connectors, API & on-premise reach
n8n
Named nodes for Microsoft Excel 365, Google Sheets, Gmail, Postgres and MySQL sit alongside a documented HTTP Request step, an inbound webhook node and a public API with workflow and credential endpoints, which covers my baseline. Custom nodes and bash scripts are available in self-hosted only, and we found no public information on connectors to SAP, DATEV or another DACH ERP, on connector changelogs, or on who maintains each connector.
Zapier
Nine thousand plus apps, a webhook step reaching any API without code, a documented platform API for creating and configuring Zaps, and custom integrations buildable in code on the CLI give broad reach, with instant event-driven triggers shown. I found no public information on connectors to ERP systems common in DACH such as SAP or DATEV, on SOAP or database steps, or on any agent reaching systems behind our firewall — a real gap for a European estate.
Execution, error handling & monitoring
n8n
The pricing page documents automatic retries, error workflows, per-step input and output in the editor, and hard limits per plan: execution duration, concurrency, saved executions and log retention. Error-handling templates send email alerts with the failed workflow id, name and error message plus a machine-readable error payload, log streaming to Datadog and queue mode for scaling are listed, single-step re-run and mock data are documented, and self-hosted OpenTelemetry tracing is in preview; we found no public information on a public status page with incident history or an SLA with service credits.
Zapier
Automatic retries on throttling and authentication refresh with retry are documented, errors land in Zap history with email notification, the task limits and the 25-step maximum are published, and run-content retention is laid out per product with custom retention on Company and Enterprise. I found no public information on replaying a failed run from the failing step, on configurable retries or back-off, or on a public status page with an uptime commitment.
Governance, credentials & audit trail
n8n
SSO via SAML and LDAP, custom project roles, an encrypted credential store, external secret store integration, execution data redaction, audit logging and enforced 2FA are all listed, with two dev and prod instances and Git-based publishing — close to what I demand before a department ships anything. The privacy policy even states what the platform records about users, namely session recordings on cloud with credential values never recorded. We found no public information on SCIM provisioning or an exportable audit trail, and the workflow-and-credential inventory I want is a community template rather than a central inventory with named owners.
Zapier
SAML single sign-on with SCIM provisioning, granular permissions per team member, and a governance view showing every agent action and workflow run with its owner and the systems involved are precisely the inventory I demand; Company and Enterprise plans can shorten content retention. We found no public information on separate development, test and production environments with a publishing approval, external secret stores, payload redaction, or an exportable audit trail — and the SDK permissions documentation itself states those guardrails are per-credential, not an organisation-wide policy system.
Hosting options & portability
n8n
This is where the exit story holds: the engine can be self-hosted via Docker, on-premises and air-gapped, the source is on GitHub, enterprise licence terms are published, and workflow definitions version in Git with export from cloud and import from file on the self-hosted side. The documented migration from cloud to self-hosted is manual, however, credentials explicitly cannot be exported from cloud for security reasons and must be re-entered, and we found no public information on a migration path in the other direction — a workable exit, not a turnkey one.
Zapier
The terms state the service operates from a cloud located in the United States, and Zap Workflows, account data and Zap history can be exported, with the terms pointing to a retention, deletion and export schedule for switching to a new provider before termination. I found no public information on a self-hosted edition, a published engine licence, or export of workflow definitions as BPMN or documented JSON — the five-year exit I sign against cannot be planned from these pages.
European sovereignty
n8n
The imprint and the enterprise terms put the contracting entity at n8n GmbH, Novalisstr. 10, Berlin, with a pre-signed data processing agreement naming the customer as controller and n8n as processor. We found no public information on where cloud executions and their payloads run or on a subprocessor list; the privacy policy references the EU–U.S. Data Privacy Framework and SCCs as safeguards and names Paddle as merchant of record for card payments. The self-hosted and air-gapped editions keep the data on our own servers, with a documented telemetry opt-out.
Zapier
The contracting entity is Zapier, Inc., a Delaware corporation, and the terms say the service is operated from a United States cloud, with the customer as data exporter and Zapier as data importer; a privacy policy and a data processing addendum exist and Zapier certifies under the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework. No EU contracting entity or EU execution is shown on the captured pages, and the terms prohibit uploading sensitive personal data — which constrains which of our processes could run here at all.
Pricing transparency
n8n
Every self-serve tier is public — 20€ /mo, billed annually for 2.5k workflow executions; 50€ /mo for 10k; 667€ /mo for 40k self-hosted — with the billing unit defined as a full workflow execution rather than per step or per user, unlimited users and workflows, and every integration on all plans; Enterprise is contact sales. Execution limits, retention and concurrency per plan sit on the same page, annual billing saves 17%, fees are exclusive of taxes and the enterprise terms state 12-month terms paid in advance. We found no public information on a per-execution overage price beyond the custom-plan tiers from 50,000 to 500,000 on Pro-2 monthly, or on a published calculator with worked examples.
Zapier
The billing unit is defined better than most: polling and triggers never consume a task, a documented list of step types does not count, one MCP tool call uses two tasks, and the free plan states "100 tasks per month". But Professional shows only "Starting from $19.99 /month" and Team "Starting from $69 /month" without the captured allowance per tier, Enterprise is "Contact for pricing", overage is described only as a higher per-task rate than the base subscription without the number, and taxes sit with the customer on top.
Sovereignty, side by side
Dimension
n8n
Zapier
Legal entity
Not determined
Incorporated in US
Ownership
Not determined
Not determined
Data residency
Not determined
Not determined
Subprocessors
Not determined
Not determined
Facts, side by side
Only facts both products carry under the same definition — anything else would not be a fair row.
As of 28 Oct 2026, the panel rates both 2.5/5. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 5 of the 6 judges pick n8n and 1 picks Zapier. Which one fits depends on the criteria that matter to you; the table on this page shows both side by side, and each judge’s reading has its own page. Both were scored by the same AI bench under the same rubric, from public evidence only, as the methodology describes.
Is n8n or Zapier European?
n8n is European (EU-Made). Zapier is not European by provenance (Rest of world, United States). Provenance is read from each company’s own legal pages: who builds it and who owns it.
Do n8n and Zapier have a free plan?
As of 28 Oct 2026, Zapier’s own pages state a free plan; n8n’s pages as captured do not. Each product page links the pricing page it was read from.