Make vs n8n—The Wrong Choice Will Cost You

what if you knew exactly which automation platform to use make or nadn so you don't waste tons of time learning the wrong platform I've been using AI automation to generate well over $100,000 per month consistently so today I'm going to condense down what I've learned teaching hundreds of beginning automator and hundreds of business owners so that you can pick the right automation platform the first time but I'm not going to just explain the differences I'll go further and explain why these different features matter to you specifically or not whether you're a beginner or intermediate automator

or business owner looking for the right Solution by the end of this video you'll know the important differences between make and n8n and which platform is best for you first I'll cover the basics pricing the user interface how the platforms are similar and different and we'll cover their support for new AI Tools Plus an analysis of why all of this matters to you and your business so here's the agenda first we'll go over pricing and features the user interface and experience technical differences and similarities AI adoption and the various features they have why it matters

to you and make sure to stick around to the end of the video to learn the number one thing to know about picking your automation platform if you're excited about the future of AI automation but don't want to waste your valuable time on the wrong platform this video is for you I'm about to condense down thousands of hours of experience into just a few minutes all right so let's get going let's talk about the pricing and features so what you're going to find in both make and nadn is they both have this tiered pricing where

we have pricing that goes up on this horizontal side where we are either either the starter the pro or the Enterprise plan and you can see here in make we have the same thing we have the free we have the core we have the pro teams and Enterprise and what you can see is these additional tiers give you access to additional features in the various platforms and you can see NN is the same and as well both platforms allow you to select how many operations you want to buy per month for any given tier so

here I'm in the core plan we can buy 10,000 operations 20,000 operations 40,000 operations and then over here on NN you can see here we have 2.5 workflow executions so this is where we run up against one of the real differences between n8n and make and how they price at first glance you might say well I'm paying $20 a month for 2500 workflow executions but on make for $9 I'm getting 10,000 operations so make clearly seems a lot cheaper on the surface however when you look under the hood the way that make an n8n charge

for these operations is different so if we look at a make automation here every single one of these nodes here when the automation runs is going to cost us one operation so you can see in this automation we're going to have 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 operations to fully execute this automation so nadn Works a bit differently they don't charge per operation they charge per workflow execution so if we have a big complicated automation like this and it starts to run and it's going through all of these different nodes one

by one it's only going to charge us one whole operation for running this entire automation so it's charging you for the execution of the entire workflow they aren't trying to get you to pay for each different node that you add to your automation but still there's a few things to consider in that when you are on the starter plan you are only allowed to have five active workflows so if I come back to this autom and I turn it on I'm actually only able to have five different workflows active at any different time whereas in

make.com as long as you have a paid plan you can have an unlimited number of active scenarios so if we were to take a look at this automation here I could have hundreds of these various automations all running at the same time there's no limit but in n8n I'm only allowed to have five active workspaces similar to this running at any given time now it does start to get a bit more techn Tech but the workflows in make are also a bit more advanced in that you can have several different automations running in the same

workflow so here we have a web hook that is listening for a new video coming out of zoom and it's a complete automation that is sitting here in the workflow and then we have an entirely different automation here that is listening for messages coming in from slack so you can have one workflow that has numerous different scenarios running inside of it so really even with one workflow you could have several different automations within that workflow so with these containers that you can use in Ann you can separate logically all of your different automations and actually

store them in one workflow and that's nice because in makes sometimes you have a lot of different scenarios and you're always searching through them and trying to find them whereas in NN you can organize them just like this so this is a way of getting around the limited number of workflows of course you can always upgrade as well one other important difference is that n8n will limit the number of concurrent executions you have at any one time so if you have a bunch of these different automations and workflows it's going to limit you to a

maximum of five concurrent automations running at the same time so you can imagine if you have a lot of different automations and triggers all running at the same time you could easily run into a situation where you're running more than five automations at a time which is going to bottleneck it they're going to go into a queue and then once you're running fewer automations then the next one will kick in automatically and then if you upgrade you can get up to to 20 concurrent executions make.com is different if you have a 100 different automations just

like this they can all be turned on and running at the same time and there are no limits now there are some smaller differences between n8n and make.com if you scroll down on their pricing page you can get a very detailed feature list based on the tier you're on so it's important to go through all these different features but the one I do want to call out which is very different from nadn is the concept of data limits so make.com is very strict in terms of how much data they will allow you to transfer through

their system when you're actually working with a specific file you are limited to five or 100 or 250 or 500 megabytes based off of the tier you're on you can only work with a file of that maximum size and if we look at these numbers here 5 100 250 and 500 are relatively low especially if you're talking about working with any sort of video or large data file they also monitor how much data you are actually pushing through their system if you come to one of their automations they are actually keeping track of how much

data is going through the network even when you're just passing around text so all of this text that you're pushing around in their system they are keeping track of that and if you reach that limit you are going to run out of data transfer now if you're just moving around a lot of text like this you're not going to run into any sort of issue but again if you are moving around large files then this limit is going to be an issue that you really need to consider in your automation devel vment and picking which

platform you want to use for your automations in NN they are not charging or keeping track of your data transfer so if you are working with large files or working with a lot of data then nadn is going to be a better solution now the last thing I want to talk about is the Community Edition which is a free version of n8n that you can actually download and use it's exactly like their hosted version except you have to host it on your own server so you'd have to go to a platform like digital ocean where

you can launch your own server now the advantage of this is that you can actually run a server for a very small amount of money per month you might need a slightly larger server than just $4 a month but what you can see here is that for a very small amount you can launch your own server and you can simply install nadn on that server and you can use it as if you were using the cloud version so when you pay nadn directly what you're essentially paying for is the hosting you can see here that

it's hosted by nadn so they basically set this up it's really easy to use you don't have to set up your own server there are obviously certain limitations to the paid plans whether it's starter Pro or Enterprise but there is overhead in setting up your own servers so this might seem like a great option for a lot of people hey we can launch our own Ann server there's not going to be any limits and that's a great thing to mention here is that if you download and install your own version of n8n none of these

limits are going to apply to you you'll be able to have as many workflows running at the same time you'll have no limits in terms of workflow execu tions you won't have any concurrent executions you can put it on a lowcost server that would be cheaper than using the cloud services with nadn but now it's important to remember that launching your own server comes with its own set of troubles so when you start to launch your own servers on a place like digital ocean you're starting to get into a more technical situation where you need

to be able to fix certain issues that happen from time to time with servers so while it might be cheaper month to month to launch your own nadn instance on a digital ocean server if you don't know how to actually maintain This Server you could be in a situation where your server breaks down and you're just out of luck or you have to hire expensive help to actually help you debug it or keep it running so we'll talk more about how this fits into your specific plan but self-hosting might be cheaper than n8n but you

might actually spend more if you have to hire expensive help to get you to run it or you don't know how to manage it on your own all right so now let's go ahead and talk a bit more about the actual user interface and the user experience so when you log in to make on the left hand side here you're going to have your main controls you can manage your organization your team and your scenarios templates connections web hooks Keys devices and NN is going to feel very much the same now again they call them

workflows instead of scenarios but in general the navigation is going to feel very similar except as workflows instead of scenarios you get the templates the admin panel here we have credentials which is the same thing as Connections in make.com this is where you can see all the different connections that you have stored up for different apis like air table or open AI or Google Drive and the credentials here in nadn are the same so in general despite some differences in the names like workflows instead of scenarios and credentials instead of connections the overall interface between

nadn and make is very similar so now let's jump into an actual scenario or a workflow here I've got a workflow that is almost identical here we're in make you can see we have these nicely colored modules here that are connected with these lines you can move them around when your automation starts to get messy there's this Auto align feature that's really cool it's not as impressive when there's only two modules but you can see when you have a automation that is more complex and let's say You're Building it out and it just looks a

little bit messy naturally when you build something something it's not quite as perfect but you can always come down here to this magical line and just pop it back into place so even when you have pretty complex automations you can always get them to look relatively clean and that definitely does make it easier to work with now when you start to work with automations in n8n it's definitely going to have a more technical feel to it and a less polished look in terms of just having everything nicely organized and clean like these little colored modules

every module that you work with is going to have a slightly different color so you got your HTTP module this is blue then You' got your web hook this is red so these colors even in a subtle way make it much easier to just visually see things at a glance in NN things start to blend together a bit more but of course if you really focus in on each individual module you can see exactly what it is but it's just harder to do at a glance and you really have to look a little bit more

closely everything is gray except for the logo so it's definitely not something that you can't get over and I find that once you start to work in either one of these they both start to feel normal so it's only really when you go from one to the other the first time where you start to say wow this looks a lot different I like the other way but once you work in either one of these honestly you'll get used to either one all right so now let's go into a quick demo here and actually look under

the hood in these modules and talk a bit about how the experience is going to differ when you are using make or nadn so here we have a simple Automation in make it's searching records in an air table database here we have two records in this air table database it happens to be two different contacts with their full name and first name last name and email now what this automation does is it searches through the database and it takes the full name and it splits up the first and last name and adds them to the

row so if I were to remove all of this data here and then we were to come back to air table and run this automation this module here is searching for all of the records and here you can now see we have first name and last name it just added those back and then this module here is simply updating each air table row with just the first name or the last name and this example here is going to give us a inside look at how make and nadn are quite a bit different so first and

foremost let's open up this air table module this is a simple air table search at the top here we have a connection and we have to select a specific base that's like which base in air table are we actually using and then we also have to select the table and in this case we're using the contact list table so our base name is called contact list and the table is as well we can sort the results coming out we can limit it to a specific view we can select which fields we want to see we

can see the formula here and we can also see that there's a limit of 10 records so when this runs it's only going to bring back 10 records now if we look at the equivalent version in n8n and we look here we have again two modules one is a search and one is an update if we look at the search now aside from it being graphically different with the inputs over here and the outputs over here like that everything is actually relatively the same we have the credentials that's just like this here the connection at

the top it's asking us which kind of resource that we want to work with in this case it's a record there's a little more flexibility in this module in nadn where it can actually work with the base and get information from the base itself so if you wanted metadata about the base you could do that again you pick the operation which is a search you pick the base and the table right so you can see base and table so it's relatively the same it's got a filter here with a return all if we come back

here we've got a formula here as well so you can see things match up almost one for one except they might be a little bit different at times and so you just kind of have to be aware and look out for these things so that you can spot them over here we have a toggle switch which is returning everything if we turn this off is going to allow us to select the limit here in this case it's defaulting to 100 I come back to to a table the default is limiting to 10 same thing is

going on here it's just a slightly different interface and how they expose it and use it and then in make.com down here we have the show advanced settings and they expose a few more different settings that you can use down here and n8n is going to work in a similar way except that they access that type of thing in the options so here we have a bunch of different options that we can add to the automation so here you notice that there's nothing about a view like we saw here we had that view option whereas

in n8n that is an option down here you add the view and you can actually do the exact same thing that you could do in make.com we look here should have the same grid view just like that and then of course the sort is down here whereas in air table it was right here so when it comes to a direct comparison to the modules that are in air table or n8n there's going to be differences no doubt across the board but in general what you're going to find is similarities just like that where they basically

do the same thing there might be a little bit more or less in either one of them and they might be slightly configured differently or a different order but they essentially do the same thing now where things start to differ is when you actually start to run these automations and start to use them so I'm going to refresh this page just so we can refresh and lose the fact that we had some existing that had already been run I'm going to come back to make here I'm not going to save the changes here I already

have add those I'll go and ahead and refresh this so we're starting fresh again so now one of the main differences between make and n8n is simply just how you can step through these automations one by one and that's important because when you build these automations especially these larger ones typically the way you do it is you build the first one you run it you figure out how it's working then you build the next one you figure out how it's running you do the next one you figure out how it's running you do the next

one you just kind of Step through it that way validating each one is working as you go and that's the same way you do it in make as well except that in make when you test your automation you have to test the entire thing so I have to come down here and run it this automation is small so it's going to run quite quickly but you can see here I had to run both of these modules if I were to come to this node here and simply try to run this module only it's going to

actually ask me for information now normally this information is passed in from this module and in fact we can open this up and we can see here that we have a function here and we're passing in the full name from one and one here happens to be the search so we're taking values from this module and we're inserting those into this module but when we run this once it's not able to look here and look at this data and to help us out and just make this easy we actually have to fill this in manually

so I would have to put in an ID here which is possible and I do use this from time to time it's just a pain so I would have to come here I'd have to grab this record ID and then I'd have to put a name here and click okay and now this one module will run using the data that I added now in nadn it's much easier I can run a single module here it's going to run it's going to run successfully and I can go in here and see the output from that particular

module and now I can directly use that here when I run this it's going to know that I already run this previously and it's just going to use that information that was already there which is what I would expect to happen normally now when there's only two modules it doesn't feel like that big of a deal right because it just doesn't take that long but when you have a more complicated automation like this where you have several different modules that are before an existing one if you have to rerun it every time or if you

have something even more complex like this if you have to step through every module just to test a module down here or if we look at this example here in make.com if we had to run this entire automation every single time just to test this module there's a lot of wasted operations that you're spending every single time just to test this module whereas nadn is going to allow you to test and save the results from each of these entries so that when you want to test this one you can just test it and it's going

to remember all these values and use them as needed all right well now what I'm going to do is I'm going to jump back to make here and I'm going to delete these two modules just so I can show you the process of working with make versus nadn as we build out these sample scenarios so that you can see how it works so again this first module here was a simple air table search so I'm going to add the trigger in this case the trigger is going to be a search records so this trigger here

is going to run at some specific interval this is very similar to how n8n works as well you have instant and interval triggers again you have to select the connection you have to select the base table in this case we're going to leave the sort and the view alone we're going to select all for the fields we're going to leave the formula and the limit alone we'll go ahead and save it and now we can run this module only and you're going to see that it's going to pull up two different rows from our contact

database as you see right here so now again I'm going to remove the first and last name because we're creating an automation to detect those from the full name so I'm going to come back up to make and we're going to go ahead and loop through the these two rows and we're going to look at the full name we're going to split it up and put it back in the last name and first name this is already here because when we ran this those values were here but I'll go ahead and run it again we're

going to see that those values are no longer here so now I'm going to add another module update record again this is going to look very similar to n8n and the way it works over there again the connection it's going to pre-fill that from basically the one we used here we'll go ahead and add the base and the table and now it's asking us for the record ID I'll show you the equivalent in nadn in just a moment but we're just going to take this ID and drag it right here that is taking the ID

from this module so it's basically saying Hey We're looping through these different rows here's the ID of the row and so if we're going to update a row we need the original ID from this module and we already have the full name so now we need to figure out the first and the last name so now this is where we're going to see one of the biggest differences between make and nadn now make is going to make this a very friendly process relatively so it does take some practice to use these different functions but in

this popup here they have all of these different variables and functions and operators and keywords that you can use in these cells here to calculate information you can do math you can do string functions you can uppercase everything you can lowercase everything you can do searches you can trim spaces off the beginning and end of a string you can uppercase strings you can split strings you can do things with dates you can do things with arrays these are all built-in functions for arrays so to extract the first name from the full name well what we

would need to do is first we would need to split the full name by a space right because if we look at a full name we're going to split it by a space so I'm going to come in here and I'm going to go to the string functions and I'm going to use split so you can see here it created the function for us we can actually drop in the placeholder if I come back here to the star we can actually drop in the placeholder full name into that little section and then here I can

add in a space so what we see here is that we're splitting the full name by a space so it's going to return two different strings the first name and the last name as an array and so then what we need to do is we need to add another function which is first which is going to take the first element of an array so you can see here is we're splitting the name into two pieces and then we're saying take the first piece and so you can imagine what we're going to do here in fact

I'll just copy and paste it but here I'm going to do last instead of first of course so here we're grabbing the first value of a split Name by a space so you split Stephen Pope in half with a space you're going to get Steven and then Pope that's going to get the Steven and this is going to get the pope so we can go ahead and save that I'll save the automation as well and then let's go ahead and run that jump back to a table and we're going to see here we have those

values so that's cool right you have access to all of these different functions here and there's all sorts of stuff all of the common things that you probably would need are here now let's jump over to n8n I'll go ahead and delete these modules and we'll start from scratch I'll add a node we'll go to air table in this case we're going to do a search pick your credentials again resource we're working with records I'm going to do a search contact list again a lot of these things are going to feel very similar but in

just a moment you'll see how they're different so filter we're going to leave that blank return all that's fine options we can leave that let's go ahead and test it now we have the output here so what you're going to find is when you're working with a module in nadn you're going to have the inputs you're going to have the inputs of the module before and then you're going to have the outputs which are the values coming out going into the next module I'm showing you this in in make but you got the inputs and

the outputs so now we come to the next module here and you might also notice this here this is just a simple placeholder for the trigger technically this module isn't a typical trigger for n8n you can't run it as a trigger so it actually creates this here for you so that you can test that workflow then we'll go ahead and add in the air table update in this case we're going to update a record and so now what you're going to see is over here on the left is we're seeing all of the inputs from

previous modules so in make.com the way that works is when you're in a module and you click into a field you see all of the inputs from previous modules here in this box whereas in n8n it's putting the inputs before essentially the process here and then it's got all of the outputs coming here so let's go ahead and pick the base got to change the connection contact list table contact list here we have a special option for mapping column mode mapping each column manually just means that we're going to map all the values manually down

below columns to match on so it's asking us which columns we want to match in terms of updating a record in this case we're going to match on on the ID this is a unique ID so we're going to use that and then we would just drop that ID here so this is going to feel very similar to make so these placeholders look quite a bit different from make.com you can see their placeholders are just quite a bit easier to read they're not as I guess I'll use the word scary when we look at these

nadn placeholders they're starting to look a lot like code like source code or code that we run on computers and that's because that's what it actually is so this is where you really start to see some of the major differences between make and n8n in n8n here in these expressions in between these curly braces and this isn't a video where I explain how to code you can actually use code to manipulate the output that goes into any of these fields so in make we were using these functions again all of these different functions that you

can find here which is really quite awesome and it's nice that you can just browse it and use it and if we hover over it it's going to give us some help in n8n in order to accomplish the same thing that we did here we actually have to write a bit of code so here in this case we're just pulling in the ID so we don't need to do anything there but here when we get to the first name if I drag in the full name right here in a similar way that we did in

make now I don't have access to this array of built-in functions in nadm instead what I have is the ability to write code so this is going to be JavaScript code that I add here where I just type split and I'm going to split it by a space and then after I split it I'm going to access the first element of that array so that's what this JavaScript does takes the full name it splits it by a space and then it takes the first element of the array that is Created from the split which is

equivalent to what we have here it's just in JavaScript instead of these friendly function calls and then in order to figure out the last name I could just simply cut and paste this I could drop it into last name I do need to hit expression here which evaluates the text here instead of just considering it text so if I were to put fixed here then if I were to run this automation it would literally add this text to the last name which is not what we want we don't really want this in a last name

here right like that's not what we're not trying to do that if you used fixed that's what that does it's it doesn't interpret it if we use expression then anything in side of these curly braces will run inside the code and whatever the code returns that's what will go into the last name so the only thing we need to change here in the last name is just updating this to one so that it's looking at the second element of the array the last element instead of the first here we're looking at the last here we're

looking at the first and that is equivalent to what we had here so let's come back to the contact list remove this here then we can go ahead and test this step now again remember this was easy to do because we had already run the previous step so nadn remembers that we had already run this so again remember because we have that step debugging we can actually run this one automation without rerunning everything else before it and again that becomes really important when we have the much more complex automations and we don't want to run

the entire thing just to run something that's further down the line so we just ran this so if we jump back to our contact list you're going to see here that we have essentially the the same results from n8n as we did from make except now we're using the JavaScript placeholders here so now this is one of those first examples of where you can start to evaluate which platform you might want to use either way there's going to be some learning curve right so if you're using make you have to explore these different functions and

use them and look at the help and kind of see how they work whereas in n8n you're going to have to figure out the code now I might argue that figuring out the code for some simple things might actually be easier if we were to go to chat GPT how could could we split a variable in a node and return the first word let's assume we had a full name Steven Pope in NN what would the code be to split the name and return the first name so let's just see how that goes it literally

returned the exact same thing that we just did so that's pretty reass assuring right so like if you're doing simple stuff and you're able to Simply describe what you need to do then cat GPT is good enough to tell you exactly what you need to put in this particular value now for some people that's just overwhelming and they can never see themselves ever doing this they when they see code they just it just they get turned off and they'd rather not so if you don't want to get into anything like this then nadn is just

not going to be a great platform but as you can see with just a little bit of learnings and trying and using chat gbt it's really not that hard to overcome and the best thing about this is that code is very flexible so pretty much anything that you can think of that you want to do you can do in make you are going to be limited by the functions that they have so if it's not on this list if it's not on this list here or this list here then you're out of luck you're going

to have to figure out this problem in a different way and as we continue to explore we're going to continue to find more and more examples where n8n is just more technical it it allows you to do more but in some cases it's just a little bit more difficult now one of the most important things to remember is that whether it is make or it is n8n both of these platforms are essentially doing the same thing they are reaching out to various services like Gmail or Google Drive HubSpot or what whatever they are they're going

out to these different platforms they're simply making an API call to one of these platforms they're sending it some input data and then coming out of that automation is some sort of output data and both of these platforms simply string together modules and allow you to go from inputs to outputs to inputs to outputs to accomplish a bigger task together now under the hood here how these things actually work on a computer or a server is quite complex now what I would say on the most General level is that make is trying to make this

process as powerful as it can be while still trying to make it as simple as can be it would be quite easy for an employee or a non-technical person who had some determination to figure this out and to learn how to build automations quite easily now sometimes in order to make things simple you have to hide things do these things on behalf of the user so they they don't have to think about it we sacrifice some ability to keep things simple now of course we can always pretty much accomplish the same task in make but

when it starts to get complicated and when we want to use some really Advanced features or some more subtle features they might not be available in make because they are trying to keep it simple whereas n8n I think they're trying to make it as simple as possible possible but they are not going to sacrifice functionality they're not going to make it so you can't do as much purely to make it simple so inherently nadn is going to feel more technical it's going to feel harder in some cases so that it can do more more easily

so make is going to be powerful but also simple whereas n8n is going to give you full control it's going to make you feel more like a developer more like an advanced automator but it's going to add complexity or it's going to require additional knowledge to get it to work that you might not need on make when you are creating more complex things that actually makes nadn easier to use because to do some of the more complex things in make you end up having to go outside the box and do things that really just it

wasn't meant to do and so let's look at one simple example I'm going to delete this trigger here and I'm going to add a web hook we have a web hook here hook it up right here so now let's go into this web hook there's quite a few different controls here we have a test URL and a production URL we have the HTTP method we have a path we have authentication we can control how the web hook responds we have some additional options now let's head over to make let's go ahead and add a web

hook we're going to create that URL here we'll save it and we'll connect it up here so now let's take a look at the options here so as you as you can see there really aren't any options we can expand this and it gives us some additional capabilities here but we're missing a lot of options that are possibilities when it relates to a web Hook make.com is just not allowing us to access that information which for maybe a large percentage of the population is actually a good thing because they just don't need to think or

worry about those things a lot of the things that we see here are not things that you would necessarily have to have but if you did need those it's important that you have them so here just to give you an example in this web hook here they give you a test and a production URL so if you see as I click back and forth here this web Hook is changing whether it's a test or production so that means to access this automation it's going to use the test web Hook when the automation is off and

when I turn it on to active it's going to use the production URL so when you're building out more advanced automations that's a really cool feature because you can have a different test and a different production URL so that you can test your automations when you need to test them but then you can also have them running in production and not mess it up imagine if you only had one URL then whether you were testing or in production you wouldn't be able to differentiate them and your tests would end up going into your production automations

and it just creates stuff that you now have to clean up in make.com you don't have that luxury you just have one URL now again for most people that's really just not a big issue and so they don't even think about it they never even consider and they never even run into an issue because of it but if you did need that test and production URL you'd be out of luck now on the flip side it's great to have this functionality but now it's something that you actually have to deal with when you're testing this

you have to use this URL and then once you activate it you've got to switch that so anywhere that this automation is being called you're going to have to switch that and manage that and it's not really a big issue but it is something you have to do unless you need that that might actually be kind of a pain or you might not even understand and in that case using nadn is just going to feel too complex and you're going to wonder why do I even have to deal with this when I was using make

I just had a URL I didn't have to think about it it always worked and I was good to go I think that's the thing that you're going to find is that some of these platforms is just like yeah there's added features and added complexity if I need it but if I don't I actually don't want it right i' would rather just make it easy and not have to think about it but even beyond that we have more control we can change the path here so if I add you know the path I can actually

change it you see how the path changed here I'm not able to change the path here I'd have to run a whole new one it would and it comes up with the path on it own I don't have any control over that I can actually add authentication here so that nobody can call my web hook unless they have authentication make.com does not have any authentication although I did talk with their VP and he says that will be added and then here as well is you can control when the web hook responds so if somebody's calling

a web hook you might actually have a response you might want to respond to the web hook with some sort of success or failure or whatever in n8n you can control do we want to respond immediately or do we want to use a response web hook or do we want to respond when the last node finishes we just have more control over when this responds explicitly whereas in make.com even though there is a response web hook that will respond for you you don't have explicit control over the configuration of these web hooks like you do

in nadn and if you start to build out really complex automations with clients or for your business this might be something that eventually becomes important and then one final thing that is really cool about n8n is that you can actually have multiple triggers or entry points into the automation so I have a web hook here but I could have two web hooks two different web hooks that merge into the same module so in make you are only allowed to create one scenario with one trigger in a given scenario which in most cases is not a

problem but sometimes that will require you to build more complex automations to do something that would be quite easy in nadn let's say we have an AI agent here in nadn and we are communicating with that agent through slack it's pretty cool that we can communicate through slack but what if we wanted to communicate with this AI agent from telegram as well well in n8n I can simply add another module we'll go ahead and add telegram we'll trigger on a new message put this right here we can actually map that directly into the agent so

that now we can actually chat with this agent through slack or through Telegram and then inside the agent here we would simply update the text that we send it so instead of only sending in the variables from slack we could say using the JavaScript see we have this here we could say use the slack Trigger or if that is empty let's go ahead and use telegram instead so I'm just going to copy this and then I'm going to come back to telegram here and we could just change this to telegram so what this is saying

is in JavaScript it's saying hey if we have a message from slack let's use slack but if that's empty because the message came in through telegram let's use telegram instead so you can do cool stuff like that you can actually have multiple triggers inside a n8n scenario and they can merge back together and then you can actually use both if I was in make here I would not be able to add a another trigger if I added another module like a web hook this module is here but there's no way to use it notice that

there is no lightning bolt like there is here if I move it over here and this automation here this one's completely dead everything would come off of this one in make you cannot have multiple triggers firing off at the at the same time and then again in make as well you can actually merge things together so you can have two modules that merge into one so in make you can't do that so if we did have a scenario where we had some flow control where we branched off and the automation went down this way and

then maybe it goes down this way there is no way where this could then connect back up to a module like that this is an invalid operation this just cannot be done in make which typically doesn't present a problem if you know how to get get around it although sometimes it does and you find yourself kind of hacking together something to work but in n8n you can always merge two different modules into one in a similar way that we did here and you can see why that's powerful because if I couldn't do that if I

couldn't also have a telegram module here along with my slack trigger then I would essentially have to figure out some other way or rebuild this automation twice or have two different triggers that were in different scenarios that match together here and then there was just one input here it would just make it a lot more difficult to do something which is relatively common so the ability to merge here is a really powerful feature now let's talk about AI adoption and the different features in both platforms so both platforms are moving as quickly as they can

to add more AI features and make you can tell it to build automations and it will try to build out these different nodes for you which is cool but in general I find I usually like to build these out manually anyway so both companies are opting AI I talked to the VP of product.com and they explained all the very cool AI stuff that they have coming soon but I would say that right now n8n is moving quite a bit faster and one of the best features that they have is this AI agent which is able

to communicate with some sort of chat it's able to respond to a chat you can give it different tools so that it's able to perform different actions like looking up records from Air table or producing a AI video through haen you can book calendar events or send emails you canect connect up a memory so that it can remember all of the chats you're having here you can hook it up to a vector database and they also have Vector database tools which take care of a lot of the work that you would have to do manually

in make.com they just have a few more of these AI related tools that are more deeply integrated with their platform than make does if I were to look at make at this one particular module that is very easy to add anytime you need a new agent you simply come and you type agent and you drop in you got another agent here just like that now to do the equivalent of this in make you would need to build something similar to this so in make.com here is a slack agent that I had built out before I

had used n8n and you can see here there's quite a few different modules here that I had to put together to listen to messages from slack and then depending on what that message was go down this path or go down this path and let's do this and do that there's a lot of logic I had to specifically design and it's actually quite rigid as well right like it has to flow this particular way and this Automation in itself took me quite a bit of time to build and it's completely replaced with this one module here

and not only is it completely replaced but this is a whole lot more flexible instead of having to Define all of these different actions and paths very specifically and therefore rigidly in an nadn agent I can describe all of that logic in a prompt I can describe describe all the tools and what it's supposed to do and how it's supposed to collect information from the user all of which this automation was attempting to do but what this agent is going to do is through this conversation and using the prompt it's going to figure things out

automatically and send that information or that request to a specific tool if it needs information to get this tool working it's actually going to send a message back to slack or to telegram where the user could then respond it's going to come back in and then it's going to send that message back in here it can actually combine multiple tools it can get content before it uses that content to maybe create an AI video this is able to orchestrate a process on its own whereas in make.com right now I have to build out that automation

all on my own and it's not even as flexible I had to come up with every single possibility whereas this agent is going to investigate and chat and pull things together and think on its own to facilitate the system prompt that we described here so I would say in general it looks like nadn is moving a bit faster when it comes to adopting Ai and new features although make.com is right behind so now let's talk a little bit about why all of this matters to you building out all of these automations it takes a lot

of time it takes a lot of investment either in you learning or hiring somebody choosing the right platform is going to make a big difference in terms of your long-term success with automation automations are really only going to going to provide value if you can turn it on and it runs for 6 months or more without any issues right if you have to keep coming back to this and fixing it because it broke or you had to move it somewhere else because you decided to change platforms let's say you started on make and then you

move to nadn if you can't just build your automations and let them run for an extended period of time then you're not really gaining anything the whole point of an automation is to set it up and have it actually do work on your behalf consistently for a long period of time because if it takes you $10,000 to develop an Automation and then maybe you then move it to n8n because for some reason make just didn't work and now you had to move it to NN and then you spend another $10,000 over on n8n and let's

just say that this automation only saves you $2,000 a year well you can kind of see that that this just wasn't a good investment not only did we build it in the wrong spot but then we had to rebuild it again and now now it's 20,000 bucks but it's only actually saving us $2,000 so these decisions have a real consequence on the bottom line and since automations are only there to help you save and scale it's important to get this right in an ideal situation you actually spend $2,000 and the automation helps you save $110,000

every year that's really what you want all right so given this what is the most important thing to to know when considering which automation platform you should use going forward so now if we map this out make versus N N I think in general what you're going to find is that both platforms can get the job done in general if you're building something both of these platforms are going to be able to build it without much issue one might be a little bit easier than the other but both are going to accomplish essentially the same

thing now because make is a lot easier to adopt if you are new to automations or you're a business owner you don't want to develop your own technical team where you have to hire really Advanced people to manage your make maybe you even want to pick an existing employee that you have that is pretty Technical and you want to give them the ability to learn and build out automations for your company but you don't really want to become a tech company then I think make is going to be a better choice because it's a lot

easier to find people that can modify it or someone on your team without a technical background may be able to get in there learn build automations and actually debug when there's issues but if long term your plan is to go deep on AI automation you're going to hire people that can help you do these things you know you're going to be running a ton of automations and you want to potentially save money by using the selfhosted version which has the PO potential to save you a ton of money there's essentially No Limits to how many

automations you can run here so you can see if you're automating large volumes of operations this self-hosted option is going to be incredibly powerful and coste effective long term as you learn nadn is going to give you much greater flexibility in terms of your automations and how you build them out giving you access to JavaScript code all great things if you have the technical team to back it up so if you're looking for a powerful automation platform but you want to keep it less technical either as an automator or as a business owner so that

a typical employee could learn and build out automations then I would go with make if you have long-term strategic plans to get into AI Automation and to hire a team specifically that can do that then go for the gold and go ahead and jump into 8N you're going to have a lot more flexibility long term now if you're trying to build an AI automation business or you're a business owner trying to stream online your business operations check out The noode Architects Community it's an active Community we have weekly workshops you can get tech support and

we have calls almost every single day where you can get help directly from me and in the classroom we have a make an air table workshop and in the automation Vault you can get access to all of my make and naden automations as well we have a business Clarity course to help you launch your AI business but above all it's a great group of people working together to achieve our goals hope to see you in the community but either way I hope you enjoyed this video and I'll see you on the next one