n8n vs Power Automate for teams ready to stop copying data by hand

Most automation starts in a spreadsheet. Someone copies order lines from an email into Excel every morning, another colleague pastes the totals into the accounting package on Friday, and a third sends the customer a status update by hand. n8n and Power Automate both promise to take those steps over. They get there in very different ways.

Power Automate is Microsoft's automation service. It lives inside Microsoft 365, talks natively to Outlook, Teams, SharePoint and Excel in OneDrive, and can even click through old desktop programs that have no API. n8n is a workflow tool from a German company that you either use in their EU cloud or run on your own server. It charges per workflow run instead of per person, and it is built for flows that carry logic: conditions, loops, a bit of code, or an AI step that reads a message and decides what happens next.

This page compares the two on price, hosting, licence and fit, with figures as they appear on the official pricing pages in November 2026. Make comes in as a third option, because many teams shortlist it too. For the wider picture of Make, Zapier and n8n, read our guide to Make, Zapier or n8n.

Two pricing models that reward different teams

Power Automate Premium costs $15 per user per month, paid yearly. Microsoft's licence overview lists what that buys: premium and custom connectors, one attended RPA bot on your own machine, process mining, 5,000 AI Builder credits a month, Dataverse capacity of 250 MB database and 2 GB file, and up to 40,000 actions per user per day. For bots that run without anyone at the keyboard, you add Process at $150 per bot per month, or Hosted Process at $215 when Microsoft supplies the machine.

n8n Cloud Starter costs €20 a month for 2,500 executions and five at once, and Pro costs €50 a month for 10,000 executions, both billed yearly. Every plan includes unlimited users and workflows. An execution is one workflow run from trigger to end, however many steps it contains. Self-hosting is free with the Community Edition, or €667 a month for the Business plan with 40,000 executions, SSO, Git and separate environments.

This is our own worked example on yearly prices. With Power Automate, the headcount sets the bill. With n8n, the volume does.

Where Power Automate is hard to beat

If your company already runs on Microsoft 365, Power Automate is the shortest route from idea to working flow. Saving every attachment from a shared Outlook mailbox into a SharePoint library and posting a note in Teams takes minutes, because the connectors are already there and sign-in is handled by your existing accounts. Microsoft also includes a free licence for work and school accounts in a Microsoft Entra tenant, which lets people build cloud flows for themselves with standard connectors, and some Microsoft 365 licences include a limited set of Power Automate features on top of that.

The other area where it stands out is desktop automation. When a supplier portal or an old accounting program has no API, a desktop flow can click through it the way a person would. That is RPA, and Power Automate bundles an attended bot into Premium. Few cloud tools can do this without extra software.

The catch is growth. Every colleague who needs to share flows or use premium connectors needs a Premium licence, and unattended bots cost $150 each per month. A company where twenty people automate their own work pays twenty licences.

Where n8n pulls ahead

n8n shines when a workflow is more than a straight line. You can branch on conditions, loop over rows, call any system over HTTP even without a ready-made connector, drop in a JavaScript step, and add an AI agent node that reads an incoming email, extracts the order and decides who should handle it. If you are new to agents, our explainer on AI agents covers the basics.

Because users are unlimited on every plan, n8n gets relatively cheaper as more people build flows. And because you can host it yourself, data can stay on a server you choose, which matters when you handle payroll, medical or legal files. n8n's own cloud stores data in the EU, in Frankfurt. For the wider question of where data should live, see EU data residency.

The trade-off is ownership. Self-hosting means someone installs updates, takes backups and watches security. And the licence has limits you should know before you build n8n into anything you sell.

Make as the third option

Make is a cloud-only tool with a visual editor that many non-technical teams find friendlier than n8n. It sells Free, Core, Pro, Teams and Enterprise plans and charges per credit. The free plan includes 1,000 credits a month, and yearly billing is cheaper than monthly. It suits teams that want to start quickly without a server and without Microsoft. It cannot be self-hosted.

When none of the three is the right answer

Sometimes the spreadsheet itself is the problem. If a flow exists only to keep three versions of the same Excel file in sync, automating the copying makes a bad process faster. Replacing the file with a small application, where the data lives in one place and the rules are enforced, removes the flow altogether. We explain that route in replacing Excel with software, and the build or buy question in build vs buy software. A stable API integration between two systems is also often sturdier than a workflow tool in the middle.

If the automation is really an app in disguise, with its own screens and users, a builder from our Lovable alternatives may be the better start.