When automation comes up, the first question I get is often "do you use Zapier or Make?". The answer is: almost never. I use n8n.
It's not developer snobbery. There are concrete practical reasons, and I'll explain them.
Why n8n and not Zapier or Make
Zapier and Make have their place. They're intuitive, quick to set up, with thousands of ready-made integrations. For simple automations, without complex logic, they work well.
The limits show up when things get complicated. With Zapier you pay per "zap" executed, and the monthly cost grows fast if the flows run often. For a client with 10,000 operations a month, the cost easily exceeds 100 to 200 euros a month.
n8n is hosted on your own server. The monthly cost is the server's: 5 to 20 euros for most cases. The operations are unlimited.
There's also the question of data. With Zapier and Make, your data passes through their servers. With self-hosted n8n, it stays on yours.
What n8n is in simple terms
n8n is a tool for building automatic flows between applications. You have nodes that represent actions (read an email, update a record in the database, send a message, call an API) and you connect them together in a logical sequence.
The flow starts from a trigger: an event that sets everything off. It can be a fixed time, a webhook, a new file in Google Drive, a message received on Telegram, a record added to a Google Sheet.
Then you can add logic: if this condition is true, do this; otherwise do that. You can transform the data, call AI, wait, loop over a list.
You don't need to know how to program to build simple flows. For complex ones, knowledge of JavaScript helps but isn't required.
What you can do with n8n
I've used n8n to collect forms from the site and automatically add the contacts to a CRM, with an email notification to the team the moment a new request comes in.
I've connected custom management software to Google Sheets to sync data in real time, without any manual intervention from anyone.
I've built lead qualification pipelines: the prospect fills in a form, receives a welcome email, their data is enriched with publicly available information, then the lead is assigned to the right salesperson based on the category of request.
I've automated weekly reports: the flow starts every Monday at 7:30am, collects data from several sources, assembles it and sends the result by email. The team arrives in the morning with the numbers already ready.
A real workflow I built
For a client in the B2B services sector I built this: every night n8n reads the new requests that came in from the site during the day. It passes them to Claude with a specific prompt that extracts the key information: the customer's sector, the type of request, the perceived urgency. It updates a worksheet shared with the sales team and sends a summary on Slack.
The team arrives in the morning with everything already prepared, without opening the general email inbox and without doing any manual classification.
Who should use it
If you have repetitive processes involving digital data and need them to run on their own, n8n is probably the right tool.
It's not suited to those who want something plug-and-play with no setup. It requires an initial configuration. For complex flows, someone who knows how to build them.
If you want to see what's feasible for your situation, head to the automations page.