migrating-zapier-to-n8n

Project

Saving Righteous Felon $600/mo by migrating to N8N

Our client Righteous Felon Craft Jerky is a boutique distributor of all-natural, high protein meat snacks. They work with businesses like hotels, airlines, independent grocers, and national retailers like Costco, Sprouts, Wawa, and Ralphs to offer their snacks to customers, and provide their clients with a customized experience that makes ordering, delivery, and inventory management a breeze.

When we started working with them, they were leaning heavily on Zapier for their automations. As their order volume and automation complexity grew, their monthly bill increased to over $800/mo. 

By migrating the highest volume automations to N8N for them, we were able to save them >$600/mo. 

Let’s zoom out for a second. What are you paying for when you pay for Zapier? Ultimately, you are paying for a number of conveniences layered on top of raw processing power.

Zapier’s cost to provide you the service is minimal. If you’re paying $800/mo to Zapier, their cost to host and run the automations you’ve created is likely under $20. You could recreate everything Zapier does for you and pay $15/mo to run it on a virtual private server.

So if you’re not paying primarily for processing power, then what is it? You’re mostly paying for the costs associated to research and develop the features Zapier has to make life easier for you:

  • Easy authentication to thousands of services, some of which you can’t integrate with outside of Zapier. Authenticating with some of these services, like Quickbooks, sometimes requires creating your own app and submitting an application.
  • Skipping time-consuming coding with a visual automation builder
  • Execution log to visually see what your automations are doing
  • Stability: Zapier has 99.999% uptime
  • Zapier’s triggers handle polling for you in cases where a web service doesn’t provide webhooks

Pricing for tools like Zapier are generally on a continuum of ease of use and cost. 

Zapier is really easy to use, but it also costs more than alternatives. 

For example, N8N is a lesser-known competitor to Zapier with a “Sustainable Business” license that’s similar to open source. It’s another tool that enables you to build automations without writing a bunch of code, although it’s built more for people who at least understand the basics of Javascript. 

Keep in mind that ease of use is relative. If you’re even somewhat familiar with Javascript or capable of using AI prompts to write basic scripts, then N8N is probably easier to use in the long run. After getting over the initial learning curve, I find that I can build a complex workflow in N8N in a fraction of the time. 

This isn’t the only continuum though—you also have to consider the capabilities of the platform. And when it comes to tools that try to make development easier, capabilities often go down with ease of use. 

That means with the right skillset, using a tool like N8N costs less and allows you to do more than Zapier. 

Why do capabilities go down with ease of use? Because building a UI that makes complex things simple is difficult. There’s often a trade-off between giving users a lot of powerful features and keeping the platform easy to use.

At $800/mo, Righteous Felon was paying much more than they really needed to. So, we recommended migrating some of their automations to N8N. 

Pareto principle approach to migration

Migrating from Zapier doesn’t need to be all-or-nothing. Large organizations will often find it useful to have multiple automation tools that can each play to their strengths. 

Instead, we focused on the automations causing most of the task usage in Zapier so we could reduce their cost quickly. 

If you go to https://zapier.com/app/history/usage and sort the table by “Tasks used” you’ll quickly figure out where you’re spending the most money. 

If you take the task limit in your plan and do some basic division, you can even figure out how much you’re paying per month for that exact automation. 

The pareto principle states that 80% of your outcomes come from 20% of your causes. While the exact percentages vary, this is usually true—there’ll be a handful of Zaps that are really driving your cost up. 

Focus on migrating those Zaps first, then evaluate whether it’s worth it to continue the process with the rest of them. 

N8N cost comparison with Zapier

You can self-host N8N and use it for basically unlimited automation. On popular platforms like DigitalOcean, this can cost as little as $5/mo. I personally pay $15/mo to run all automations for Datos on DigitalOcean. At that higher price, I’ve never had N8N crash on me—and I run a lot of automations. 

I even have multiple automations that run every second as a polling trigger. That would be prohibitively expensive on most pricing models, but is just fine with N8N. 

If you’re not comfortable self-hosting or if you just want to get started quickly, you can use N8N Cloud. It’s hosted by N8N themselves and starts at $20/mo for 2,500 executions and 5 active workflows. Let’s dive into what that means practically. 

N8N Cloud charges for workflow “executions”. This means every time a workflow starts and ends, no matter how long it took or how much data it processed. 

It may be hard to appreciate what a big deal that is. I’ll give a comparative example with Zapier to show you.

Let’s say you wanted to sync 3,000 rows of data with another system in Zapier. Let’s say you run this sync once an hour. In one day, you’d use 24 x 3,000 tasks. 72,000 tasks a month costs nearly $500 on Zapier. 

In N8N, running this once an hour would be only 24 executions in a day. 

While this is an extreme scenario, it is useful to show the vast difference in what you can accomplish when you’re billed per workflow execution rather than per task.

In terms of active workflows, keep in mind that you could technically run dozens of workflows inside one workflow because you can have unlimited triggers and steps inside a workflow. In practice, I rarely have to upgrade a client’s account just to get more active workflows enabled.

Again—you can also just self-host N8N and never worry about the extra cost of a new automation again. We have set this up for a number of clients and the only maintenance is an occasional update which takes a few minutes.

Process of migrating from Zapier to N8N

It’s really very simple to migrate to N8N once you understand both platforms. This is why at Datos, we can migrate even huge automations like below in a few hours, and simple ones in ~20 minutes. 

Example of a complex automation for Righteous Felon that took a few hours to migrate.

We can generally migrate from Zapier for the same cost as 1-3 months of your Zapier subscription, giving you a very quick return on investment. 

Our approach is simple: with an ultrawide monitor or double monitor setup, split your screen between N8N and Zapier. You can generally follow the same order of operations in both tools, so you’ll just recreate each step from Zapier in N8N. 

Here’s some of the differences you may run into when migrating from Zapier to N8N:

1. Zapier has more built-in integrations. While N8N has >1,000 integrations built in and allows you to install community-built integrations or build your own, Zapier has >8,000. In most cases, this doesn’t matter because Zapier has thousands of very obscure tools that few people use. You will find the most popular tools integrated with N8N already.

Whenever a tool isn’t already built in, N8N makes it easy to work with that tool’s API directly. We consider this trivial work at Datos, but there’s a learning curve if you need to learn how to work with an API from scratch. 

N8N also allows people to create their own nodes and workflows and share them with each other, and I find that there’s usually at least one person who has gone down the same road before.

2. Zapier has formatting steps, while N8N uses Javascript snippets. 

Zapier has some built-in formatting tools that allow you to perform simple actions like replacing words or formatting dates. N8N has a few of these too, but you’ll mostly have to use Javascript snippets to do the same thing. This is trivial now that AI can help you write these snippets—they’re usually extremely simple. 

For example, if you need to split a person’s full name into first and last name, you’d have to find the right tool for it in Zapier. In N8N you’d just use {{ $json.full_name.split(“ “)[0] }} to reference the first name. 

I find that building with N8N is generally faster because there are less steps involved. You can use Javascript in any input in N8N to reference and change data as you see fit. So instead of having separate formatting steps, you can keep a clean workflow. 

3. Zapier and N8N’s integrations sometimes differ

Even when Zapier and N8N have the same integrations, they’re often different in some ways. For example, Zapier has an option to add text to the beginning or end of a Google Doc. If you use HTML, it will output formatted text in the document. 

N8N also has a method for doing this, but it doesn’t automatically convert HTML to Google Doc formatting. 

N8N’s integrations tend to be straightforward and cover more endpoints than Zapier, meaning you can technically do more with them, but Zapier does occasionally have some extra conveniences built in.

Finishing up the migration

Once you’ve finished re-building the automation in N8N, simply activate the new workflow and deactivate the old Zapier workflow at the same time so any new operations will run through N8N. 

Honestly, it’s one of the easier types of migrations to pull off. 

4. N8N has more flexibility

You may find yourself making upgrades to the workflow as you migrate. N8N has lots of additional options and tools that make it possible to improve your workflow logic. For example, you can add custom error handling, unlimited paths that can split off and merge together, and sticky notes that make your automation easier to understand. 

Here’s an example of the Zapier workflow from earlier, with additional functionality added when we moved it to N8N. 

The result

We migrated most of Righteous Felon’s Zaps to N8N within a month, and immediately cut their monthly bill from >$800 to less than $100. They now pay about $200/mo total for both tools (we set them up with N8N Cloud at their $120/mo plan). 

While we could have cut costs further by self-hosting N8N, we chose to pay for N8N Cloud for stability. Righteous Felon’s workflows are critical and even though the risk of crashing is low with an appropriate virtual machine, N8N Cloud’s platform is very stable and the tradeoff is worth it for them. 

If you’re paying over $500/mo ($6,000 a year) for Zapier, contact us right away. We can not only migrate your automations to N8N, but we can also make them do more for you than they could in Zapier. You should see a positive ROI within a few months. 

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