# n8n vs Power Automate vs Make: Which Fits a Microsoft 365 Business? > A practitioner comparison for Australian businesses on Microsoft 365: what you already pay for, how each tool bills, where the data sits, and what happens when a flow fails. **Published:** October 27, 2026 **Updated:** October 28, 2026 **Author:** Matthew Clarkson, Osher Digital **Category:** Business Process Automation **Reading time:** 11 min read **Source:** https://osher.com.au/blog/n8n-vs-power-automate-vs-make/ --- If your business already runs on Microsoft 365, you will probably end up using two of these tools. Power Automate is the natural home for flows that stay inside Outlook, SharePoint, Teams and Excel. n8n is the better fit once a workflow reaches outside Microsoft, runs hundreds of times a day, or handles documents and AI steps, and you can host it in Sydney. Make is the quickest to learn and suits light SaaS-to-SaaS work, as long as US or EU hosting is acceptable. We are Osher Digital, a Brisbane automation consultancy, and we build on all three for clients. n8n is the one we reach for most, so treat this as an informed opinion with a bias we are telling you about up front. The facts below come from each vendor's pricing and documentation pages, checked on 27 October 2026. If you only want Power Automate on its own, our [honest look at Power Automate](/blog/microsoft-power-automate/) goes deeper. For head-to-head detail, see [n8n vs Make](/blog/n8n-vs-make/) and [n8n vs Zapier](/blog/n8n-vs-zapier-comparative-analysis-business-automation/). * * * ## The three side by side | | Power Automate | n8n | Make | |---|---|---|---| | What you pay for | Users or bots (Premium per user, Process per bot) | Executions: one whole workflow run, however many steps | Credits: roughly one per module action, so every step counts | | Included with Microsoft 365 | Standard connectors only | No | No | | Entry price | Premium AU$22.40 a user a month, paid yearly | Cloud Starter €20 a month (paid yearly) for 2,500 executions. Self-hosted Community Edition is free | Free for 1,000 credits a month. US$9 a month (paid yearly) for 5,000 | | Where data can live | Australian region available, with caveats below | n8n Cloud is in Frankfurt. Self-hosted goes wherever you put it | US or EU only | | Code | Expressions, plus Azure Functions if you need more | JavaScript and Python inside the workflow | Formulas and built-in functions | | Version control | Solutions and ALM tooling | Git on Business and Enterprise plans; JSON exports on any plan | Scenario blueprints | | Best at | Automation inside your own tenant, under IT governance | Integrations across systems, documents, AI steps, volume | Fast, visual automations for small teams | * * * ## What Microsoft 365 already includes The most common misunderstanding we see is "Power Automate comes with Microsoft 365, so it is free." Partly true. Business Basic, Standard and Premium, and the E and F plans, include cloud flows that use standard connectors, up to 6,000 actions per user per day. That covers a lot of useful work: an approval in Teams, filing email attachments to SharePoint, a weekly Excel summary. The free version stops at premium connectors, and you hit them quickly. SQL Server is premium. The trigger that receives an HTTP request from another system is premium. Custom connectors and the on-premises data gateway are not included at all. Xero is a good Australian example: Microsoft publishes no Xero connector, and the two third-party ones (from Magnetism and The 848 Group) are both premium and both still in preview. The Magnetism connector also needs its own licence. When a flow touches a premium connector, the person it runs as needs Power Automate Premium at AU$22.40 a month, paid yearly. A flow that runs unattended under a service account usually suits a Process licence instead, at AU$224.50 a month, which also gives everyone who uses that flow premium access. Microsoft's Australian pricing page notes that its prices "may not be reflective of actual list price", so confirm with your reseller. So the useful question is which connectors a flow will touch, and who it runs as. * * * ## What each one charges for The three tools bill on different units, which is why price comparisons online rarely agree. A worked example makes the difference visible. ![How n8n, Make and Power Automate count one run of a 12-step workflow: 1 execution, about 12 credits, or 12 requests against a daily limit](/images/blog/n8n-vs-power-automate-vs-make/billing-units.webp) Take an invoice intake flow with 12 steps: an email arrives with a PDF, the fields are extracted, the supplier is looked up in Xero, a draft bill is created, and a message goes to Teams. At 40 invoices a working day, that is about 880 runs a month. | | At 40 invoices a day (880 runs) | At 500 invoices a day (11,000 runs) | |---|---|---| | Power Automate | One Premium licence (AU$22.40 a month) for the flow owner, or a Process licence (AU$224.50) for an unattended flow, because the Xero connector is premium | The same licence. About 132,000 actions a month sits well inside Premium's 40,000 requests per user per day | | n8n Cloud | 880 executions, within Starter's 2,500 (€20 a month, paid yearly) | 11,000 executions. That passes Pro's 10,000, so the 50,000 tier at €1,450 a year | | n8n self-hosted | Free licence plus a server; a small Sydney server costs from about $20 a month | The same server, sized up if needed | | Make | About 10,500 credits a month, just past the 10,000-credit level at US$16 a month (paid yearly) | About 132,000 credits a month, because every step of every run counts | At low volume all three are cheap, and price should not decide it. Volume changes the picture. Make's cost grows with every step you add, n8n's with the number of runs, and Power Automate's with the number of users and bots. A 12-step flow that becomes a 25-step flow doubles its Make bill and leaves the other two unchanged. * * * ## Where your data lives This matters more than price for health, legal and financial work. Under the Australian Privacy Principles, if you send personal information offshore you are generally accountable for how the overseas provider handles it. ![Where each tool can keep your data: Power Automate in Australia with caveats, n8n wherever you host it, Make in the US or EU only](/images/blog/n8n-vs-power-automate-vs-make/data-residency.webp) Power Automate has an Australian region. There are caveats: only tenants homed in Australia can create an Australian database environment, and Microsoft is moving new environments to an Asia-Pacific "macro region" that also includes Singapore, India, Japan and Korea. Microsoft's documentation says keeping data at rest in Australia under that model needs Advanced Data Residency across your Microsoft 365 seats. Check where your environment sits before you put patient or client records through it. n8n Cloud stores data in Frankfurt. Self-hosted n8n runs wherever you put it. We run client instances on Australian servers, which is the main reason sensitive work lands on n8n with us. Make has two data centre locations, the US and the EU, and you cannot change the location after you create the organisation. Its built-in AI assistant and web search always process in the US. * * * ## When a step fails Every automation fails eventually: an API times out, a supplier sends a PDF in a new layout, a token expires. What matters is whether you find out in minutes or at month end. Power Automate keeps run history for each flow, retries failed actions on a policy you set, and lets you build try-and-catch blocks with scopes and "run after" settings. It works well once someone sets it up deliberately, but the defaults leave a lot to whoever builds the flow. n8n lets every workflow name an error workflow that fires when anything fails, on every plan, and every node has its own retry and on-error settings. Queue mode, which spreads work across several workers, is included in the free self-hosted edition. Git-based version control needs the Business or Enterprise plan. We export workflow JSON to git on every plan regardless. Make has five error handlers (skip, retry, resume, commit and rollback) and error handler modules use no credits. Its "incomplete executions" feature, which stores failed runs so you can resume them, is turned off by default. Turn it on. * * * ## AI agents: Copilot Studio, n8n and Make If the job is an assistant that answers staff questions from your SharePoint and email, inside Teams, Microsoft's own tooling fits. For users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence (from AU$44.90 a user a month), agents in Copilot Chat, Teams and SharePoint are not charged for classic answers, generative answers or grounding in your Microsoft 365 data. Publishing an agent outside Microsoft 365 needs standalone Copilot Studio, which is billed in credits: AU$299.30 a month for a pack of 25,000. If the job is an agent that does work across systems, such as reading a document, deciding what it is, writing to a practice management system and asking a person when it is unsure, we build that in n8n. You choose the model, pay the provider directly, and keep the human review step in the same workflow. Make can call AI models too, at one credit per operation on your own connection plus whatever the provider charges. * * * ## How we choose for clients - Power Automate when the flow stays inside Microsoft 365, one team owns it, volume is modest, and IT wants it governed in the tenant. - n8n when the flow leaves Microsoft 365 (Xero, Bullhorn, a practice management system, a custom API), runs at volume, handles documents or AI steps, needs proper failure handling, or has to keep data in Australia. - Make when a marketer or operations person wants to build and own simple automations between SaaS tools, volume is low, and US or EU hosting is fine. - Custom code when none of them fit: very high volume, unusual systems, or logic that has outgrown a workflow canvas. Most of our clients on Microsoft 365 end up running Power Automate for the small internal jobs and n8n for the integrations. One licensing point if you self-host n8n: the free Community Edition is licensed under n8n's Sustainable Use License. You can run your own business on it, and consultants can build and maintain workflows for you. What it does not allow is hosting n8n as a service for other people to build their own workflows. * * * ## Two Microsoft 365 jobs we built in n8n DNA Recruitment, a national medical recruitment agency, received job requests across up to 10 inboxes, in every format from plain email to scanned images. The trigger lives in Microsoft 365, and everything else does not. All the inboxes forward to one automation mailbox, and an n8n pipeline extracts the job details with an AI agent, uses Microsoft Graph to keep a link back to each original email, maps every value to the IDs Bullhorn requires, and creates the job. Where there is no confident match, the workflow fails loudly instead of writing a guess. ([Case study](/case-study/ai-powered-job-intake-automation-for-recruitment-agency/)) Statera Health, a Melbourne medical practice, received pathology, ECG and discharge reports through email, Healthlink and OneDrive, often as one PDF with several patients inside. Staff spent 10 to 20 minutes per batch, several times a day, splitting, classifying and renaming files. n8n workflows with custom AI agents and Azure Document Intelligence now do that, with a person checking the cases the system is unsure about. ([Case study](/case-study/ai-medical-document-classification-for-a-healthcare-practice/)) If you are weighing these tools for a specific workflow, our [n8n consultants](/n8n-consultants/) and [system integrations](/system-integrations/) pages explain how we work. If you are not sure which processes to automate first, a [Business Process Audit](/services/business-process-audit/) gives you a costed plan in one day onsite. Or [book a 15-minute call](/book-a-call/). * * * ## Frequently asked questions ### Is Power Automate free with Microsoft 365? For flows that only use standard connectors, yes, up to 6,000 actions per user per day. As soon as a flow uses a premium connector, such as SQL Server, an HTTP request trigger or a third-party Xero connector, it needs Power Automate Premium (AU$22.40 a user a month, paid yearly) or a Process licence. ### Is n8n cheaper than Power Automate? At low volume the difference is small: n8n Cloud Starter is €20 a month and Power Automate Premium is AU$22.40 a user a month. Self-hosted n8n has no licence fee, only the server and someone to look after it. The bigger differences are where your data lives, which systems you need to connect, and how failures are handled. ### Can n8n connect to Microsoft 365? Yes. n8n has nodes for Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive and Excel, and it can call any Microsoft Graph endpoint directly. Several of our client builds start with a Microsoft 365 mailbox and end in a system outside Microsoft. ### Where does Make store data? In the US or the EU, depending on the zone you choose when you create your organisation, and you cannot move it afterwards. Make has no Australian data centre.