Every platform wants to be your everything now. They all have AI features. They all promise automation. They all cost more than they used to. And most business owners I talk to are more confused than ever.

I have built extensively with n8n, worked with Zapier, and wrestled with Monday. Here is what I actually think.

Zapier

Zapier is the granddaddy of automation. It connects together blocks where you trigger a process by some event, a sale or an email or whatever, and then things happen. This happens, then that happens. Simple.

For connecting two services together it works fine. You might connect a user sign-up on your website to creating a contact in Mailchimp and a lead in your CRM. Straightforward. Point and click. No technical knowledge needed.

The problem is that straightforward is all it really does. Once you need complex logic or conditional branching or anything that requires actual decision-making in the middle of a workflow, you hit the ceiling fast.

Monday

Monday as a CRM is incredibly powerful. On paper. It can manage leads, track projects, handle complex workflows, integrate with dozens of tools. The problem is it is so powerful it becomes unwieldy.

I struggle with the complexity of it. The people I work with struggle with it. And Monday keeps making it worse because they keep bolting on new features to attract new customers. Every few months there is a redesigned interface. New AI features nobody asked for. Updated workflows that break your existing setup.

This is my core problem with complex software platforms. You get comfortable with how something works and then one day you log in and everything has changed. Your familiar processes are gone. Your integrations need updating. Your staff need retraining. And none of this happened because your business changed. It happened because the platform decided to ship a feature for a press release.

You have no control over those updates. You cannot opt out. You cannot roll back. You just have to deal with it. And that means spending time maintaining your tools instead of doing your actual work.

I can integrate with Monday using n8n or Zapier when a client already has it. But I do not recommend it as a starting point.

n8n

I love n8n.

You trigger a workflow from some event and then you build an entire tree of actions and decisions and processes. You can use AI to make a decision and then branch off to generate an image while at the same time generating a video and sending an email and posting to social media and reviewing a website and providing an SEO analysis and using that to generate a preview of a redesigned homepage. All in one workflow.

It connects to hundreds of services. People are building new integrations all the time. You can watch every execution step by step, debug in real time, and AI tools can connect in and actually create or monitor or fix workflows for you.

It is almost creative. Building an n8n workflow feels more like solving a puzzle than configuring a business tool. You can download it free. Self-host it. There is a paid cloud version if you do not want to manage infrastructure. And because it is open and extensible you are never locked in.

But honestly, n8n is not for beginners. There are security concerns. It requires updating. It needs connections to external services that have their own costs and quirks. You really need to work with someone who understands how it fits together, who will make sure your data is secure, the system is reliable, and the whole thing does not quietly break.

The feature bloat problem

This goes beyond any one tool. Every SaaS platform is in an arms race to add AI and it is making the user experience worse.

The AI bolt-ons are often crippled. Your email tool adds an AI assistant and you think great, I will ask it to search my email history. But it can only remember the last fifty messages. The utility of these add-ons is limited by things like context window and memory and they do not provide enough to justify the cost or the disruption to the interface.

And every time a platform adds features, the price goes up. You are paying more for things you did not ask for. You need to watch webinars and read changelogs to understand what changed. Your team needs retraining. Your existing workflows might break.

Some AI integrations are genuinely useful. Photoshop’s generative fill is brilliant. But unless the AI feature is justified and there is a real reason for it, it just makes the user experience worse.

Why I usually build something custom

Take a typical WordPress site with WooCommerce. You are paying hundreds of pounds a year for the e-commerce plugin. Then individually subscribing to ten or twenty additional plugins. Security. SEO. Backup. Caching. Each with its own annual fee. On a large site that cost blows up fast.

I can build a site that does all of that. Integrates with Stripe for payments. Handles bookings, calendar, analytics. No subscription costs for any of it. All the client pays for is hosting and my development time.

When I build something custom I find out exactly what the client needs. I am not charging for bloat. I am not burdening them with changes to a platform that might make it useless next year. I build something tailored to them and how they operate. If they do not like technical terminology I build a very simple interface. If they want granular control they get that. The tool wraps around them rather than the other way around.

And it is futureproofed against the predictable growth of their business. It can be updated fast. And because I built it, I know exactly how it works when something needs changing.

If you are on Zapier right now

Ask yourself some questions. Is it doing everything I need? Does it do everything I want it to do? Are there things I wish it could do? In a perfect world where it could do anything, how would I change it to simplify and automate other parts of my business?

If Zapier is handling your needs and you are happy, do not fix what is not broken. But if you are bumping against its limits, or if you are paying for Zapier plus Monday plus three other tools and they still do not talk to each other properly, it might be time to think differently.

Sometimes the answer is n8n. Sometimes a custom build. Sometimes just a conversation with someone who can look at the whole picture and suggest a simpler path.