Disclosure: This page contains affiliate links. If you purchase through our links we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Every price below was checked against each vendor’s own pricing page in September 2026, not against other comparison articles.
The short answer
If you are leaving Zapier over price, Make is the closest swap and the cheapest credible one — $9 a month for 10,000 credits against Zapier’s $129 a month for 10,000 tasks, both on annual billing. Same visual-builder idea, 3,000+ apps, and most of what you already know transfers in an afternoon.
If your workflows are long — five, ten, twenty steps — then n8n and Activepieces change the arithmetic completely, because they charge one unit per complete workflow run instead of one per step. A ten-step workflow that burns ten tasks on Zapier burns a single execution on n8n.
If you mainly want the bill to stop moving, Pabbly Connect is $14 a month for 10,000 tasks and does not count internal steps at all.
And if none of that applies — if you are on Zapier because it connects to something nothing else connects to — staying put is a legitimate answer. Zapier lists 9,000+ apps, roughly four times the nearest alternative on this page. That is the one gap money does not close.
Why people actually leave Zapier
Three things, in the order they usually start to hurt.
1. The entry tier is far smaller than the headline suggests. Zapier’s Professional plan advertises “from $19.99 a month”. That figure buys 750 tasks, and it assumes annual billing — month to month the same tier is $29.99. Move up to a realistic volume and the curve steepens quickly: 2,000 tasks is $49 a month on annual billing, and 10,000 tasks is $129. Paying monthly instead, those become $73.50 and $193.50.
2. Annual billing is doing a lot of work in that headline. Zapier’s yearly commitment saves 33%, one of the steepest annual discounts in the category. Make’s is about 11%, Zoho Flow’s is 15%, n8n’s is 17%. So Zapier’s advertised price is the one most dependent on you signing up for a year, and the gap between the sticker and the month-to-month reality is widest there.
3. AI steps now draw from the same task pool. Zapier’s current pricing page states that AI steps, code and SDK calls all follow the same task-based model, sharing one allocation with your Zaps, and that heavier AI models and longer code runs consume more per action. If you have been adding AI steps to existing Zaps, your task consumption has changed shape without your workflows changing at all.
The billing unit is the whole game
Comparing monthly prices between these tools is close to meaningless until you know what each one counts as one billable unit. There are three different models here, and the difference between them is far larger than the difference between the prices.
- Per action step — Zapier, Pabbly Connect, Integrately, Zoho Flow. A five-step workflow costs roughly five units each time it runs.
- Per module action — Make. Similar to the above, but Make counts each module in the scenario, so builders who add routers and iterators see consumption rise faster than they expect.
- Per complete run — n8n and Activepieces. One unit covers the entire workflow no matter how many steps are in it.
Take a concrete case: a five-step workflow that runs 2,000 times a month. On Zapier that is about 10,000 tasks, so $129 a month on annual billing. On Make it is about 10,000 credits, so $9. On n8n and Activepieces it is 2,000 units, not 10,000 — which lands inside n8n’s €20 Starter plan, and inside Activepieces’ free tier, which allows 100 credits a day.
That is a spread of roughly $0 to $129 a month for identical work. The tool you pick matters far less than whether its billing unit matches the shape of your workflows.
What 10,000 operations a month actually costs
Prices verified at each vendor’s own pricing page, September 2026. Figures are per month.
| Tool | Free plan | Cost at 10,000 operations/month | One billable unit = | Apps | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zapier (the baseline) | ✗ 100 tasks/mo, two-step Zaps only | $129 annual / $193.50 monthly | One action step | ✓ 9,000+ | Teams that need an app nobody else carries |
| Make | ✓ 1,000 credits/mo | $9 annual / $10 monthly | One module action | 3,000+ | The closest like-for-like swap |
| Pabbly Connect | ✗ 100 tasks, one-off not monthly | $14 (list $19) | ✓ One action step, internal steps free | 2,000+ | A flat bill that never surprises you |
| n8n | ✓ Unlimited, self-hosted | €50 annual (Pro) | ✓ One whole workflow run | 2,174 | Long workflows with many steps |
| Activepieces | ✓ 100 credits/day (~3,000/mo) | $16 annual | ✓ One whole run | ✗ 760+ | Open source, self-host at no cost |
| Integrately | ✗ 100 tasks/mo, single-step only | $39 annual (Professional) | One action step | 1,500+ | People who want Zapier's simplicity back |
| Zoho Flow | ✗ 100 tasks/mo, 5 flows | €41 annual (Professional) | One action step | 1,000+ | Teams already living inside Zoho |
n8n and Zoho Flow are shown in euros because both price by region and served euro pricing from Europe. Zapier, Make, Pabbly, Integrately and Activepieces quoted in dollars throughout.
1. Make — the closest like-for-like swap
$9/month for 10,000 credits (annual), $10 monthly. Free plan: 1,000 credits a month.
Make is where most people who leave Zapier for cost reasons end up, and the reason is simple arithmetic: at 10,000 operations it is about a fourteenth of Zapier’s price. The visual canvas is genuinely nicer than Zapier’s linear editor once you are past the first hour, and routers and iterators make branching workflows easier to read.
Two honest caveats. Make bills in credits, not operations — a rename that happened recently and that most published comparisons still have wrong. And every module action draws a credit, so scenarios with heavy branching consume faster than the equivalent Zap. Its free tier is still ten times Zapier’s at 1,000 credits a month against 100 tasks.
Check Make’s current pricing — or read our full Zapier vs Make comparison.
2. Pabbly Connect — the flattest bill
$14/month for 10,000 tasks (list price $19). Free: 100 tasks, one-off rather than monthly.
Pabbly’s distinguishing feature is not the headline price, it is what does not count. Filters, routers, formatters and other internal steps are free — only the steps that touch an external app consume tasks. On a workflow heavy with conditional logic that can halve real consumption against a per-step competitor.
Worth knowing before you commit: the $14 is promotional against a $19 list price, and Pabbly runs near-permanent lifetime deals, so the number you see depends heavily on the day you look. It also has the smallest app library of the mainstream options here at 2,000+.
One caution we will note because it cuts against our own interest: Pabbly’s on-site comparison widget overstates its competitors. It currently claims Zapier charges $254 a month for 10,000 tasks and that Make charges $29. Zapier’s own page shows $129 on annual billing or $193.50 monthly, and Make’s shows $9 — the $29 figure is Make’s Teams tier, not its entry tier. Check the numbers yourself; they are one click away on each vendor’s site.
Check Pabbly Connect pricing — or read our Zapier vs Pabbly comparison.
3. n8n — pay per run, not per step
€20/month for 2,500 executions, €50 for 10,000 (annual billing). Community Edition free and self-hosted.
n8n charges for a workflow execution from start to finish regardless of how many steps are inside it. If your automations are long, this is the single biggest structural saving available anywhere on this page — and the longer they get, the wider the gap grows.
It is also the most technical option of the mainstream set. It expects some comfort with data structures and API thinking, and the self-hosted Community Edition is free but you are then running the infrastructure. At 2,174 integrations its library is strong for a tool in this price bracket. Per unit it is not the cheapest — €50 for 10,000 executions is more than Make’s $9 for 10,000 credits — but 10,000 executions is not 10,000 steps.
4. Activepieces — open source with a real free tier
$16/month for 10,000 credits (annual). Free: 100 credits a day, roughly 3,000 a month.
Activepieces uses the same one-credit-per-whole-run model as n8n, and its free tier is the most generous here by a wide margin — about 3,000 runs a month against Zapier’s 100 tasks. For a solo marketer running a handful of workflows, that free tier is a real plan rather than a trial. It is open source, and cloud and self-hosted cost the same.
The catch is coverage: 760+ integrations is the smallest library on this page, under a tenth of Zapier’s. Check your specific apps before you plan a migration around it.
5. Integrately — Zapier’s simplicity at a third of the price
$39/month for 10,000 tasks, $19.99 for 2,000 (annual billing). Free: 100 tasks a month, single-step only.
Integrately is the option for people who did not want a more powerful tool — they wanted the tool they had, for less. It leans on ready-made one-click automations rather than a blank canvas, which makes it the fastest of these to get a first workflow live.
It is not the cheapest per task; at 10,000 it is more than four times Make’s price. What it is, is roughly a third of Zapier’s for the same job with a similar feel. Worth noting for credibility: Integrately’s site quotes competitor prices of $49 at 2,000 tasks and $129 at 10,000, and both match Zapier’s own pricing page exactly.
6. Zoho Flow — only if you already live in Zoho
€41/month for 10,000 tasks, €25 for 5,000 (annual billing). Free: 100 tasks a month, 5 flows.
Zoho Flow is not a budget play, and it is worth being blunt about that: at 10,000 tasks it is more expensive than Make, Pabbly, Activepieces and Integrately. Its case is ecosystem. If your CRM, desk, books and campaigns are already Zoho, Flow connects them natively and the billing sits in an invoice you already receive.
Outside that situation there is little reason to choose it over the cheaper options. If you are weighing the wider Zoho suite, our Pipedrive vs Zoho CRM comparison covers the CRM side of that decision.
What you give up by leaving
Every page like this one is written by somebody with an incentive to tell you to switch, so here is the other side, plainly.
App coverage is not close. Zapier lists 9,000+ apps. n8n has 2,174, Make 3,000+, Pabbly 2,000+, Integrately 1,500+, Zoho Flow 1,000+, Activepieces 760+. If one workflow depends on a niche tool, there is a real chance only Zapier carries it — and a $120-a-month saving is no saving if it breaks the automation your business actually runs on.
Migration is manual. None of these import Zaps directly. Rebuilding twenty workflows is a weekend, not an afternoon, and every credential has to be reconnected by hand.
Documentation and community depth follow market share. When something breaks at 11pm, the odds that somebody has already written up your exact error are highest on Zapier.
The honest threshold: below roughly 1,000 tasks a month the saving is small enough that switching is rarely worth the disruption. Above 10,000 it is hard to justify staying on price alone.
How to choose
- Best Integrately Alternatives — the same field judged on seats and task counting
- Count your steps before your tasks. If your typical workflow is five steps or more, look at n8n or Activepieces first — the per-run model will beat any per-step discount.
- Check your three most important apps against each candidate’s integration directory before you compare a single price.
- Compare month-to-month prices, not annual ones. Zapier’s headline assumes a year’s commitment; most of these do not move nearly as much.
- Rebuild your two highest-volume workflows first on a free tier and run both tools in parallel for a fortnight before you cancel anything.
Frequently asked questions
What is the cheapest Zapier alternative?
For per-step workloads, Make at $9 a month for 10,000 credits. For workflows with several steps each, Activepieces is effectively cheaper still — its free tier covers about 3,000 complete runs a month at no cost.
Can I import my Zaps into another tool?
No. None of the tools here import Zapier workflows directly. Budget for rebuilding by hand and reconnecting every app credential.
Is there a genuinely free Zapier alternative?
Two. Activepieces gives 100 credits a day on its free cloud plan, and n8n’s Community Edition is free to self-host with no execution cap — though you then run and maintain the server yourself.
Why is Zapier so much more expensive?
Partly the app library, which is expensive to build and maintain, and partly that Zapier charges per action step while the cheapest alternatives charge per complete run. At 10,000 operations a month the gap between Zapier and Make is roughly fourteen-fold.
The bottom line
Make for most people leaving Zapier on price. n8n or Activepieces if your workflows are long, because the per-run billing model beats any discount. Pabbly Connect if a flat, predictable bill matters more than the last few dollars. Integrately if you want the same simplicity you already have for about a third of the cost. Zoho Flow only inside Zoho.
And Zapier itself if it connects to something the others do not. That is not a consolation prize — for a lot of teams it is the correct answer, and no price table on this page changes it.
For a wider view of the category, see our roundup of the best automation tools for marketing teams, or compare two alternatives head to head in Make vs Pabbly Connect.