It’s a question advice firms ask a lot, and most of what they find when they search was written for Shopify stores and marketing agencies. Those comparisons don’t mention Intelliflo, Xplan, data residency, or what happens when the FCA asks you to evidence your client communication process.
This is the comparison written for regulated advice firms instead.
The short version
Platform choice matters less than most people think. All three can solve the problems most wealth management firms have. They differ in cost structure, technical upkeep, and where each one starts to strain. Choose wrong and you’re looking at roughly six months of rework when you hit the ceiling. Choose right and you build once and extend it.
Start with your constraints, not with the platforms.
What regulated firms actually need from automation
Regulated firms need four things that most automation guides ignore.
You need audit trails: not logs you can dig out if something goes wrong, but records you can produce clearly and quickly. If a workflow sends a review letter, you need to know exactly when it went, what it said, and whether anything in the chain changed the data before it went.
You need data residency you can account for. Most firms don’t have a formal policy written down, but under UK GDPR they should be able to say where their client data goes. A workflow that sends a client’s name, date of birth and portfolio value through three US-hosted third-party services is an entry on your data map, and someone needs to own it.
You need integrations that exist. Intelliflo has a published API. Xplan has one too, though it’s more involved. Any comparison that doesn’t cover this is answering a different question.
Finally, you need something your compliance officer can look at and broadly understand, even if they never touch it.
Zapier
Zapier is the easiest of the three to start with and the most expensive at scale. If one person needs to automate something this week and you can’t wait for a proper implementation, Zapier will get you there.
You pay per task, meaning each action the workflow performs. For low-volume, high-value automations (sending a meeting confirmation, logging a call outcome to your CRM, starting a review workflow from a calendar event) the cost is reasonable. Anything that runs hundreds of times a day gets expensive quickly.
Zapier’s Intelliflo integration exists but is limited. You can trigger on new contacts and push data in a few directions. For simple onboarding notifications or CRM-to-calendar sync, that’s enough. For document generation, fee calculations or multi-step client processes, you’ll reach the edge of the built-in connector fairly fast.
Where Zapier wins: you need something working in a day, a non-technical member of staff will own it, and the workflow doesn’t move sensitive data across more than two systems.
Where it breaks: task costs add up fast, the audit trail is basic unless you deliberately build in logging steps, and complicated branching becomes very hard to read and maintain.
Make (formerly Integromat)
Make is usually the best balance for an advice firm: cheaper than Zapier at volume, and readable enough for compliance. It charges per operation rather than per task, which makes it much cheaper than Zapier for the same work once you’re past a few hundred runs a month. The visual interface is very good. Workflows appear as diagrams you can follow, which helps when a compliance officer or a new member of staff needs to understand what a process does.
Its error handling is considerably better than Zapier’s. You can set up fallback routes, catch specific types of failure, and log exceptions to a separate system without much effort.
Data residency needs more thought here. Make started in the Czech Republic and offers EU data processing. For UK firms that still means a specific check against your data processing agreements, including who owns Make today and which sub-processors it uses. It’s solvable, but it needs checking, not assuming.
Where Make wins: you run moderate to high volumes of automation, you want workflows a non-developer can read and audit, and cost matters. For most IFAs, Make hits the right balance.
Where it breaks: the learning curve is steeper than Zapier’s, so your first two or three workflows take longer to build. And like Zapier, you depend on its connector library for anything involving your back-office system. There’s more on the platform in the Make guide.
n8n
n8n is the only one of the three you can host yourself, and for firms serious about data residency that’s what matters. Run n8n on your own infrastructure, or a cloud environment you control such as an Azure or AWS account you manage, and client data doesn’t leave your systems to reach the automation layer.
For some firms that’s important. If your compliance team has flagged data flows as a concern, or you handle particularly sensitive client situations, self-hosted n8n removes a category of risk that Zapier and Make can only reduce.
The trade-off is technical upkeep. Someone has to run the server, apply updates and manage the environment. For a firm with a technical director or a managed IT provider who can take that on, that’s fine. For a five-person firm with nobody technical in-house, it’s a real cost.
n8n also has a cloud-hosted version, which removes the upkeep but brings back the data residency question. The cloud version is priced per workflow execution and is competitive with Make.
For most firms, self-hosted n8n is the right long-term answer, and Make is the right practical answer for the next twelve months while you get comfortable with automation in general.
Where n8n wins: you have or can buy technical help, data residency is a firm requirement, and you want to build a bigger automation capability over time rather than solve one problem. It’s also the best fit for Level 3 work (custom builds with complex logic) where you need full control of the pipeline.
Where it breaks: without someone to maintain it, a self-hosted n8n instance becomes a liability. A server set up for one project and then left unpatched for months is a common way for this to go wrong.
The one question that decides it
Set the comparison aside for a moment and answer this: does your firm have, or can it reliably get, someone who will own and maintain the automation setup for the next two years?
If yes, n8n is worth serious consideration, especially if data residency is on your compliance radar.
If no, or you’re not sure, Make is the right choice for most regulated advice firms at Level 2 (integration work connecting two or three existing systems). The visual interface makes workflows auditable, the pricing is sensible, and it has enough depth for everything from onboarding sequences to review triggers to fee reconciliation notifications.
Zapier is the right choice in one situation: you need something working now, a non-technical person will own it, and the workflow is simple enough that you won’t outgrow it.
A note on Intelliflo and Xplan specifically
Both platforms have APIs, but none of the three tools has a rich built-in connector for either. In practice you’ll be using HTTP request modules to call the API directly, which means knowing the API documentation and writing the calls by hand.
That’s less difficult than it sounds, because Intelliflo’s API is well documented. It does mean your first automation involving either system will take longer than your first one involving, say, Gmail or HubSpot, so budget for that. If you’re still choosing the back office itself, the Intelliflo vs Xplan vs Plannr comparison covers it.
If you’re building Level 2 integrations with your back-office system, the platform matters less than the person building the workflow. A good Make implementation with Intelliflo will beat a poor n8n implementation every time. Get the platform constraint right, then put the effort into the work.