n8n’s merchant of record collects the tax, and the fine print adds a gross-up

n8n does not itself charge sales tax: Paddle, standing as merchant of record, handles that instead, with prices quoted tax-exclusive and the customer named as liable for it. Enterprise terms go further still, requiring a gross-up on any withholding tax — a clause easy to miss, since no state list and no dedicated tax page accompanies it anywhere.

Make sells in its own name, and still won’t name a state

Make, selling as Celonis, Inc., charges sales tax due upfront, with exemption available only on request and no state list, calculation basis, or nexus owner published on its pricing page. Its own pages separately claim Make itself is ISO 27001 and SOC 2 or SOC 3 certified, yet assign the ISO 27001 to Celonis SE, its parent company, and the SOC 2 to its hosts instead.

One vendor lets you pick the region; the other doesn’t let you pick at all

n8n Cloud runs on Azure, with hardware and data held in a single EU region and no residency choice offered there; self-hosting instead lets a customer choose the region, the United States included, on AWS or GCP. Make names two US zones, us1 and us2 on make.com, on AWS EC2 and VPC, with no specific region ever named and no residency choice on any of its five tiers.

Non-card billing needs a DocuSign at one vendor, a US bank account at the other

n8n opens non-card billing only on an annual Business plan — invoice or wire, signed through DocuSign, in euros or dollars — while Enterprise sets a fifteen-day payment term rather than net-30 and excludes customer purchase orders outright; ACH and a W-9 are absent. Make accepts card, digital wallets, and US ACH on its Core, Pro, and Teams tiers, reserving any other method for Enterprise, with no purchase order, net-30 term, or W-9 published either.

Both vendors’ own app counts disagree with their own documentation

n8n’s integrations page states two thousand one hundred forty-seven integrations, while its own documentation describes only “hundreds of nodes,” with no total ever settled between the two pages. Make’s directory advertises over three thousand apps, a counter reading three thousand six hundred four the day it was checked, against “a thousand-plus standard apps” in its own product description.

The entry price is published in a different currency on each side

n8n’s Starter tier costs twenty euros a month billed annually, for two thousand five hundred executions and one project. Make’s Core tier costs twelve US dollars a month for ten thousand credits — two different currencies, two different units of measurement, and neither one settling the other’s tax question.