You want to send a digest email at 7 AM every weekday, or fire a Slack alert when an "INVOICE" subject lands. Three tools claim to solve this: n8n, Zapier, and the Nylas CLI. They look interchangeable on a marketing page. They are not.

I built the same five email-automation tasks in each. Here is what I found.

The five tasks

Task Why it matters

Send a daily digest from a Postgres query The "report by email" workflow every product team needs

Auto-archive newsletters with subject "weekly" Inbox hygiene

Forward attachments to S3 Compliance: store invoices as they arrive

Reply to "out of office" with a templated answer The classic agent task

Trigger a webhook on message.created for support@ Real-time fan-out to ticketing

Quick comparison

Dimension Zapier n8n Nylas CLI

Pricing (small team) $30+/mo per seat Self-host or $20+ API-key, usage-based

Auth setup Per-app OAuth click-through Per-node OAuth One auth config --api-key

Source-controllable No (visual workflows) Yes (export JSON) Yes (it is…