Where n8n sits

Suppose the job is this: every morning, pull yesterday's orders from an API, drop anything already refunded, enrich the rest from a second service, write them to a spreadsheet, and post a summary to a chat channel. You can build that four ways. A no-code platform like Zapier or Make. n8n, hosted or your own. A script in TypeScript or Python on a small server. Or an AI agent that is handed the tools and left to work out the sequence. All four will run tomorrow morning. They differ on two axes that decide everything else: how much control you keep, and how much of the work you carry yourself. Figure 1.1 places them.