n8n vs Make vs Workato for Enterprise: An Evidence-Based Scorecard

Enterprise automation comparisons usually start with connectors and a demo. That is the easy part. The harder questions arrive later: Who can approve a workflow? Can identity be managed centrally? How does a change move from development to production? What happens when volume spikes? Can the team get its workflows out?

I compared n8n, Make, and Workato against those questions. I did not try to force a single winner. The right choice depends on which constraints your organization cannot negotiate.

The short version

Platform	What the published evidence makes clear	What needs extra diligence
n8n	Cloud, self-hosted, and air-gapped deployment are published. Git-backed environments, project RBAC, SSO, LDAP, queue mode, and log streaming are available on paid plans or Enterprise. Checked 2026-08-29: n8n Enterprise and n8n pricing.	Self-hosting transfers availability, upgrades, database, Redis, encryption, and recovery work to your team. ISO 27001 and HIPAA support were not published on the official pages I reviewed. SCIM was also not published there.
Make	Enterprise publishes SSO, role-based access, audit logs, analytics, a separately managed AWS environment, 24/7 support, and a 99.5% Cloud Service Uptime commitment. Checked 2026-08-29: Make Enterprise and Make security.	The platform itself is cloud-hosted. The on-premise agent provides private connectivity, not self-hosted Make. Enterprise pricing is custom, and SCIM, LDAP, HIPAA support, and formal environment promotion were not published on the official pages I reviewed.
Workato	Published documentation covers broad compliance, SAML, optional SCIM, custom RBAC, audit streaming, development/test/production environments, deployment history, rollback, and managed private hosting. Checked 2026-08-29: Workato compliance, environments, and hosting editions.	Enterprise list prices and support response commitments are not publicly stated on the pages I reviewed. Some security capabilities, concurrency, limits, and environment functions depend on the purchased edition or contract.

That summary is not a ranking. It is a map of what each vendor publishes and what still has to be confirmed in procurement.

Methodology: published documentation only

I compared documentation published by n8n, Make, and Workato as of 2026-08-29. I used vendor pricing pages, security pages, product documentation, and official help centers. I treated a feature as published only when I found it in those sources.

“Not published” does not mean “the vendor cannot do it.” It means I could not verify it in the official pages reviewed. That distinction matters. A sales team may offer a control under a private contract, but a buyer should not assume that before seeing the exact entitlement and terms.

I also avoided a numerical score. Adding up nine categories would pretend that HIPAA support, self-hosting, price visibility, and export options have equal value to every organization. They do not.

How to read the scorecard

• Published: the vendor documents the capability publicly.
• Plan or contract dependent: the capability exists, but the edition, limit, or commercial term varies.
• Not published on reviewed pages: I did not find a vendor-owned source that confirms it.

Every scorecard cell includes a source and the date checked. Pricing, limits, and plan packaging can change, so those dates are part of the claim.

n8n vs Make vs Workato enterprise scorecard

Criterion	n8n	Make	Workato
Security and compliance SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, data residency	Published: SOC 2 program; SOC 2 report for Enterprise and public SOC 3. Cloud data is hosted in the EU on Azure. ISO 27001 certification and HIPAA support were not published on reviewed pages. Self-hosted data location is customer-controlled. Checked 2026-08-29: security.	Published: SOC 2 Type II, SOC 3, ISO 27001-certified security program, GDPR, and AWS EU/North America hosting. HIPAA support was not published on reviewed pages. Checked 2026-08-29: security and pricing matrix.	Published: SOC 1 Type II, SOC 2 Type II, SOC 3, ISO 27001, ISO 27701, ISO 42001, and HIPAA with a BAA. Multiple regional deployments are listed. Checked 2026-08-29: compliance and security.
Governance RBAC, audit logs, environments and promotion	Published: project RBAC, log streaming, and Git-backed environments. Source control is Business and Enterprise; docs warn that push/pull mistakes can overwrite work. Checked 2026-08-29: Enterprise and environment tutorial.	Published: role-based access, audit logs, domain claim, spend limits, and analytics. Formal development-to-production promotion was not published on reviewed pages. Checked 2026-08-29: Enterprise.	Published: custom RBAC, activity audit log with SIEM streaming, development/test/production environments, deployment history, rollback, APIs, and CI/CD. Availability is plan dependent. Checked 2026-08-29: security and environments.
IAM SSO, SCIM, LDAP	Published: SAML, OIDC, LDAP, and role provisioning. SCIM was not published on reviewed pages. Checked 2026-08-29: Enterprise controls and OIDC documentation.	Published: OIDC or SAML 2.0 SSO, team provisioning, and domain claim for Enterprise. SCIM and LDAP were not published on reviewed pages. Checked 2026-08-29: SSO documentation.	Published: SAML SSO. SCIM 2.0 is available with the Data Monitoring/Advanced Security & Compliance capability and requires SAML SSO. LDAP was not published on reviewed pages. Checked 2026-08-29: SSO and SCIM.
Self-hosting and deployment	Published: n8n Cloud, self-hosted, and air-gapped options. Self-hosting gives infrastructure control but makes the customer responsible for TLS, encryption at rest, upgrades, database, queues, and recovery. Checked 2026-08-29: Enterprise and security.	Published: cloud-hosted platform with an Enterprise environment isolated from self-service cloud. The on-premise agent reaches private network services; it is not self-hosted Make. Checked 2026-08-29: security and on-premise agent.	Published: Workato-hosted SaaS plus Virtual Private Workato, a dedicated AWS VPC environment managed by Workato. On-prem agents provide private connectivity. Customer-operated self-hosting was not published. Checked 2026-08-29: hosting editions.
Operations and scale HA, queueing, throughput limits	Published: queue mode, configurable workers, concurrency controls, and 200+ concurrent executions on Enterprise. Cloud does not expose every worker, queue, timeout, and pruning control. Checked 2026-08-29: pricing and Cloud tier features.	Published: the cluster runs across two availability zones; Enterprise has a separate AWS environment. Credit usage and scenario rate controls are documented. Public pages reviewed do not state a universal throughput number. Checked 2026-08-29: security, credits, and rate limits.	Published: default platform limits, recipe concurrency, and requestable Enterprise limit extensions. The published default recipe concurrency is 1 and the maximum is 30, but purchased concurrency and limits can vary. Checked 2026-08-29: platform limits and recipe settings.
Error handling and observability	Published: error workflows, execution data, logs, metrics, log streaming, and OpenTelemetry. In self-hosted deployments, the customer operates the surrounding monitoring stack. Checked 2026-08-29: Enterprise and logging and monitoring docs.	Published: incomplete executions, retries/backoff for rate limits, scenario history, organization analytics, and credit-usage history. Checked 2026-08-29: rate-limit handling and credit history.	Published: retry and fallback paths, job history, logs, RecipeOps, audit streaming, and test automation. Checked 2026-08-29: iPaaS overview and observability.
Commercial model and pricing predictability	Published: monthly workflow-execution pricing with unlimited users, workflows, and integrations. Enterprise pricing is custom. A workflow execution is one full workflow run, regardless of steps. Checked 2026-08-29: pricing.	Published: credit-based billing. Most standard app operations use one credit, while some AI or advanced functions consume credits differently. Enterprise pricing is custom. Checked 2026-08-29: pricing and credits.	Published: a platform edition fee plus usage fee for direct pricing. Enterprise list prices are not published. Additional capabilities and concurrency may be contracted separately. Checked 2026-08-29: pricing documentation.
Support and SLA	Plan or contract dependent: pricing lists dedicated Enterprise support with SLA, while the support scope says guaranteed severity-based SLAs require a separate support contract. Checked 2026-08-29: pricing and support scope.	Published: Enterprise lists 24/7 support, 99.5% Cloud Service Uptime, and defined Customer Support Service SLAs. Exact response times were not published on reviewed pages. Checked 2026-08-29: Enterprise and security.	Plan or contract dependent: the exact Enterprise response-time and service commitments were not published on the official pages reviewed. Confirm them in the order form and support schedule. Checked 2026-08-29: pricing documentation.
Lock-in and exit	Published: workflows can live in Git-backed source control. Credential information is represented as stubs and must be configured in the target. Self-hosting reduces infrastructure dependency but workflows still use n8n’s runtime and node model. Checked 2026-08-29: source control.	Published: scenarios can be exported as JSON blueprints and imported to another Make account. Connections must be recreated. A blueprint remains a Make scenario, not portable executable code. Checked 2026-08-29: blueprints.	Published: projects can be downloaded as ZIP packages, moved between environments, and stored in version control. Connections require target-side setup. Packages remain Workato assets. Checked 2026-08-29: deployment.

Evaluate n8n, Make, and Workato on security, compliance, and governance

Start with the compliance frameworks your organization actually needs. Do not use the length of a badge list as a general security score.

Workato publishes the broadest set among these reviewed pages, including HIPAA with a BAA and multiple ISO certifications. Make publishes SOC 2 Type II, SOC 3, and an ISO 27001-certified program. n8n publishes its SOC 2 program and makes its SOC 2 report available to Enterprise customers, with a public SOC 3 report. All of those statements were checked 2026-08-29 against the vendor security pages linked in the scorecard.

The practical question is narrower: Does the exact service, region, plan, and deployment model in your order form fall inside the certification scope you need? A badge on a company page is not a substitute for reading the report scope and data-processing terms.

Governance is more than SSO

SSO controls login. Enterprise governance also needs least-privilege roles, ownership, audit history, change promotion, production protection, and a way to investigate who changed what.

n8n documents project RBAC and Git-backed environments, including a protected-instance option for production. Its source-control guide also warns that pushing and pulling to the same instance can overwrite changes. That warning is useful because it shows where process design still matters. Checked 2026-08-29: n8n environment documentation.

Make documents role-based access, audit logs, domain claim, spend controls, and organization analytics for Enterprise. I did not find a published development-to-production promotion workflow on the pages reviewed. Checked 2026-08-29: Make Enterprise.

Workato documents development, test, and production environments, deployment history, rollback, APIs, and CI/CD. Those functions are plan dependent. Checked 2026-08-29: Workato environments.

IAM: SSO, provisioning, and deprovisioning are separate controls

All three vendors publish enterprise SSO. The differences appear when a company wants automatic lifecycle management and protocol-specific compatibility.

n8n publishes SAML, OIDC, LDAP, and role provisioning, but I did not find SCIM in the reviewed pages. Make publishes OIDC and SAML 2.0 SSO with team provisioning and domain claim, but I did not find SCIM or LDAP there. Workato publishes SAML SSO and optional SCIM 2.0 tied to an additional security capability; I did not find LDAP. Checked 2026-08-29: the IAM sources are linked in the scorecard.

Do not reduce this to a checkbox. Ask whether group membership maps to roles, whether deprovisioning removes sessions and access quickly, whether service accounts are governed separately, and whether the feature is included in the edition being quoted.

Self-hosting is an operating model, not a checkbox

n8n is the only one of these three that publicly offers customer-operated self-hosting and an air-gapped option. That can be decisive when the organization needs infrastructure control or cannot send workflow data to a shared SaaS platform. Checked 2026-08-29: n8n Enterprise.

It also changes who owns the failure. n8n’s security page says self-hosters must handle TLS and encryption at rest. The surrounding deployment also needs a database, backups, upgrades, queue infrastructure when used, monitoring, capacity planning, and recovery procedures. Checked 2026-08-29: n8n security.

Make’s on-premise agent and Workato’s on-prem agent solve private connectivity. They let the cloud platform reach systems that are not exposed to the public internet. They do not move the full automation control plane into your data center. Workato’s Virtual Private Workato is a dedicated AWS environment managed by Workato, not customer-operated self-hosting. Checked 2026-08-29: the deployment sources are linked in the scorecard.

Evaluate n8n, Make, and Workato on enterprise operations and scale

“Scales” is not a useful requirement by itself. Replace it with the peak arrival rate, acceptable queue delay, maximum recovery time, connector rate limits, payload size, concurrency, and the consequence of a duplicate execution.

n8n publishes queue mode, workers, concurrency controls, and 200+ concurrent executions for Enterprise. Make publishes a multi-zone cluster and scenario-level controls but no universal public throughput number on the pages reviewed. Workato publishes default platform limits and recipe concurrency, with extensions available to Enterprise customers. These claims were checked 2026-08-29 against the operations sources linked above.

Those numbers still do not predict your workload. A workflow that waits on a slow ERP behaves differently from an event pipeline that writes small records. A useful proof uses production-shaped payloads, the real connectors, realistic rate limits, and a recovery test after a worker or dependency fails.

Error handling should be designed before the first failure

Every platform documents some combination of retries, error paths, job or execution history, and monitoring. That does not make every workflow reliable.

• Define which errors may be retried and how many times.
• Make writes idempotent when a retry could create a duplicate order, ticket, or payment.
• Route unrecoverable events to a durable queue or review process.
• Alert on backlog age and failure rate, not only on a red status.
• Keep enough execution data to investigate an incident without retaining sensitive payloads forever.

n8n’s log streaming and OpenTelemetry can feed an existing observability stack. Make publishes run history, incomplete executions, analytics, and credit history. Workato publishes job history, RecipeOps, logs, test automation, and SIEM streaming. Checked 2026-08-29: the observability sources are linked in the scorecard.

The monitoring bill matters too. I use the same discipline for agentic workloads: measure the work that creates value, not only the activity. My guide to AI agent token usage explains why a usage meter without an accepted-outcome metric can reward expensive noise.

Commercial model and pricing predictability

The three platforms meter usage differently.

• n8n: monthly workflow executions. One execution is a full workflow run regardless of the number of steps. Enterprise pricing is custom. Checked 2026-08-29: n8n pricing.
• Make: credits. Most standard operations use one credit, while some AI and advanced features consume credits differently. Enterprise pricing is custom. Checked 2026-08-29: Make pricing and credit documentation.
• Workato: a platform edition fee plus usage fee for direct pricing. Enterprise list prices are not published. Checked 2026-08-29: Workato pricing documentation.

Do not compare a workflow execution, a credit, and a Workato usage unit as though they are the same thing. Model one year of actual workload shapes: polling, branching, retries, high-volume bursts, AI steps, test runs, and failed executions. Then add the people and infrastructure needed to operate the deployment.

This is where self-hosting can look cheaper in a license comparison and become more expensive in an operating model. It can also be the right trade when control is mandatory. The spreadsheet should show both sides.

Support and SLA: read the schedule, not the feature card

n8n’s pricing page lists dedicated Enterprise support with SLA, while its support scope says guaranteed severity-based response SLAs require a separate support contract. Make publishes 24/7 Enterprise support, 99.5% Cloud Service Uptime, and defined support SLAs, but the exact response times were not on the pages I reviewed. Workato’s public pages reviewed did not state Enterprise response-time commitments. Checked 2026-08-29: the support sources are linked in the scorecard.

Ask procurement to put the operational promise in one place: severity definitions, response time, restoration target, support hours, named escalation path, exclusions, maintenance windows, service credits, and the difference between a platform outage and a failing connector.

Lock-in and exit: export is not portability

All three platforms provide a way to move or back up workflow definitions. n8n uses Git-backed source control. Make exports scenarios as JSON blueprints. Workato packages projects as downloadable ZIP files. Checked 2026-08-29: the exit sources are linked in the scorecard.

Those artifacts still depend on their original runtime, connectors, expression language, credentials, and platform behavior. They are useful for backup, promotion, and account migration. They are not vendor-neutral programs that can run unchanged elsewhere.

A real exit plan identifies the business-critical workflows, stores human-readable specifications outside the platform, documents data mappings and failure behavior, inventories credentials, and estimates the rebuild effort. For knowledge-heavy automation, the same ownership question appears in my guide to building a company knowledge system instead of renting one.

What does an enterprise-ready n8n rollout look like?

An enterprise-ready n8n rollout is not simply a larger n8n server. It is an operating system around the product.

1. Choose Cloud or self-hosted based on data, network, and operating requirements.
2. Separate development and production. Use Git-backed promotion and protect production from direct edits.
3. Connect SSO or LDAP and map instance and project roles.
4. Move credentials to an approved secret-management process.
5. Design queue mode, workers, database capacity, backups, and recovery around measured load.
6. Stream logs and traces to the system the operations team already watches.
7. Define workflow ownership, error handling, idempotency, and incident escalation.
8. Confirm license entitlements and support SLA in the contract.

The n8n-specific risks and tradeoffs deserve more detail than a three-way scorecard can carry. I cover those in Why n8n Often Isn’t the Right Choice for Enterprise Automation. This comparison stays focused on the evidence that separates the three vendors.

What I did not test

• I did not load-test any platform.
• I did not negotiate procurement terms or compare private discounts.
• I did not review private Enterprise order forms, security reports, or support schedules.
• I did not run a hands-on paid-tier trial.
• I did not test every connector or region.

This is a documentation scorecard, not a benchmark. It tells you what the vendors are willing to state publicly as of 2026-08-29. It does not replace a proof of concept or contract review.

What I would not over-claim

• I would not say one platform is “more secure” because it lists more certifications.
• I would not say a missing public feature is impossible. I would call it not published and ask the vendor.
• I would not treat an on-premise connectivity agent as full self-hosting.
• I would not turn a published concurrency limit into a throughput benchmark.
• I would not treat a JSON, ZIP, or Git export as vendor-neutral portability.
• I would not estimate Workato Enterprise pricing from a reseller, forum, or old quote.
• I would not call a platform enterprise-ready until the deployment, people, controls, and contract all match the workload.

This is the same reason I do not treat AI as a product category that can be judged by one headline number. In my argument that AI is becoming infrastructure, the difficult work is governance, cost control, evaluation, and operations. Automation platforms face the same test.

Enterprise evaluation checklist

1. Write the non-negotiable compliance frameworks and confirm the exact service is in scope.
2. Choose the required data region and decide whether cloud, dedicated SaaS, or self-hosting is acceptable.
3. Test SSO, provisioning, deprovisioning, role mapping, and service-account governance.
4. Build one production-shaped workflow and promote it from development without editing production directly.
5. Run peak load with realistic connector rate limits and payload sizes.
6. Kill a worker or dependency and measure backlog, retries, duplicates, and recovery.
7. Send logs and alerts to the operations team’s existing tools.
8. Model twelve months of usage using each vendor’s real billing unit.
9. Read the support schedule and write escalation expectations into the contract.
10. Export the workflow, rebuild its connections, and estimate the cost of leaving.

My bottom line

n8n, Make, and Workato can all automate serious business processes. The published differences are in control, deployment, governance depth, billing model, and how much remains contract dependent.

Use the scorecard to find the questions, not to manufacture a universal winner. Mark your non-negotiable rows. Verify the exact edition. Test the failure path. Read the contract. Then choose the operating model your team can actually support.