Make vs n8n: 2,500 Bookings a Month for $9 or €20

Short answer: if you run short automations like booking confirmations, intake forms and follow-up emails, Make is the cheaper place to run them, and it is the only one of the two with a free plan. Our own 4-step booking flow cost 4 Make credits per booking. Make Core gives you 10,000 credits for $9 a month billed yearly ($10.59 monthly), which is 2,500 bookings. n8n's cheapest cloud plan, Starter, gives you 2,500 runs for 20€ a month billed yearly (24€ monthly). Same 2,500 bookings: $9 against 20€. n8n wins when each run is long: it bills a whole run as one execution however many steps it has, so past four steps per run its Starter plan carries more work than Make Core.

This is our own Make account plus a source roundup of n8n, and we keep the two apart. Every Make cost per booking below we measured ourselves, on a Make Free account we ran from 18 September 2026 until it hit zero. We have never run n8n, on its cloud or self-hosted. Every n8n statement on this page comes from n8n.io/pricing, captured on 6 October 2026. That is why this page has no rating. How we draw that line: how we test.

What we ran and what we only read

n8n showed us its prices in euros, so we quote them in euros and do not convert. We did not build a workflow, connect an app or watch a run on n8n. We cannot tell you how its editor feels to a non-technical owner, because nobody on our side has used it.

The difference that decides it: credits per step or one charge per run

The two tools count usage in opposite ways, and each says so on its pricing page.

Make charges per step. "Each module action in your scenario, like adding a Google Sheet row or fetching Gmail account data, counts as one credit." We saw exactly that in our account: our booking automation had four modules (a new booking arrives, the client gets an email, the owner's calendar gets the event, the booking row is marked Confirmed), and one booking moved the counter from 0 to 4.

n8n charges per run. Its FAQ says 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." So the same four-step booking would count as one execution, and so would a forty-step one.

That one rule is the whole comparison. Short flows are cheap on Make. Long flows are cheap on n8n.

The same 2,500 bookings: $9 or 20€

Here are the two cheapest paid cloud plans side by side.

Now put our measured booking costs through both. This is our arithmetic, from Make's 10,000 credits and n8n's 2,500 executions:

For the automations most coaches, clinics and agencies start with, the first two rows, Make carries the same work or twice as much for less money. If your typical automation is ten steps or more and runs thousands of times a month, n8n's per-run pricing is the better deal, and we would say so to a client. If you want to plug in your own flow, our Make credits calculator does the Make side of this arithmetic.

Schedules cost money on both

A webhook only runs when something arrives. A schedule runs whether or not anything happened, and both tools charge for that.

On Make we measured it: a Google Sheets trigger checking every 15 minutes cost 1 credit per check, booking or not, and used 998 of our 1,000 free credits in 10 days and 7 hours. Over a month that schedule is about 2,900 credits, under a third of Core's 10,000.

On n8n every scheduled run is an execution. Its own FAQ gives the example: a workflow that runs every 5 minutes is "about 8,600-8,900 executions monthly", more than three times Starter's 2,500. A daily schedule is 30 or 31.

The fix is the same on both: trigger from a webhook wherever the form or app can send one. On our Make account the webhook flow cost nothing while it waited and got the confirmation email to the client in 3 seconds. The full test is in make.com free plan.

Starting free: Make Free or an n8n trial

Make Free is a plan, not a trial. Make's pricing page says "No time limit on the Free plan", and our account has been on it since 18 September 2026 with no card. It gives 1,000 credits a month, 2 active scenarios at once and a 15-minute minimum schedule. With a webhook trigger, our measured 2-credit email flow fits about 500 bookings a month, or about 250 for the full 4-step flow.

n8n has no free cloud plan. Its pricing page offers a free trial with no credit card: 1,000 executions, 5 concurrent runs, a 180-second limit per run and one project. The page does not say how long the cloud trial lasts, so we do not quote a length. n8n's other free option is the Community Edition, which you install and run on your own server from GitHub. That is free software, not free hosting: someone has to set up the server, keep it updated and fix it when it stops.

Know where Make Free stops before you put a client's bookings on it. When our account hit 0 credits, every screen still said Active, and our booking webhook still answered Accepted, while nothing ran for 17 days until the monthly reset. Make did email us at 75%, 90% and 100%.

When Core pays for itself

Move from Make Free to Core in the month one of these becomes true:

• You need a third automation. A confirmation, a reminder and a follow-up are three scenarios; Free runs two.
• You need a schedule. Some tools cannot send a webhook, and a 15-minute check costs about 2,900 credits a month, almost three times Free.
• You pass about 250 full bookings a month, or 500 email-only ones.
• You cannot afford a silent stop. On Free, running out mid-month means waiting for the reset.

Core is $9 a month billed yearly or $10.59 monthly, and the same 10,000 credits that cover 2,500 of our bookings also cover that 15-minute schedule with room to spare. If you are weighing Core against staying free, make.com pricing goes through each tier and how fast a 1-minute schedule can burn the allowance.

What n8n's plans include that Make's do not

The n8n Starter card and feature table list these on 6 October 2026:

• One charge per run, unlimited steps, the point above.
• Unlimited users and workflows on every plan.
• AI agent nodes and "AI models without API keys", plus 1,600 Assistant credits a month for its in-editor helper.
• Code steps in JavaScript or Python on every plan, and custom HTTP requests.
• A self-hosted Community Edition if you have someone technical to run it.

And the limits that come with Starter: 5 runs at once, 1 shared project, 5 minutes per run, and 7 days of execution logs. Make's pricing page lists code at "2 credits per 1 sec of code execution time" and lets you bring your own AI key or use its AI provider; how Make bills AI agents is in make ai agents pricing.

Which to pick, by what you automate

You take bookings or leads and send a confirmation, a calendar invite, a reminder. Make. Start on Free with a webhook trigger, and move to Core at $9 when you need a third automation or a schedule. Our best booking system for coaches shows the whole chain we built.

You run fewer than 250 short automations a month. Make Free. It costs nothing and does not expire; n8n's cloud has nothing at $0.

You build long workflows, 10 steps or more, that run thousands of times a month. n8n Starter carries 2,500 of those for 20€; Make Core carries 1,000. Look at n8n.io/pricing and its trial.

You have a developer, or you are one, and want to self-host. n8n's Community Edition. That is a different kind of product from what this site covers: we write for owners who do not want to run a server.

If you are still deciding between Make and Zapier instead, we ran both on their free plans in make vs zapier free.

Who should skip Make

If most of your automations are long, with loops over many records, branching and code, Make's per-step credits add up and n8n's per-run pricing is built for exactly that. The same goes if you are a developer who wants to host the tool yourself, write code in it and keep your data on your own server: n8n offers that and Make does not. Neither of those describes the typical owner of a coaching practice, a clinic or a small agency, but if it describes you, n8n is the better fit.