Zapier bills you per task. Make (Integromat) bills you per operation. Both work fine — until you’re firing 20,000 events a month from a WooCommerce store and the bill hits $200 for what should be a $5 problem.

n8n is the self-hosted, open-source alternative that most agencies quietly moved to in 2024–2025. You run it on a $6 VPS, connect it to WordPress via webhooks or the REST API, and it fires unlimited workflows for the cost of the server.

Here are seven real automations I’ve built for clients this year. Every one of them replaced a paid Zap or a manual VA task.

1. WooCommerce order → Google Sheet + Slack + Airtable

Every new WooCommerce order fires a webhook to n8n. n8n branches into three actions:

• Append a row to the sales Google Sheet (with SKU, quantity, city, total).
• Post a formatted message to the #sales Slack channel.
• Create/update a customer record in Airtable with lifetime value.

Setup: WooCommerce → Settings → Advanced → Webhooks → “Order created” → paste your n8n webhook URL. In n8n, drop a Webhook trigger, then a Switch node, then three parallel branches. Total setup time: 15 minutes. Cost per month: $0.

2. Contact form submission → CRM + auto-reply + task assignment

WPForms or Elementor Form sends the submission to n8n. n8n:

• Enriches the email via Clearbit or Apollo (if a free API key is available).
• Creates a lead in HubSpot or Pipedrive with the enriched data.
• Sends a personalized auto-reply through Gmail API (not the site’s SMTP — better deliverability).
• Posts to Slack with a “Claim this lead” button that assigns the deal on click.

Replaces a $30/month Zapier plan and a $20/month email-verifier plan for most small businesses.

3. New blog post → social media + email + indexing

WordPress fires the publish_post hook via a webhook (use the WP Webhooks plugin or a 10-line mu-plugin). n8n:

• Generates a LinkedIn post using Claude/OpenAI API from the post excerpt.
• Schedules a Twitter/X thread from H2 headings.
• Adds the URL to your Mailchimp/ConvertKit RSS-to-email queue.
• Submits the URL to Google’s Indexing API and Bing’s IndexNow.

One publish click, six downstream actions, zero manual work.

4. Abandoned cart recovery (without the plugin bloat)

Most WooCommerce abandoned-cart plugins are heavy and slow the checkout down. Alternative: n8n polls the _wc_session_ table every 30 minutes for carts older than 1 hour, then fires a personalized recovery email through your transactional provider (Postmark, SendGrid, or SES).

Cost of a $15/month cart-recovery plugin vs a self-hosted workflow: obvious.

5. Client onboarding automation

New client signs a proposal in PandaDoc / Docusign. Webhook → n8n:

• Creates a Google Drive folder from a template.
• Sets up a Notion/ClickUp project with your standard task list.
• Adds them to Slack Connect.
• Sends a welcome email with credentials for a temporary staging site (spun up automatically via your host’s API if it supports one — Cloudways, RunCloud, and SpinupWP all do).

Saves 45 minutes of clicking per new client. If you onboard 10 clients a month, that’s most of a workday.

6. Broken link + uptime monitoring → auto-fix or escalate

n8n runs a scheduled workflow every 6 hours:

• Hits the WordPress REST API to fetch all published posts.
• Extracts external URLs from post content.
• Checks each URL for 4xx/5xx status.
• If broken, checks the Wayback Machine for the last working snapshot and posts a Slack message with both the broken link and the archive.org replacement.

Free alternative to Broken Link Checker Pro, plus it doesn’t hammer your database like the plugin does.

7. AI-generated FAQ from support tickets

Every ticket resolved in Freshdesk / HelpScout fires a webhook. n8n:

• Reads the ticket resolution.
• Sends it to Claude/OpenAI with a prompt: “Turn this into a FAQ entry with a question and a 2-paragraph answer.”
• Creates a WordPress post as a draft in the FAQ CPT via the REST API.
• Notifies the content lead to review and publish.

Your help center writes itself from the tickets you’re already answering.

Setting up n8n for WordPress work

Hosting: Hetzner CPX11 (€4.50/month) or DigitalOcean $6 droplet. n8n has an official Docker Compose file — 5 minutes to deploy.

Auth: Behind Cloudflare Access or basic auth. Never expose n8n’s UI on a public URL without protection.

WordPress connection: Two options:

• Webhook triggers — use WP Webhooks (free) or a custom mu-plugin. Best for real-time events.
• REST API polling — n8n’s built-in HTTP Request node with an Application Password. Best for scheduled workflows.

Application Passwords live under Users → your profile → Application Passwords. Generate one per workflow so you can revoke individually.

The three nodes you’ll use 80% of the time

• Webhook — receives events from WordPress.
• HTTP Request — talks back to the WP REST API or any other service.
• Set / Edit Fields — reshapes data between nodes. This is where beginners get stuck; spend 30 minutes on the docs and it clicks.

When Zapier still wins

n8n is not always the right answer:

• If you don’t want to manage a server, Zapier or Make is worth the money.
• If the workflows are trivial (under 100 tasks/month total across the business), the free tiers cover you.
• If the person maintaining it after you leave isn’t technical, hand them Zapier — n8n has a learning curve.

For everyone else — agency owners, WooCommerce stores past $20k/month, SaaS founders with a WordPress marketing site — self-hosted n8n pays for itself in the first month.

Where to start

Pick one existing manual task on your site. Something you do more than once a week. Automate that one thing end-to-end before touching the next. The trap with automation is building 15 half-finished workflows; the win is having 3 that actually run every day without you.