Pick a depth. Each prompt opens in your AI pre-loaded with the lesson. Click a row to preview the prompt.
Tool paralysis kills more beginner automators than any technical problem. People spend three weeks reading 'Zapier vs Make vs n8n' comparison posts and ship nothing, while someone who picked one on day one already has a working flow and a portfolio piece. The honest truth: for a two-to-three step flow like the one you build this module, all three tools work fine, and the skills transfer almost completely — a trigger is a trigger, field mapping is field mapping. So this lesson is a ten-minute tour with one job: get you to commit to a tool today. The deeper comparison — pricing at scale, self-hosting, AI steps — genuinely matters for client work, and it gets its own treatment in module 2, after you have a working flow to compare against.
The same automation looks different on each canvas. In Zapier, a workflow is called a Zap and reads top-to-bottom like a checklist: step 1 'Tally — New Submission', step 2 'Google Sheets — Create Spreadsheet Row'. Each step a Zap performs counts as a task against your quota; the free plan gives you 100 tasks a month and lets you build multi-step Zaps, which is plenty for this module (about 30 test submissions through a three-step flow). In Make, a workflow is a scenario, drawn left-to-right as connected circles on a freeform canvas; each module execution is an operation, and the free plan gives you 1,000 operations a month — the most generous free tier of the three for learning. In n8n, a workflow is a workflow, on a canvas similar to Make; the twist is that n8n's source code is public and you can self-host it for free on your own server, but n8n Cloud (the hosted version) has only a free trial, not a permanent free plan — and 'just self-host it' is a rabbit hole you do not need in week one.
The decision rule for this module, stated flat: pick Zapier if you want the gentlest first hour and the biggest library of app integrations, pick Make if you want the most free headroom to experiment and do not mind a slightly busier canvas, and park n8n until module 2 unless you already have a server running. Spend ten minutes total: open each editor, look at one template, feel the difference, and choose. Write your choice down with one sentence of reasoning — you are allowed to switch later, and module 2 will give you real criteria for doing so.