Dify vs n8n: I Replaced a $600/Month Automation Bill With One of Them — and It's Not the One You'd Expect

My team was paying $600/month across Zapier + Make for ~40 workflows (lead enrichment, ticket triage, report generation). I self-hosted both Dify (150K GitHub stars) and n8n (198K stars) for two weeks each and moved everything to one of them. The winner surprised me, because the internet consensus is wrong about what these tools are for.

The controversial part first

Dify is not an automation tool, and n8n is not an AI tool. Everyone compares them head-to-head, but after 40 migrated workflows I can tell you: they overlap in maybe 20% of use cases. The trick is knowing which 20% you're in.

Head-to-head on my real workloads

Workload (my actual 40 flows)	n8n	Dify
Webhook → transform → API calls	✅ Built for this	😬 Painful
Cron jobs, retries, error branches	✅ First-class	❌ Weak
LLM chatbots / RAG over docs	😬 DIY everything	✅ Built-in
Prompt versioning + eval	❌	✅ Excellent
Non-dev teammates editing flows	😬 Steep	✅ Friendly
Self-hosted resource usage	~400MB RAM	~2.5GB RAM (ouch)

The numbers after migration

36 of 40 workflows went to n8n (anything that's "when X happens, do Y with APIs")
4 workflows — the ones with an LLM in the middle doing summarization/classification — run in Dify, because rebuilding its RAG pipeline in n8n would have been 3x the nodes
Cost: $600/mo → $8/mo (a single Hetzner VPS running both in Docker)
Execution failures dropped 31% — Zapier's retry logic was silently dropping runs we never saw

The setup tax (honest)

Dify's self-hosted footprint is heavy — Postgres, Redis, Weaviate, and its API/worker/web containers. First boot took me ~2 hours and 3 docker-compose edits. n8n was 15 minutes, one container, done. If you only need automation, don't touch Dify. If you only need a chatbot over your docs, don't touch n8n.

# n8n — the entire install
services:
  n8n:
    image: n8nio/n8n:latest
    ports: ["5678:5678"]
    volumes: ["n8n_data:/home/node/.n8n"]
volumes:
  n8n_data:

Verdict

For pure automation, n8n wins and it isn't close. For anything where an LLM is the workflow, Dify saves you days. Running both side-by-side on one $8 VPS beat a $600 SaaS bill in every metric except my weekend.

For the code glue inside these workflows I use MonkeyCode — free and open-source AI coding: https://ly.cyberserval.tech/iIETXiF

Hot take: most teams paying for Zapier could cut 80% of their bill with one VPS. Am I wrong — what does Zapier actually do better once you've self-hosted n8n?

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