" loading="lazy" width="800" height="533"> Automation demos are easy. You watch a 5-minute YouTube video, drag a trigger to an action, and feel like you've just automated your entire business. Then month two starts. That's when you realize that "one-click" simplicity is a trap. Most teams don’t switch from Zapier to n8n because of a missing integration. They switch because their Zapier bill exploded, their Make scenarios became impossible to debug, or they finally accepted that building logic in a GUI is harder than just writing a line of code. To figure out which platform actually survives in production, I spent weeks building the exact same AI-powered lead enrichment and outreach pipeline in Zapier , Make , and n8n . Here is the ground truth on what actually breaks when the shiny demos meet production scale. The Executive Reality Check Automation is a maintenance liability. Every node you add is a potential failure point.…