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 Operations Analyst
Is asked every Monday why invoices took eleven days. Wants a searchable execution history, cycle times per step, alerts that reach a channel rather than an unread mailbox, runtime and throughput limits published before the month-end run hits them — and to know what a loop over 5,000 rows costs in tasks.
n8n
This judge's pick
Zapier
Criterion by criterion
Process design, forms & approvals
n8n
Approvals are real and time-controlled — the ClickUp template documents poll interval, max attempts, reminder threshold and approved/revision/rejected/timed-out outcomes, the Gmail template waits for a response with approve, reject and cancel, and switch nodes branch on department and role, all inside a visual builder where you can also write JavaScript or Python. But approvals ride on Gmail and ClickUp rather than a task inbox, and we found no public information on BPMN-style modelling, four-eyes multi-stage approvals, substitutes, or running instances staying on their original process version — workflow history, workflow diff and Git versioning exist, but as definition versioning, not instance-preserving process versions.
Zapier
A visual no-code editor with paths, filters, looping, scheduling and a forms product with conditional logic is well documented, plus loops and steps after loops in the newer workflow manager. We found no public information on approval steps assigned to roles or groups, substitutes, deadlines or escalation, or on keeping versions of a process already running.
Connectors, API & on-premise reach
n8n
The HTTP Request node and inbound webhooks each have documented per-app pages with docs and examples, a public API under an API key reads and manages workflows, and self-hosted installs add custom nodes and bash scripts to reach internal systems, with connectors including Microsoft Excel 365, Postgres, MySQL, Google Sheets and Slack. We found no public information on connectors to DACH ERP or accounting systems such as SAP, DATEV or Microsoft Dynamics, on SOAP steps, on connectors built from an OpenAPI description, or on who maintains each connector.
Zapier
Integrations for more than 9,000 apps, webhooks to connect to any API, and a documented REST API that can create a fully configured workflow, with private integrations buildable in code and convertible between the UI and CLI toolchains. We found no public information on an on-premise agent reaching internal databases or file shares, or on connectors to DACH ERP systems such as SAP or DATEV.
Execution, error handling & monitoring
n8n
Runtime and throughput limits are published per plan before the month-end run hits them — max execution duration of five to forty minutes, concurrency from five up to 200+, saved executions and log retention per tier — alongside automatic retries, an error-workflow pattern whose emails carry the failed workflow id, name and error message in machine-readable JSON, single-step re-runs, search of executions by the data they contain, queue mode for scaling, and log streaming to Datadog or OpenTelemetry. We found no public information on a public status page, incident history, or an uptime commitment with service credits.
Zapier
Automatic retries on throttling and authentication-refresh retries are documented, errors surface in Zap history with email notification, and task limits are published including the pause-at-limit behaviour. Custom retention and Log Streaming appear as platform controls, but we found no public information on replaying a failed run from the failing step, a public status page or an uptime commitment.
Governance, credentials & audit trail
n8n
Project-level and custom roles, SSO via SAML and LDAP, an encrypted credential store with external secret store integration, execution data redaction, enforced 2FA, audit logging, and dev/prod environments under Git version control are all listed, SOC reports are gathered in the trust center, and the privacy policy describes session recording and telemetry on Cloud. We found no public information on SCIM provisioning or a publishing approval between environments, and the captured pages do not describe which user fields the audit trail records — matters when an approval log doubles as a record of employee behaviour.
Zapier
SAML SSO with SCIM, shared Zaps and shared app connections, an admin view of every workflow run with its owner and the systems involved, and configurable Zap content retention on Company and Enterprise plans. We found no public information on separate development and production environments with publishing approval, payload redaction, or an exportable audit trail describing what it records about users.
Hosting options & portability
n8n
A self-hosted edition deploys with Docker and is advertised as runnable air-gapped, the entire source code is accessible on GitHub, definitions version in Git, and cloud workflows export via the admin panel and re-import into your own instance. The support article states there is no automated way to migrate from n8n Cloud to self-hosted — workflows transfer manually and credentials cannot be exported from Cloud for security reasons — and we found no public information on a migration path back to Cloud or on documented system requirements for self-hosted installs.
Zapier
The service is operated from a cloud location in the United States, and workflows, Zap history and account data can be exported, with integration code checkable into source control via the CLI. We found no public information on an EU region, a self-hosted edition, or a documented export format another tool could read.
European sovereignty
n8n
The contracting entity is n8n GmbH in Berlin with a German commercial register number and VAT ID, a pre-signed data processing agreement as processor is published, and SCCs and the EU–US Data Privacy Framework cover international transfers, though the enterprise terms choose the law of England and Wales. Where cloud workflows execute and where execution logs with their payloads are stored is not shown on the captured pages, and we found no public information on subprocessor locations, including the AI model providers behind AI steps — only that self-hosted telemetry can be switched off.
Zapier
The contracting entity is Zapier, Inc., a Delaware corporation, and the service runs from the United States; a data processing agreement exists and there is a DORA addendum for EU financial entities. The captured pages show no EU contracting entity, EU representative or EU execution, and data residency is marked unknown on the vendor's own pages.
Pricing transparency
n8n
The billing unit is defined — a full workflow execution from start to finish, not per step or user — with public prices per tier (Starter at "20€ /mo, billed annually" with 2.5k executions, Pro at "50€ /mo" with 10k, Business at "667€ /mo" with 40k), unlimited steps and unlimited users, every integration included on all plans, and fees stated exclusive of taxes. Enterprise is contact sales, and we found no public information on per-execution overage pricing or the price of additional AI Assistant credits — Credit Terms exist for them, and custom execution tiers on Pro-2 monthly run from 50,000 to 500,000.
Zapier
The billing unit is defined in unusual detail: triggers never count, a named list of steps does not count as a task, and one MCP tool call uses two tasks, with the Free tier at $0 and 100 tasks per month, Professional from $19.99 and Team from $69. Professional and Team are starting-from figures without their task allowances shown, pay-per-task is described only as a higher rate than the base subscription without a number, Enterprise is contact for pricing, and we found no public calculator or worked examples.
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.