Make and n8n are good at wiring services together. That is a real problem and they solve it well.
It is a different problem from putting an autonomous agent next to your ERP and being able to say what it did, prove where the data went, and show what it cost. Connection stops being the hard part the moment the agent starts acting on its own.
Symbols read as marketing. Words read as documentation. Scroll sideways on a narrow screen to reach every column.
| Dimension | aamp | n8n | make.com | Direct LLM APIs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Group A · Security and sovereignty | ||||
| Control plane ownership | Yours, host-side | Yours if self-hosted | Vendor cloud only | Vendor cloud |
| Data residency | Property of your deployment | Configurable when self-hosted | Region option, vendor-operated | Region option, vendor-operated |
| Prompt retention exposure | No third party involved | Depends on model provider | Depends on model provider | Contractual |
| Secret handling | Host-held, encrypted at rest | Platform credential store | Vendor cloud | Your application's problem |
| Agent execution boundary | Sandboxed — filesystem, exec and network scoped | None | None | None |
| Outbound network control | Host proxy with domain rules | Limited | No | No |
| Content safety filtering | Inbound and outbound firewalls | No | No | Provider-side only |
| Audit trail depth | Prompt, retrieval, tool call, output, spend | Execution logs | Operation logs | API logs |
| Evidence for compliance work | Produced by operation | Build it yourself | Build it yourself | Build it yourself |
| Group B · Cost | ||||
| Pricing model | Self-hosted, no per-operation charge | Per execution or self-host | Per operation | Per token plus platform overhead |
| Cost as automation grows | Flat | Rises with executions | Rises with operations | Rises with tokens |
| Tiered routing | Built in | Build it yourself | No | No |
| Agent loop budgets | Built in | No | No | max_tokens only |
| Reasoning-token control | Per-agent effort caps | No | No | Per-call parameter |
| Cost attribution | Per agent, workflow and model | Per execution | Per operation | Aggregate per key |
| Infrastructure overhead | Single binary and SQLite | Node runtime and database | None, hosted | None, hosted |
| Group C · Model freedom | ||||
| Provider binding | Per agent, workflow, capability | Connector-level | Connector-level | Single vendor |
| Local open-weight models | First class | Self-managed | Not a focus | No |
| Open-source models on your hardware | Native engines — vLLM, Ollama, LocalAI, TGI, with 0% token markup | HTTP node to an endpoint you operate | Not supported | Not applicable |
| Cost of switching model | Configuration change | Rewire connectors | Rewire scenarios | Application rewrite |
| Fallback routing | Designed in | Manual | Manual | None |
| Mixed local and hosted | Native | Possible, unsupported | No | No |
| Exposure to one vendor's roadmap | None | Low | Medium | Total |
| Group D · Operations and fit | ||||
| Systems with no API | Adapter layer, core use case | Connector-dependent | Connector-dependent | Not addressed |
| Deterministic workflows | Inspectable, host-side | Visual, versioned | Visual | No |
| Scheduled automation | Host scheduler with run history | Yes | Yes | No |
| Grounded retrieval | Host-managed ingestion and retrieval | Via connectors | Via connectors | Build it yourself |
| External endpoints | OpenAI-compatible, policy-enforced | Webhooks | Webhooks | Direct API |
| Deployment requirement | Linux host with KVM | Node.js or hosted | None | None |
| Time to first result | Hours | Hours | Minutes | Minutes |
Read the column that matches your requirement.
n8n self-hosts, and that is real — do not let anyone tell you otherwise. The difference is not where it runs. It is what governs it once it is running. n8n is a workflow engine with AI nodes attached: no tiered routing, no loop budgets, no token-level attribution, no sandboxing of what an agent can touch. You can build that layer on top. aamp is that layer.
Their control plane is their cloud, and their pricing scales with the thing you want more of. Every operation bills. Sovereignty is a region setting rather than a property of the architecture. For business users wiring SaaS tools together, that trade is often worth it. For an agent acting next to regulated data, it is not.
You are buying a model, not a platform. Governance, routing, cost ceilings, audit trail and legacy integration are all yours to build — and the architecture is now a bet on one vendor's pricing, terms and availability. One frontier model was suspended globally for nineteen days this summer. Fallback should not be improvised.