Zapier and Make — fast, and someone else's
For a straightforward connection between two popular apps, an off-the-shelf platform like Zapier or Make is usually the right first answer. The connectors already exist, the flow is running the same afternoon, and there is nothing to host or maintain. When the need is simple and the data is not especially sensitive, paying for that speed is the sensible trade.
What you give up is ownership and, past a point, cost. The flow runs on infrastructure you do not control, the data passes through a third party, and pricing that is trivial at low volume climbs as the number of tasks grows. For a simple, low-volume, low-sensitivity link, none of that matters. For anything else, it starts to.
Self-hosted n8n — owned, and private
When the flows carry data a business would rather not route through someone else's cloud, or when volume makes per-task pricing painful, self-hosted n8n changes the trade. It offers the same visual, connector-based way of building automations, but it runs on infrastructure the business owns, so the data stays in-house and the cost is the server rather than a per-task meter.
The price of that ownership is that you now run the thing — it needs hosting, updates, and monitoring like any service. For a business with sensitive flows or serious volume, that cost is worth paying and often cheaper overall; for a one-off connection between two apps, standing up and maintaining a server is more than the job needs.
Custom integration — when exactness is the point
Some connections do not fit a connector at all — an internal system with no public integration, a transformation too particular for a visual builder, a flow where reliability and error handling have to be exactly right because a failure is expensive. There, a custom integration built with the same typed, tested discipline as any of our services is the honest answer, even though it is the most work up front.
The trap is reaching for custom code when a Zap would have done, or for a Zap when the job truly needed custom code — both are common, and both cost the client. Our job is to tell you which one your problem actually is, including when the cheapest tool is the right one and there is less for us to build. That framing runs through automation and integration, and the practical side is in automating your business without duct-tape.