n8n vs Make.com | Which Automation Platform Should You Use?

Is is probably your choice. And this is what a make.com scenario looks like. You can see how clean, clear, pristine, it's just it generally speaking, it's just very, very, very smooth and it just feels like a comfortable place to be. Now when it comes down to the, you know, the which is the which is better from an NAM perspective, NAN is like a developer, but not just the developer. Anybody's Swiss army knife, right? It has unprecedented flexibility and control over what you do inside of it and the deployment options for it between each of them. And going a little bit beyond just which is the better platform and actually looking at what is the right tool for your individual needs is probably the way that I would explain it the most simplest. Now the two core differences that you'll notice straight away. Make.com is effectively a visual and accessible powerhouse. It's designed for ease, it's designed for lack of complexity, it's designed for beginners and it gives you a real leg up in terms of its intuitive interface to be able to just drag and drop nodes, piece them together and, and have direct connections. So that is perfect. If you're looking for rapid deployment, you don't need much technical background whatsoever and you literally just want to, want to, you know, group them, group the nodes together, have a simple flow built then make.com infinite. You can actually use nan. Go and sign up on the website like you would normally. But you can also self host nan and if you self host NAN effectively it's free outside of the, the self hosting costs. So there is NAN generally speaking is ideal for technical teams. If you're a developer and you go inside of NAM, it basically NAN. It basically just makes your life 50 times easier. And it does have a golden nugget which I'm going to share with you a little bit later in the, in the, in the video. But the choice isn't about which objective is objectively, yes, which platform is objectively superior. It's about which philosophy and feature set aligns with your specific business requirements. If you're not looking to, to have any learning curve at all and you just want to be able to go and connect nodes, then I would, I would advise that you use make. If you're looking for a more sophisticated platform, I would advise that you go to nan. It has incredible power. It has AI agents inside of it. It's, it has the ability to be able to do a lot more things a lot quicker, but they're just not as easy to set up and there is a steeper learning curve. One of the core philosophies. Well the core philosophy of this is convenience versus control. Make.com gives you the maximum convenience and Nan gives you ultimate control. Make.com is a pure SaaS product, fully hosted, maintained by, by somebody else, which NAN can be like. It can be fully hosted by N but like I said, you can self host it. Instant setup with zero infrastructure requirements. Your data is processed on their servers. You have the ability to be able to use it for free initially up to a certain amount of operations. They are changing that shortly. Effectively it's like rent in a fully furnished apartment. This is the analogy I use. Make.com is like renting a fully furnished apartment. Move in, start working. Whereas NAN is like owning a house. There's more setup but once it's correct it's more suited to what you want it to be and it has more freedom alongside it. When it comes down to the NAN I mentioned the self hosting choice, you can deploy your on your own infrastructure on a £5amonth server. You then own the processing of all of that data and it's yours. There is a big difference. Convenience versus control. Like if data privacy is your number one concern, do you need predictable scaling costs? If you do, NAN self hosting platform is for you. If you'd never, you know, you'd never want to bother yourself with anything technical involving servers or anything like that. MAKE has everything that you can do. And I have to say something important because for the majority of it, both, both platforms can deliver the same outcome, right? There's not many things that you can't do inside of one or the other. It's just the expense of the deployment and the complexity and debugging which is what we're, we're going to get to as we go through here. So if you look at this artistic canvas versus logical flowchart, you will see what I mean. So on the, on the left is make.com and on the right is Nan on the left. Beautiful freeform visual canvas drag modules wherever you like. You know, I'll show you a scenario now inside of here like let's have a look. Which one, which one? Which one? Let's have a look in, let's have a look in here. So an automated follow up system. This is an automated follow up system that like from, from Google Sheets, grabs a date, checks it runs through. You simply drag and drop these nodes, move them around and you can see how they, how they work. You auto align them. It looks very clear, right? As a, as an approach it literally looks exactly how you Would would want it to be. And it make you can read it and it makes, it makes complete sense. Okay, little filters here. 14 days shows you exactly what they are literally drag and drop modules in. If you wanted to add another module in here, you literally just right click add module and you have thousands of individual applications that are already implemented inside of it. Whereas if we go, sorry, I'm all over the place for that. Whereas if we go inside of nan, you can see already it looks a bit scarier just from the second that you land on it. From the minute that you land on it, it looks a little bit scarier. But then when you start to look at actual flow flows like this that I've built out, which is a, a flow using Telegram, which allows it to be able to tap into different events and different tools using calendar different agents. It's called a multi agent flow slash agent swarm. If you look at this, it just looks a little bit more complex, right Than, than what you, than what you, than what you see from Make. If you look at the differences between the two, you can see quite clearly that one is definitely more friendly. Make.com is a thousand percent more friendly. I think even NAM founders would tell you that Make.com looks, looks more friendly. But the trade off that you have for the comfort is massive when it comes to cost ins. When it comes to ability to be able to do things quickly and have things out there and put out and developed as fast as possible, you, you, you lose that. So feels like creating a mind map when you're using make.com is, you know, intuitive for visual thinkers and it gives you an easy solution. When you look at nan, structured node based interfaces, they are clear, logical flowchart sort of layouts with arrows exactly the same. And people often say they're easier to read for more complex workflows. I showed you quite a basic flow inside of make.com so it's easy to understand. But can you imagine if this had 18 times the fl. The, the, the, the modules inside of make and it just covered this whole screen, it would become quite, you know, it would be quite the, quite the overwhelming feat. Well, when you look at nan, this still does look a little bit overwhelming. But I've dragged, dragged and dropped sections. Like I know that this is the input section there. Then I have the AI agent that sits here, okay. Then I have the outputs from a Telegram perspective and then underneath I have all of my individual assistants and drag and drop them out and effectively I've got like phase one, two and three and If I was to zoom out and look at that and you were to look at something really comprehensive. And especially if I use sticky notes like this, I can add labels to what things are and I can say, hey, you know, this is the tool section. If I, and I write tool section inside of that sticky note. And yeah, you know, you wouldn't use it in that exact sort of format, but you can have the layouts put together, piece together naturally. So even though make.com is a more natural and friendly interface, as you get to more complex flows, it can, it can look quite daunting. There's a lot of, there's a lot going off with the routers and things. But NAN definitely favors engineering mindsets, software development backgrounds, things like that. Both accomplish exactly the same task, but their visual approaches reveal different philosophies about how automation should be built and understood. And one of them is more technical nan than the other, which is make.com this is probably the best infographic that I could put together for you that would showcase it to you. So, and this touches on the, the, the, the, the real power of any N, which is the code node. Okay, so handling complexity, hitting a wall versus breaking through it in each individual channel. Comparatively. Make.com's built in tools, NAN node codes and NAN's tools Data transformation and the crossover you have here. Automation and integrations. Well, automation, automations and integrations. If it comes down to direct integrations, Make.com smashes NAN every day of the week. There aren't many tools you can find. There are, there are, there are a few and you do come across them, but there aren't many that you can find in here. Like, I haven't even heard of half of these tools that I'm scrolling through that have direct integrations where you literally just click a button, right click a button, find an email, create a connection and connect using your API key. You literally connect just like that. And then you have your, you have your connection set up. Whereas inside of, whereas inside of nan, if you are to add a new node, if you were to look at that action in app, there are quite a few, but there are nowhere near as many as what. There are nowhere near as many as what make.com has by a long, long way. And the capacity, literally, I'm at the end of the list there. The capacity that you have for direct integration is heavily limited. So make.com from an automations and integrations perspective actually beats NAN every day of the week. And that's why it's better for simpler flows and simpler transitions as you head towards pre built transformers, custom script transformers or transformation data transformation. And really the golden goose that is the NAN node code. You can do all of these inside of each one. The one thing which stands out is the NAN code node. And to give you an example, let's say there's a complex data challenge. The scenario is to format a list of 50 names as last name F and filter out anyone named Smith. Okay, let's say that was the flow that we were trying to do. The make.com flow would involve multiple modules chained together. Google sheets, Iterator, router, text parser, filter, variable set array, aggregator, 10 + steps in order to get it done. In terms of the NAN solution that is one single code node with five lines of JavaScript that AI can write for you. And to showcase you an example of this, I'll go inside of this flow because it's got a code node in it and inside of here this is simple JavaScript that the slashes tell you that the double slashes tell you what the like. Well, anything in gray. It's not actually an actionable, it's information. So you can write notes for yourself. But AI wrote this for me. You can literally if you're on, if you're on, if you're not, if you're on the, the, the hosted like the, the cloud hosted NAN platform where you go and sign up to their, their system and allow it to run as sort of a SaaS, then you be this AI function will work for you and you can literally ask it to rewrite JavaScript in, in any way and it will do it for you. There are debugging things you're going to have to do, but AI can power using a code node to be able to do this. But what I'm trying to tell you here is the reason for this, this code node in this flow is because we wanted to split multiple split into multiple messages. This was a telegram trigger. It would fire, it would run through all the flow, do everything perfectly fine, but the output would always be one message. Well, we wanted to dissect that based off of what it was. Well, is there a meeting booked? Is there X and Y? And that one code node allow allowed us to be able to trim all of the messages from all of these in well, let's say all of these individual tools. It's not necessarily true, I didn't go that deep into it, but it sends, it allows it to send multiple messages and you can transform that code node into just about anything. The code node the code node is the power of nan. The code node is the true, the real holy grail of NAN usage and why it is the king when it comes between the two, the two, the two platforms. But that doesn't mean you should use it just because it has the code node if it doesn't fit your actual requirements and you know, sort of learning curve. Because the learning curve like even that when I just showed you the JavaScript there, if you're watching this for the first time, getting into the no code space, you're going to be like, whoa. Like, you know, like what's a code node, what's JavaScript? How do I do this? And then therefore make.com might be a more ideal solution to you at that, at that stage. But that's an example of it. Pricing is a big thing. The cost comparison for processing 5,5000 orders a month. So each order requires four automation steps. Process new order, add to Google sheet, check inventory, send confirmation, make.com would be 5,000 orders, would be four operations. Because there was, there was four nodes. That's 20,000 operations just from that one individual flow alone. More complex workflows like the one I just showed you. It's not, it's not a complex workflow, but like this one here, you know you're going to be talking like, what's that? Six, seven, eight. You're going to be talking like nine operations per individual run of this. You can imagine if you were running this thousands of times, you would end up in a situation where you're really racking up the costs from an operation point of view. Whereas NAN Cloud, which is basically the SaaS system that NAN has 5,000 order execution regardless of the number of steps, as predictable costings for complex workflows, better value for data intensive processors. You can have as effectively, you can have as many nodes as many modules. Modules in, in, in any end, they're called nodes. It doesn't matter how big that flow is, you are charged on the execution alone, just executing it, pressing go. So for example, if this, if this was unlinked and this just had these two nodes, you would be charged two operations. In mate.com in NAN, you would just be charged for one execution. And that is the, that is the key to, to this, the sort of the, the pricing module in comparison really, I guess, you know, that's, that's it. If you talk about self hosting, which is what I, which is what I do, I'm not self hosted in the one I'm showing you here. I don't think Am I? No. I mean I'm in the normal hosting but for my major flows or any flows I run at scale. I am self hosted. I wouldn't worry about getting into this right now if I was a beginner. Focus on the the N8N Cloud, that's absolutely fine but eventually you can look at any and self hosting which means that you pay five to ten pound a month for the service, sorry the server cost and then everything is free. You can literally run whatever you want outside of it for, for free. So yeah. Error handling and debugging visual history versus raw data Make.com has an intuitive visual history tracking platform. You can see the exact path the data took for a scenario. It appeals bubble. It's all lovely bubbles. It's. It's nice like it's just. It shows where things went wrong. It's perfect for non technical troubleshooting because you can see the debugging. The issue is a completely different thing. Actually fixing it, maybe using the AI or actually going out there and finding it is a different beast. But just the way that it looks to you on a screen is a lot better like it is when it comes down to nan. It's a detailed technical execution log. You go through it, you look at raw JSON data between nodes, complete visibility of headers and fields shows precisely why things failed. You can see very developer friendly formatting of issues to fix. But I wouldn't let that scare you too much. It's a very developer friendly debugging experience. But when I started in MAKE and I went to nan and since I've gone to nan, I would never go back. And apart from very rare use cases where you can pull specific data which you can do with APIs and webhooks anyway. But like there's very rare use cases for clients and stuff where I will use make and I don't find the interface in any overwhelming now you obviously have to have a learning curve around it. The key takeaways use it based off of your team's profile, what you try, or your individual profile or your business's profile and choose what's best for you. I think that error handling isn't really an issue. I think that from an error handling perspective you're going to need some level of technical understanding just because there's a beautiful little bubble that pops up inside of. Inside of make and you have to dig into the executions and look at the failure in NAN which like I'll show you executions, executions that ran. So you see like this was a successful execution Using the code node there isn't enough. It doesn't go back long enough for me to show you a failed example. But this is an execution. You can see, look if you follow the green lines. Let me zoom in, zoom in a bit for you. If you follow the green lines on the, on the page you can see. So this was telegram trigger. Well this was an audio file. So it went through the audio file. It used simple memory. It fetched emails and it sent a message in Slack and then it sent the text message. This was before the code node. This was during testing. This is what I was doing when I put the code node in here and can see how it ran. Whereas inside of make.com if you were to run a scenario I don't have one built that I could show you but effectively. Let me just see if this, if this will run okay. Perfect. Absolutely perfect. So inside of here we tried to run this flow but it, it had an error. So whereas inside of make.com there nan all you would see is this and it would tell you if it failed. But you, you have that then you have to go to executions to look at the issues. Whereas inside of make.com you literally just get a little red bubble that tells you what the issue is. Google sheets. Yeah, I mean like it tells you invalid argument unable to pass range audits. Undefined the it's got an Error 400 code invalid argument. You know and you can look about more information on error handling and it will take you to make's database for knowledge base to fix it. It's just because the sheet don't exist or whatever the whatever's inside of there. I'm not even going to open it up. This sheet name min wrong is probably the cause of that. Anyway point being is that you can see how that shoot that showed beautifully in error. Whereas if you look at the, the make.com scenario that sort of flows you would have to go into this execution panel and look at the logs. But it has. So it's a little bit more technical but it actually has power in it. So ultimately this video was edit n vs make.com which one should you choose? The answer to that is solely based off of your requirements. If I was to be asked that question and have to give an answer and be forced I would always say nan. But make.com I see some incredible people build some incredible things inside of make.com cost averse. You know all of these things, they all come into play. I've covered them with you simplistic direct connections ease of use, make.com wins every time. When it comes down to viewability, scalable flows, costings and the abilities that Nan has that make.com simply can't compete with using things like the code node then NAN takes the cake for me. So let me know down in the comments which one you prefer. There isn't a real loser in this situation, it's just that one has more power and capabilities at a lesser cost than the other. If you're brand new to this, feel free to go and start building in. Make and transfer that skill set over to Nan which is exactly what I did during my journey. If you are stuck and you're a business and you're in a position where you're looking to roll this out then hit me up in the link below. Book a meeting with me, let me discuss your businesses requirements and I'll help you from there. And yeah, if you're a follower and you like this like this sort of content like and subscribe. Catch you soon. Cheers.