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Every platform here will sell you a canvas, a checklist or an entire low code suite, a connector library and a login, and two of them will start you at nothing a month. What none of them prices, on a page you can read without booking a call, is accountability for the workflow still running in March. Each comparison sets that platform beside a service that owns the automation itself. Where building it yourself is the better move, the page says so.
Where to start
Most businesses shopping for an automation platform already know something broke. A workflow stopped firing, or the person who built it left and nobody else can read it. Those are different problems, and only one of them is fixed by switching tools. If the workflow itself belongs to nobody, what the managed service actually covers is set out in full elsewhere.
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Zapier bills a task for every step and every connector call, and its own pricing page confirms that AI steps, code, MCP calls and SDK calls all draw from that same pool. n8n bills one execution per workflow run no matter how many steps sit inside it. Those two models produce very different invoices for identical work, and the headline monthly price tells you almost nothing about which way yours will land. Where keeping existing automations alive matters more than building new ones, automation maintenance is priced separately.
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At every platform on this page the answer is you, or somebody you have to negotiate for separately. A vendor changes an endpoint, a credential expires, a field gets renamed, and the run fails into a log nobody reads. n8n is the plainest about this, stating on its own pricing page that dedicated support belongs to Enterprise, so a Business plan at several hundred euros a month still points you at the community forum. Zapier goes further and pauses your workflows outright once the task ceiling is reached with overage billing switched off.
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Building the first version is the easy half, and every platform here has made it genuinely pleasant. Somebody still has to notice the run that failed quietly at two in the morning, rewrite the step when a vendor deprecates an endpoint, and decide whether a workflow nobody has triggered since March is worth maintaining. If that somebody already works for you and does not mind the job, build it yourself and keep the difference. No canvas creates that person, and where a platform here does sell you people they arrive as an annual agreement, a partner engagement or a package quoted on top. The same split runs through every comparison we publish.
Every platform here has its own answer to what a run really costs and who carries the consequence when it stops.
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Nine Thousand Apps
Every Step Is A Task
Workflows Pause At The Cap
Zapier is the broadest automation platform on the market and says so on its own page, with more than nine thousand app integrations. The free tier runs a hundred tasks a month, Professional starts at nineteen ninety nine and unlocks multi step workflows, and Team starts at sixty nine. The catch is the meter. Every step and every connector call spends a task, and its own pricing page confirms that AI steps, code, MCP calls and SDK calls all draw from the same pool. Reach the ceiling with overage billing switched off and your workflows pause until the next cycle.
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VS
Credit Based Billing
Visual Scenario Builder
Five Plan Tiers
Make is the most visual platform here, and for people who think in flowcharts rather than lists it is the nicest place on this page to build. Its plans run Free, Core, Pro, Teams and Enterprise, billed on credits rather than seats. Core is twelve dollars a month, Pro twenty one and Teams thirty eight, each against ten thousand credits. Credits accrue per module per run, so a scenario looping over fifty records is not one credit, though routers and error handlers cost nothing at all. The bill tracks the shape of your data rather than the count of your workflows, and unused credits expire at the end of the term.
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VS
Open Source And Self Hostable
One Execution Per Run
Forum Support Until Enterprise
n8n has the best pricing model on this page and we are not going to pretend otherwise. One execution covers an entire workflow run regardless of how many steps sit inside it, Starter is twenty euros a month billed annually for two and a half thousand executions, and the Community Edition is free to self host. Users and workflows are unlimited on every tier. The gap is support. Its own pricing page states that dedicated support belongs to Enterprise, which means the Business plan at six hundred and sixty seven euros a month still sends you to a community forum when a production workflow breaks in the middle of a billing run.
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VS
Built For Microsoft Estates
User And Bot Licences
One Unattended Run Per Bot
Power Automate is the right answer if your business already lives inside Microsoft 365, and it does a great deal we do not, including desktop robotic process automation and process mining. It also carries the most complicated published licensing on this page. Its pricing page splits it into user licences and bot licences. Premium is fifteen dollars per user per month with attended desktop automation included, while running anything unattended needs a separate Process licence at a hundred and fifty dollars per bot, or two hundred and fifteen for a Microsoft hosted one. Choosing the wrong side of that split is the expensive mistake here, and a single bot runs only one unattended flow at a time, so concurrency means buying more of them.
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Three Plans, No Price Shown
Startup Caps At Five Users
Automates Through Zapier Or Make
Process Street is the odd one out here, and the most useful one if what you are missing is the procedure rather than the plumbing. It holds the checklist, enforces the task order, routes the approvals and records who signed what, with unlimited workflows, tasks, forms and pages on every plan. Its own plan comparison lists connectors for Zapier, Power Automate, Tray.io and Make, so the automation still runs through a canvas you pay for separately. The catch is the price. Startup, Pro and Enterprise all end in a contact sales button, and Startup counts five users, ten guests, a hundred automation actions a month and fifty API calls.
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No Published Price At All
Fixed Annual Agreements
Implementation Included
Kissflow sits at the enterprise end of this page and bundles its own architects into the licence rather than routing you to a partner. Solution architects, hands on implementation, training for the teams who will use it and help standing up a center of excellence all come with it, which is genuinely unusual among software vendors. It publishes no plan table at all, not even tiers with the prices removed, only a button that books a consultation. What it does state plainly is that agreements are annual and fixed, that AI and API usage carry no surcharge, and that further services are purchased as required. It is built for what its own hero calls million dollar problems, which is a long way from four hours a week spent copying records between two systems.
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VS
Three Separate Platforms
Pricing Behind A Form
Docs, eSign And RPA
Nintex is three products rather than one. Automation CE runs in their cloud, Automation K2 is self hosted, and a Salesforce native edition sits inside Salesforce, and each carries a different capability set. Between them they cover workflow, process management, application development, document generation, eSign and robotic process automation, which is wider than anything else on this page. Implementation runs largely through a partner network rather than through Nintex directly. It publishes no price for any of the three, and the pricing address resolves to a contact form, so the deployment decision and the budget conversation both happen before you ever see a number.
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VS
Four Editions, No Prices
Metered Per Capability
Twelve Hundred Connectors
Workato is the platform here that looks most like Zapier and Make in shape and least like them on the invoice. It is one product in four editions, Standard, Business MCP, Enterprise MCP and Workato ONE, each listing what it includes and none listing a price. Twelve hundred prebuilt connectors, unlimited workspaces and unlimited users come with every one of them, which is unusually generous. Consumption is weighted per capability rather than per task and is tracked in a usage dashboard you get after you sign. Concurrency runs from one on the two lower editions to thirty on the top one, and can also be bought as an add on, so how many jobs run at once is a purchase rather than a setting.
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About the service
Managed Automation is not a folder of workflows with our name on them. Your business owns the process, the automations run on whichever platform actually suits the job, and the vendor account stays in your name. We design the process, build it, watch every run, repair the step that breaks when a vendor deprecates an endpoint, and retire the workflows that stopped earning their keep. You own the process. The runbook is ours.
Automation platforms are sold on how many apps they connect to, which is close to irrelevant once you have picked the four you actually use. What decides whether an automation survives its first year is error handling, because every one of these will fail on a rate limit or a changed field eventually. A silent failure is worse than no automation, because people stop checking the manual process once they believe the robot has it.
The second question is who maintains it. An automation is a small piece of software with dependencies on APIs you do not control, and those APIs change. A field gets renamed, a token expires, an endpoint is deprecated with notice that goes to an inbox nobody reads. Somebody has to notice and fix it, and if that is the operations manager who built it in an afternoon, the fix competes with their real job.
Where the platforms below genuinely differ is how much they hide from you. The friendliest are hardest to debug, because the abstraction that made building easy is the same one obscuring the failure. Pick based on who will be reading the logs at nine on a Monday, not on the connector count.
A workflow switched on changes nothing once the credential behind it has expired. The run fails quietly, the error lands in a log nobody opens, and the first anyone hears about it is the invoices not going out. We hold the monitoring, watch the failures, and check that each run actually completed rather than assuming it did. The distance between a workflow set to run and a workflow that ran is made entirely of work somebody has to do.
Tasks, operations, executions, automation actions, Power Platform requests and capability weighted consumption are all different meters, and a business running automations across more than one platform ends up reconciling every one of them. Our fee covers the design, the building and the watching, and it does not move when a workflow gets busier. The platform subscription stays in your name at whatever the vendor charges you. Nothing here is metered by us, because we are not selling you runs.
An automation that stops does not announce itself. It fails into a log, the records it should have written are simply absent, and the gap is usually found weeks later by somebody reconciling a report. Catching the failure in the same week is the difference between a fix and a reconstruction. We watch for that, which is dull work and exactly the sort that never gets done in house.
What does a managed automation service do that Zapier does not?
Zapier connects over nine thousand apps and will have a first workflow running before lunch. Nothing on our side replaces that catalogue. What the subscription does not include is somebody who notices when a vendor changes an API and the workflow starts failing quietly at two in the morning. Zapier will email whoever owns the account. Whether that address still belongs to a person who acts on it is the entire question, and no plan tier answers it.
How does a business actually lose a workflow it has run for years?
Almost always the same way. Somebody built it, it worked, and everybody stopped thinking about it. Then a field is renamed in the CRM, or an authentication token expires, or the person who built it leaves without writing down why the refund branch exists. The platform behaves exactly as designed, the run fails, and the alert goes to an inbox nobody reads. The first real signal is a customer asking why the confirmation never arrived.
Who owns the automations if you build them for us?
You do. The workflows are built in your accounts, on your platform tenancy, under your billing, and they stay there if we part ways. We hold the design work and the monitoring, which is what lets us repair and extend them. If you want to take it in house, we hand over the process maps and the credentials and stop touching the workflows. None of it is locked to us.
Is it cheaper to just build this ourselves in one of these tools?
On the licence alone, yes, and the arithmetic is not close enough to argue with. Zapier Professional starts at $19.99 a month and n8n Starter at twenty euros billed annually. Our entry tier is $200 a month, so this is roughly ten times the software cost. What you buy here is not a canvas. It is the mapping and the build, plus somebody accountable for the thing still running in month nine. If you have a person who enjoys that work and has the hours, build it yourself.
Which of these platforms will tell us when a workflow breaks?
Every platform here will send a notification, which is not the same thing. Zapier pauses workflows once you reach the task ceiling with overage switched off, a design decision that looks identical to a failure from the outside. Power Automate splits attended and unattended automation across two separate licences, so what you can run at all depends on which one you bought. n8n reserves dedicated support for Enterprise, in their own words. Process Street will not put a price on any of its three plans, neither Kissflow nor Nintex publishes a plan table at all, and Workato publishes four editions without a number against any of them, so in those cases what you get is whatever the meeting ends up agreeing. An alert is a message. Somebody reading it at nine on a Saturday is a job.
What happens if a workflow fails while you are managing it?
We find out, because we watch the runs rather than waiting to be told. Repairs are included at every tier, so a broken step is fixed rather than quoted for. When a vendor ships a breaking change that affects you, we tell you before it lands, and once a month you get a plain summary of what ran and what we repaired. The value of watching is that most of this never reaches you at all.
Do we have to move off the platform we already use?
No, and usually you should not. We build on what you run, whether that is Zoho, ERPNext, WordPress or one of the platforms compared here. Moving a working automation from one canvas to another costs real money and buys very little. Where the platform is genuinely the wrong shape for the job we will say so and show the arithmetic, but that is the exception rather than the finding. The tool is rarely why a process hurts.
Can you take over automations somebody else built?
That is how most of this starts. You give us access, we read what is there, and the first thing you get back is a map of every workflow, what fires it, and what it touches. Inheriting another team's build is slower than starting clean and we still prefer it, because the undocumented branch handling the awkward case is usually the part worth keeping. The inventory alone tends to turn up two or three workflows nobody knew were still running.
How long before anything is actually running?
The mapping comes first, and most of it is watching how the work really flows rather than how the process document says it does. Building follows one workflow at a time, smallest useful thing first. Nothing goes live until it has run alongside the manual version long enough to prove the two agree. One workflow you trust is worth more than six that somebody checks by hand every morning.
We already have someone technical. What is left for you?
Less than you would think, and more than they want. Building an automation is not the hard part. Keeping forty of them alive across four vendors who each ship changes on their own schedule is perpetual, unglamorous work that slides the moment anything with a deadline arrives. We take the monitoring and the vendor churn, and leave the decisions about how the business should actually work with the person who ought to be making them.
When should you not hire us for this automation work?
Two cases, and both are common. If you need three simple workflows and somebody in the building enjoys tinkering with them, a Zapier subscription is fine and considerably cheaper, and we will tell you so. And if the process you want automated is regulated to the point where the compliance work dwarfs the engineering, you want a specialist in that regulation first and an automation partner second.
What if the automation is not our real problem?
We will say so before taking your money, and looking costs nothing. Automating a process that should not exist only makes the wrong thing happen faster and more reliably. A fair number of these engagements start as a build request and end with three steps deleted and one form rewritten. That answer is cheaper than anything on the pricing table, and it is more often the correct one.
What does this actually cost through you?
Four flat monthly tiers, all listed on the business process automation page. The entry tier at $200 a month covers monitoring and unlimited repairs on anything we built, with no new build allocation, so it fits once the building is done. Higher tiers add build capacity, anomaly detection, tighter response times and a standing session to decide what gets automated next. Your platform licence stays yours and is billed by the vendor rather than by us.
What happens if we want to leave?
You keep the automations, because they were never built anywhere except your own accounts. We hand over the process maps and the credentials, with notes on why each branch exists, and stop monitoring at the end of the month. There is no exit fee and no notice period. That is worth weighing against the platform decision itself, since a year of workflows living inside one vendor's canvas is a good deal harder to walk away from.
What do you need from us to start?
A list of the processes that hurt, access to the systems they touch, and somebody who can say how the work is supposed to go when the awkward case turns up. The first piece of work is the map: what fires each process, who touches it, where it waits, and what it costs in hours. That step is where the surprises tend to be, and it is also the cheapest part of this to get right.
