I Compared Make.com and n8n Across 20+ Client Deployments. Here Is My Verdict.

A client came to me in January with a Make.com scenario that had started as a simple lead routing workflow and mutated into a 47-step monster. It was timing out. It was burning through their operations credits. And when they needed to add an AI agent that could make decisions based on their CRM data, Make had no good answer. Three weeks later, after rebuilding the whole thing in n8n, their monthly automation bill dropped by 71% and the AI agent actually worked. That project pushed me to do something I had been putting off: a real, systematic comparison of Make.com and n8n for AI agent workflows. Not a feature checklist review. A practitioner's assessment built on two years of deploying both platforms across more than 20 client environments. Here is what I found, and more importantly, here is the decision framework I now use before I write a single node. Key Takeaways n8n is the stronger platform for AI agent workflows in 2026. Make's AI agents launched in beta in April 2025 and still h