Every week we sit down with a builder, an electrician or a plumbing firm and hear a version of the same question. Everyone has told them automation will save their business, and now three names keep coming up: Zapier, Make and n8n. Which one should a trades business actually pick in 2026? We have built client systems on all three, so here is the honest comparison we give in the room.
The problem is bigger than most tradespeople think
Start with the uncomfortable number. The Admin Drain Report published in March 2026 by HeyBRB surveyed 167 UK small business owners, most of them in the trades, and found they spend an average of 8 hours a week on repetitive admin. That is 384 hours a year, the equivalent of ten full working weeks, spent quoting, invoicing, chasing payments and rekeying job details instead of earning.
The money side is worse. A self employed electrician charging £45 an hour is giving up more than £17,000 a year in billable time. A small firm charging £65 an hour is losing over £25,000. And 77 per cent of the tradespeople surveyed said they do this admin in the evenings, after the actual work is done. That is the problem these platforms exist to solve, and it is why picking the right one matters more than the logo on the box.
What an automation platform actually does
All three tools do the same basic job. They watch for something happening in one system, a form filled in on your website, an email landing, a job marked complete, and then carry out steps in your other systems without you touching anything. New enquiry comes in, the customer gets a text within a minute, the job lands in your calendar, the details appear in your invoicing app.
In 2026 all three also run AI agents, which are automations that can read, decide and write rather than just copy data around. We have built agents that draft quotes from a photo and a voice note, and agents that chase overdue invoices politely, then firmly, on a schedule. More than a third of the tradespeople in the HeyBRB survey spend over 20 minutes writing a single quote. An agent does the first draft in under a minute. The platforms differ in how easily they let you build this, and in what it costs once it is running every day.
Zapier: the quickest start, the steepest bills
Zapier is the household name, with more than 7,000 app integrations and the gentlest learning curve of the three. If you can use email, you can build a simple Zap in five minutes. For a sole trader who wants missed call texts and not much else, it is a perfectly good answer.
The catch is the pricing model. Zapier charges per task, and every step in a workflow counts as a task. The free tier covers 100 tasks a month, the Starter plan is around $20 a month for 750 tasks, and Professional is $49 for 2,000. That sounds like plenty until you automate something that runs constantly. A five step workflow that fires 40 times a day burns 6,000 tasks a month, and independent comparisons this year found busy setups climbing past $250 a month. The tool that took five minutes to set up quietly becomes one of your biggest software bills.
Make: the visual middle ground
Make (formerly Integromat) is where we land for a lot of trades clients. You build automations on a visual canvas, dragging modules around and watching the data flow, which suits people who think in job sheets rather than code. It takes an evening to get comfortable rather than five minutes, but the payoff is real.
Make charges per operation rather than per task, and its allowances are far more generous. The free tier includes 1,000 operations a month, and the Core plan starts at around $9 a month for 10,000. For the same busy workflows, comparisons in 2026 consistently put Make at roughly half the cost of Zapier, sometimes 60 per cent less. For a small firm that wants proper automation, enquiry handling, quote follow ups, review requests, without a developer on staff, Make is usually the sweet spot.
n8n: the power option
n8n is the platform this pipeline you are reading about runs on, so we know it well. It is open source, it can be self hosted for nothing but the cost of a small server, and its cloud Starter plan is about $20 a month for 2,500 executions. The pricing model is the quiet superpower: n8n charges per execution, meaning one workflow run counts once no matter how many steps it contains. A 20 step monster costs the same as a two step notification. Independent 2026 comparisons put n8n at a fifth to an eighth of Zapier’s cost at high volume.
The trade off is the learning curve. n8n assumes some comfort with data and logic, and the first afternoon can feel like the deep end. We would not hand it to a busy roofer and wish them luck. But for AI agents it is the strongest of the three, and it is what we reach for when a client’s automation has grown past what the simpler tools handle cleanly.
So which one fits your business?
Our honest rule of thumb after building on all three. If you are a sole trader who wants one or two simple automations running today, start on Zapier’s free tier and feel the benefit this week. If you are a small firm ready to automate enquiries, quotes and payment chasing properly, Make gives you the most capability per pound and room to grow. If you want AI agents doing real decision making, or your volumes have made the per task bills sting, n8n is worth the steeper climb, ideally with someone who has been up it before.
The wrong answer is the one 83 per cent of the surveyed tradespeople are currently living with: never calculating what the admin costs, and so never automating any of it. Ten working weeks a year is too much to give away to paperwork any of these platforms could be doing by Friday.
Not sure which fits? Ask us
We are Kaizen AI Consulting, a UK consultancy that builds AI systems and automations for founders, small businesses and the trades. We run a free 30 minute AI audit where we look at where your hours are actually going and tell you which platform fits, even if the answer is the cheap one. No obligation, and you keep the roadmap either way.