n8n doesn’t collect your tax, its merchant of record does
n8n does not itself charge sales tax: that job belongs to Paddle, acting as merchant of record, with prices quoted tax-exclusive and the customer named as liable. Enterprise terms go a step further, adding a requirement to gross up any withholding tax — a clause easy to miss since neither a state list nor a dedicated tax page appears anywhere in the published pricing.
Zapier collects tax itself, then asks for a state-specific form to waive it
Zapier charges US sales tax directly, calculated by ZIP code, but publishes no list of the states involved and no nexus threshold. Claiming an exemption means producing a certificate specific to the buyer’s own state — Alabama’s Form STE-1, for instance — and the platform offers no calculation feature for tax the customer might owe on its own downstream sales.
Both vendors disagree with their own documentation over how many apps they connect to
n8n’s integrations page states two thousand one hundred forty-seven integrations, while its own docs describe only “hundreds of nodes,” with no total settled between the two. Zapier’s own directory shows both “nine thousand-plus apps” and “ten thousand-plus connections” on the same day, and this profile does not adjudicate either contradiction.
A workflow is billed by the run at n8n, by the completed step at Zapier
n8n bills by the execution, not by the number of nodes inside it — forty nodes or two both count as one execution, and only production runs, meaning scheduled fires, webhook requests, or polling runs that find new data, are counted at all. Zapier bills by the task, one per successful step, excluding triggers, Filters, Paths, and six named apps, while charging two, three, or five tasks for certain premium actions such as its Lead Router.
Self-hosting is free at n8n and simply doesn’t exist at Zapier
n8n can be self-hosted for free under its Sustainable Use License, restricted to internal, non-commercial, or personal use, with paid white-labeling and paid hosting both forbidden under that license. Zapier names no self-hosted option, on-premise image, or comparable license anywhere in its published pages; it runs solely as an AWS-hosted service in the United States, with VPC Peering as its only networking option.
Where the data actually sits splits the same way the hosting choice does
n8n Cloud runs on Azure, with hardware and data kept in the EU in a single region and no residency choice offered; self-hosting lets a customer pick the region instead, the United States included. Zapier hosts on AWS in the United States by name, though its own Data Processing Agreement separately describes data as “transferred” to the US and elsewhere — both descriptions stand, unreconciled.
The entry price is published in a different currency altogether
n8n prices its Starter tier at twenty euros a month billed annually, for two thousand five hundred executions and one project. Zapier prices its Free tier at zero dollars, capped at a hundred tasks a month and one user, with Zaps themselves limited to two steps — two currencies, two units of measurement, and no shared number between them.
