Best Zapier Alternatives 2026: Five Tools That Cost Less Per Workflow

The Verdict

Make is the right switch for most people leaving Zapier — same no-code visual model, roughly an order of magnitude more allowance per pound, and no infrastructure to run. n8n is the pick if you want to self-host, control where your data sits, or build AI agents; its per-run billing makes long workflows almost free. Activepieces is the outlier worth knowing about: it bills per active flow with unlimited runs, so high-frequency automations cost a flat fee. Pipedream suits developers who want code in the loop, with the caveat that Workday agreed to acquire it in late 2025. Power Automate only makes sense if you already pay for Microsoft 365, in which case some of it is already yours.

Most people don’t go looking for a Zapier alternative because Zapier stopped working. They go looking because the bill moved. Zapier counts every single action as a task, so a workflow gaining one step quietly adds hundreds of tasks a month, and the Professional plan’s 750-task base can be broken by a single busy automation.

The good news is that the alternatives don’t just charge less — several of them charge on a completely different unit, which changes the maths rather than trimming it.

This is a pricing-first guide to the five platforms worth shortlisting in September 2026, built from vendor pricing pages, documentation and independent pricing trackers. It is not a hands-on lab test — nothing here is a measured result from us running these tools. Where sources disagree, and on Make’s entry price they do, that’s flagged rather than smoothed over.

Quick answer

Best for most people leaving Zapier: Make — closest like-for-like replacement, from around $9–12/month annual (~£6.70–£8.90) with 10,000 credits
Best if you want to self-host: n8n — Community Edition is free on your own server; cloud from €20/month annual (~£17)
Best for high-frequency workflows: Activepieces — $5 per active flow per month (~£3.70) with unlimited runs, free up to 10 flows
Best for developers: Pipedream — code steps as first-class citizens, free tier of 100 credits a day, Basic $29/month (~£21.50)
Best if you already pay Microsoft: Power Automate — some capability is already bundled with your Microsoft 365 licence, so check before you buy anything
Not leaving after all? If your workflows are short and your apps are niche, Zapier’s integration list may still justify the premium. See Zapier vs Make.

Why the billing unit matters more than the price

Every one of these platforms charges for a different thing. Comparing monthly prices without comparing units is how people switch and save nothing.

Platform	What you’re billed for	Practical consequence
Zapier	Per task (one action)	Adding a step to a workflow raises the bill proportionally
Make	Per credit (one module call)	Same shape as Zapier, but allowances are ~13x larger at entry
n8n	Per workflow run	Step count is free — a 40-step workflow costs the same as a 2-step one
Pipedream	Per credit (~30 seconds of compute)	You pay for time, so slow API calls cost more than fast ones
Activepieces	Per active flow	Run frequency is free — a flow firing 10,000 times costs the same as one firing once

If your problem is long workflows, n8n changes everything. If your problem is frequent workflows, Activepieces does. If your problem is simply that Zapier is expensive for ordinary work, Make is the straightforward answer.

Pricing (checked September 2026)

	Free tier	Entry paid (annual)	Approx GBP	Billing unit
Zapier (baseline)	100 tasks, 2-step Zaps	Professional $19.99/mo	~£14.80	750 tasks
Make	1,000 credits, 2 scenarios	Core $9–12/mo	~£6.70–£8.90	10,000 credits
n8n	Self-host free (unlimited)	Cloud Starter €20/mo	~£17	2,500 executions
Pipedream	100 credits/day	Basic $29/mo	~£21.50	Credits (compute time)
Activepieces	Up to 10 active flows	$5 per active flow/mo	~£3.70	Unlimited runs per flow
Power Automate	Bundled tier with M365	Premium ~$15/user/mo	~£11	Per user

GBP figures are approximate conversions at September 2026 rates, not official UK list prices. Vendors bill in USD or EUR unless stated, so your card will land somewhere near these numbers rather than exactly on them.

Make — the default switch

From ~~$9–12/month annual (~~£6.70–£8.90), 10,000 credits

Make is the closest thing to a drop-in replacement. It’s a hosted, no-code, visual builder aimed at the same buyer as Zapier, so you’re not changing category, only vendor.

The reason to switch is arithmetic. Zapier’s entry plan buys 750 tasks; Make’s buys 10,000 credits for less money. Credits and tasks aren’t identical units — Make counts routers and transformation modules that Zapier might fold into a single step — but the gap is roughly an order of magnitude, and no amount of inefficient scenario design closes that.

You also get things Zapier makes you work around. Routers handle branching properly. Iterators and aggregators loop over arrays without a second tool. Data transformation happens inside the scenario. On Zapier the same requirements tend to end up split across several Zaps that are then harder to maintain as a set.

The cost: the canvas is genuinely harder on day one. You’re mapping data between modules rather than filling in a form. Expect the first workflow to take three times as long as it would on Zapier, and the fifth to take half as long. Integration coverage is also narrower — roughly 1,800–2,000 apps against Zapier’s 6,000+ — and the gap is in the long tail, which is exactly where niche business software lives.

A flag on the price: independent trackers report Core at both $9 and $12 a month on annual billing, with monthly more consistently around $16. Check Make’s own pricing page in your currency before you commit.

Pick Make if: you want the same kind of tool for a lot less money and your apps are mainstream.

See Make pricing →

n8n — the one for self-hosting and AI agents

Self-hosted free, or cloud from €20/month annual (~£17)

n8n bills per workflow execution, not per step. That single design decision is the whole pitch. A workflow with forty nodes costs exactly the same to run as one with two, so the platform gets relatively cheaper the more complex your automation becomes — the precise inverse of Zapier’s incentive.

The Community Edition is source-available and free to self-host. Realistically you’re paying for a small VPS, which puts a fully unlimited automation platform in the £4–17/month range if you’re comfortable running a server. If you’re not, Cloud Starter is €20/month annual (~~£17) for 2,500 executions, and Pro is €50/month annual (~~£43) for 10,000.

n8n is also the strongest of these five for AI agent work. Native LLM nodes, memory, tool calling and vector store integrations are first-class rather than bolted on, and that lead has widened through 2026.

The cost: self-hosting is real work — updates, backups, uptime, and the debugging when something breaks at 3am is yours. The interface is more technical than Make’s, and n8n expects you to be comfortable with JSON and expressions. Cloud pricing at low volume is also higher than Make’s, so if you’re running a handful of short workflows on someone else’s servers, Make is cheaper.

Pick n8n if: you want data on your own infrastructure, you’re building AI agents, or your workflows are long.

See n8n pricing →

Activepieces — the one nobody costs correctly

Free up to 10 active flows, then $5 per active flow per month (~£3.70)

Activepieces moved to per-active-flow pricing with unlimited runs. Billing depends on how many flows are switched on, not how often they fire. A flow triggering ten thousand times a month costs the same $5 as one triggering once.

That is transformative for a specific shape of problem: high-frequency, low-complexity automation. Webhook receivers, sync jobs, notification routers, anything polling on a short interval. On Zapier those are exactly the workflows that quietly consume your entire task allowance; here they’re a flat fee.

The core is MIT-licensed and self-hostable, so the escape hatch is real.

The cost: it’s the smallest and youngest platform here. Integration coverage is thinner, the community is smaller, and there’s less written about it when you get stuck. Ten free flows is generous, but the per-flow model inverts against you if you run many low-traffic automations rather than a few busy ones — forty flows firing occasionally is $200 a month, where Make would shrug at that on Core.

Pick Activepieces if: you have a handful of workflows that run constantly.

Pipedream — the one for developers

Free tier of 100 credits a day, Basic $29/month (~~£21.50), Advanced $79/month (~~£58)

Pipedream treats code as a normal step. Drop Node.js or Python into the middle of a workflow, npm-install a package, and carry on. For anyone who has hit the wall of what a no-code builder can express, that’s the entire appeal.

Billing is per credit, where one credit is roughly 30 seconds of compute at 256MB. You’re paying for execution time rather than step count, which is unusually fair for short workflows and unusually punishing for anything that sits waiting on a slow third-party API.

The free tier — 100 credits a day — is legitimately generous for personal projects and prototyping.

Two caveats. Compute-time billing is the hardest of these models to forecast before you build. And Workday announced an agreement to acquire Pipedream in November 2025, so plan and pricing changes are a live risk; weigh that before you build a business-critical stack on it.

Pick Pipedream if: you write code and want it inside the workflow rather than in a separate service.

Microsoft Power Automate — check before you buy

Bundled tier included with many Microsoft 365 licences; Premium around $15/user/month (~£11)

If your business already runs on Microsoft 365, some automation capability is already in your licence. Before you pay anyone else, find out what you’re entitled to — plenty of small UK businesses buy a second automation tool to do things their existing Microsoft subscription already covers.

Power Automate is strongest inside the Microsoft estate: SharePoint, Outlook, Teams, Excel, Dataverse. It also has desktop flows, which is the only genuine RPA option on this list — if you need to automate a legacy Windows application that has no API, nothing else here helps.

The cost: third-party integrations are meaningfully worse than any dedicated platform, the licensing is famously confusing, and premium connectors sit behind an upgrade. It’s a poor general-purpose choice and a strong Microsoft-specific one.

Pick Power Automate if: your workflows live inside Microsoft, or you need desktop automation.

Which one, by situation

Your situation	Switch to
Zapier bill climbed, workflows are ordinary	Make
Workflows have lots of steps	n8n (per-run billing)
Workflows fire constantly	Activepieces (per-flow billing)
Data can’t leave your infrastructure	n8n self-hosted
Building AI agents	n8n
You want code in the workflow	Pipedream
Everything runs on Microsoft 365	Power Automate
One of your apps is niche and only Zapier supports it	Stay on Zapier

That last row matters more than it looks. Zapier’s 6,000+ integrations remain its real moat, and no saving is worth switching to a platform that can’t reach a tool you depend on. Check the integration directory of any candidate against your actual app list before you look at a single price.

FAQ

Is there a free Zapier alternative that’s genuinely usable? Two. Self-hosted n8n is unlimited if you can run a server. Activepieces gives you ten active flows with unlimited runs on its free cloud tier, which is a real allowance rather than a demo. Make’s free tier — 1,000 credits, two scenarios — also beats Zapier’s 100 tasks comfortably.

Can I export my Zaps and import them somewhere else? No. None of these platforms accept a Zapier export; you rebuild manually. Simple workflows take minutes, complex ones a couple of hours. Cost the migration honestly before switching on price alone — thirty Zaps is a week you might not get back inside a year of savings.

Which alternative has the most integrations? Make, at roughly 1,800–2,000. That’s still well short of Zapier’s 6,000+. All of these platforms offer generic HTTP and webhook steps, so any app with a public API is reachable with more effort.

Is self-hosting n8n actually cheaper? On licence cost, obviously. On total cost, only if your time is cheap or you already run servers. A small VPS is a few pounds a month; the updates, backups and 3am debugging are the real price. If you don’t already administer a server for something else, n8n Cloud is usually the better trade.

What’s the safest choice if I just want to stop thinking about this? Make. It’s the closest replacement for what you already know, it’s hosted so there’s nothing to run, and the price difference is large enough to be worth the afternoon of learning.

Does the Pipedream acquisition mean I should avoid it? Not automatically, but it’s a live risk. Acquisitions routinely bring pricing and packaging changes, and Pipedream’s free tier is generous enough that it’s a plausible target for revision. If you’re choosing a platform to depend on for the next three years, that uncertainty is a legitimate mark against it.

The verdict

Most people should move to Make. It’s the same kind of tool, it’s hosted, and its entry plan buys roughly thirteen times the allowance of Zapier’s for less than half the money. The learning curve is the only real cost and it’s an afternoon.

Move to n8n if the thing that’s actually wrong is architectural — data residency, long workflows, or AI agents. Per-run billing and self-hosting solve problems that no amount of Make’s cheaper credits will.

Look at Activepieces if your automations are frequent rather than complex. Flat pricing on unlimited runs is a genuinely different offer and almost nobody costs it correctly.

And check your Microsoft licence first. It costs nothing to look, and a meaningful number of small businesses discover they’ve been paying twice.

See Make pricing → See n8n pricing →

Pricing checked September 2026. Every vendor here revises pricing and packaging regularly, and independent trackers currently disagree on Make’s Core rate. Confirm current rates on the vendor’s own pricing page in your currency before you buy, and trust your billing screen over any comparison article, including this one.

Further reading: Zapier vs Make | Make vs n8n | n8n vs Zapier vs Make | Zapier review | Best AI productivity tools