Make.com vs n8n: I Built the Same AI Agent in Both
A client needed a lead-routing agent. Gmail in, AI classifies by industry and urgency, hot leads to a sales rep on Telegram, cold ones to the CRM with a tagged follow-up. Nine steps. I built it three times — Make, n8n, then raw code — because I picked wrong the first two times. Here is the decision rule I wish someone had given me.
The exact workflow I rebuilt three times
Before I argue about tooling, here is the spec, because vague comparisons are useless. Nine nodes total: Gmail trigger → extract sender + body → OpenAI classification (industry, urgency 1-5) → branch on urgency → Telegram message to sales rep (hot) → CRM upsert with tag (cold) → follow-up sequence enqueue → log to Postgres → error catch.
That is the surface. What killed me was the second-order work:
