BLUF: If your workflows touch regulated personal data, self-hosted n8n is currently the only option among the three that keeps that data entirely inside infrastructure you control. Zapier and Make are cloud-only — convenient, but your data leaves your environment by design.

Most comparisons of these three tools focus on price-per-task and integration count. Those matter, but for healthcare, finance, legal, or any EU-facing team, the real decision axis is where the data actually lives while it's being processed.

The Data Residency Question, Answered Directly

For a workflow that touches customer health records, financial transactions, or anything under GDPR's stricter categories, "cloud-only with limited regional data centers" is often a non-starter regardless of how good the integration library is.

The Cost Comparison Nobody Argues With

At meaningful volume, the pricing gap is not subtle:

Zapier:          ~$600/month  (50,000 tasks, Professional plan + overage)
Make.com:        ~$59/month   (Teams plan, operations-based pricing)
n8n self-hosted: ~$5–7/month  (VPS cost only — workflow count doesn't change this)

Self-hosted n8n's cost stays flat as execution volume grows, because you're paying for a server, not per-task. Zapier and Make both scale cost with usage, which is fine at low volume and expensive fast at high volume.

What Self-Hosting Actually Costs You (Honestly)

The "unlimited executions for free" pitch undersells the real cost: you now own the server. That means:

# The minimum viable self-hosted n8n stack
docker run -d \
  --name n8n \
  -p 5678:5678 \
  -v n8n_data:/home/node/.n8n \
  n8nio/n8n

...plus monitoring, backups, security patching, and someone who understands Docker well enough to keep it running. That's a real, non-zero cost — just a much smaller one than Zapier's enterprise tier, and one that comes with data staying inside your perimeter.

Feature Parity Isn't Actually Equal

n8n has fewer native integrations (roughly 400 vs. Zapier's several thousand), but its HTTP Request node and native JavaScript/Python code nodes cover almost anything with an API — which is most modern SaaS tools. For GDPR-regulated teams, this trade-off (fewer pre-built connectors, but full control over what happens to the data) is usually the right one to make.

Bottom Line

If data residency isn't a concern, Zapier's ease of use or Make's visual builder are both legitimate choices. If it is a concern — and for healthcare, finance, legal, or any EU-facing business it usually is — self-hosted n8n isn't just the cheaper option, it's often the only compliant one.

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