The three honest options
For most business automation projects in 2026, you are choosing between three stacks:
- n8n — self-hostable, open-source, very developer friendly.
- Make (formerly Integromat) — slick visual builder, huge connector library, hosted only.
- Custom code — Python or Node.js, deployed on your own infra, fully under your control.
When n8n wins
- You are technical, or you have someone technical on call.
- You want self-hosting for data residency or compliance reasons.
- You expect to run tens of thousands of executions per month — pricing of hosted tools gets painful.
When Make wins
- Your team is mostly non-technical and you need them to maintain the workflows.
- You need a connector that nobody else has built yet (Make has roughly 1,800 at last count).
- You are running well under 10,000 ops per month and prefer a credit-card line item to a server bill.
When custom code wins
- Anything with non-trivial business logic. Visual builders become read-only spaghetti past about 30 nodes.
- Anything performance-critical — a Python worker can handle 100x the throughput of an equivalent visual flow.
- Anything you want to test, version-control and code-review properly. Git beats screenshots.
The hybrid pattern we actually ship
On most Beusoft client projects we end up with both: n8n or Make at the edges (inbox triggers, simple SaaS-to-SaaS sync) and a small Python service in the middle for the actual logic. Best of both worlds — non-technical staff can edit the easy parts, engineers own the hard parts.
Three real client costs (per month)
- Inbound lead enrichment, 4,000 leads/month: $0 on self-hosted n8n vs $112 on Make.
- Marketing-email personalisation, 80,000 sends/month: $420 custom Python vs $1,200+ on either visual tool.
- Daily reporting roll-up, 30 sources: $29 on Make (simple, non-technical owner) vs $0 custom but $1,500 to build.
Cost is not only the bill — it is also the bill plus who can maintain the thing.
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