Yes. n8n is open source: the code is public and installing it costs nothing. At most you pay for hosting if you put it on a server, often a few euros a month. Zapier, on the other hand, costs €26 a month.

Do I need to code to install n8n?

No. The level is intermediate and the install takes about 20 minutes with the prompt from the page: Claude does the work, you answer its questions.

How is it different from Zapier?

n8n does most of what Zapier does, without a subscription, and your data stays with you. The point by point comparison is on the page.

Yes. With an open source tool installed on your side, your files stay on your machine or your server. Nobody can close your account or change the price.

Free alternative

Free alternative to Zapier

Zapier costs €26 a month. n8n does the same job for free, in open source: you install it on your machine or a small server, and you stop paying.

Public entry price, taken from Zapier’s website (zapier.com). Over a year, that is €312 that stays in your pocket.

What replaces Zapier

The main alternative

n8n

🟡 Intermediate⏱️ ~20 min to installSave €26/mo

n8n is your business's engine room. You draw a chain of steps on a canvas (when a form is submitted, create the CRM record, ping Slack, send the welcome email) and it runs without you, day and night. Over 400 services are already wired in, and when none fits, you call any API. The difference with Zapier and Make: you can run it on your own machine. Where Zapier counts your tasks and bills every trigger, your server counts nothing. And for automations calling Claude, you plug in your own key instead of buying their AI credits.

Loucash’s verdict on n8n

9/10

This is my favourite building block whenever something needs orchestrating. I sell it as a service, I teach it to my students, and it is almost always the missing piece when I audit a company: they have the tools, but nothing connecting them. One point of honesty, since this is a library of free tools: n8n is not open source in the strict sense, it is fair-code. Its licence lets you self-host it for your own business, for personal use, and deploy it for a client's internal needs. What it forbids is reselling it white-labelled as a hosted service, competing with their cloud offering. For the use you will make of it, you will never hit that limit. Two hard-earned reservations. When a chain grows long, debugging is painful: build in small pieces and test each step. And n8n does not replace real code at high volume; past a certain level, a script does it better and faster. But to go from doing it by hand to it running on its own, nothing is quicker.

Who it is for: You repeat the same steps between two tools every week, or you sell automation and need the building block to set up for your clients.

See the full page →See the tool ↗

The prompt that installs n8n

Paste this prompt into Claude: it checks the repository, asks you its questions and installs the tool step by step.

Installe n8n sur ma machine (l'outil open source d'automatisation de workflows, repo GitHub n8n-io/n8n) avec Docker, en suivant la documentation officielle docs.n8n.io. Crée le dossier de travail, écris le docker-compose.yml avec un volume qui conserve mes workflows entre deux redémarrages, lance-le, et vérifie que l'interface répond sur http://localhost:5678. Explique-moi ensuite comment créer mon premier workflow. Explique chaque étape simplement, je débute.

Review the GitHub repository and check whether it is safe to install given my machine and my infrastructure. Ask me as many questions as possible, using widgets, to clarify my request and be as precise as you can.

Frequently asked questions

Is n8n really free?: Yes. n8n is open source: the code is public and installing it costs nothing. At most you pay for hosting if you put it on a server, often a few euros a month. Zapier, on the other hand, costs €26 a month.
Do I need to code to install n8n?: No. The level is intermediate and the install takes about 20 minutes with the prompt from the page: Claude does the work, you answer its questions.
How is it different from Zapier?: n8n does most of what Zapier does, without a subscription, and your data stays with you. The point by point comparison is on the page.
Do I own my data?: Yes. With an open source tool installed on your side, your files stay on your machine or your server. Nobody can close your account or change the price.