Go looking for the difference between n8n and Zapier and every article hands you the same table: number of apps, learning curve, whether you can host it yourself. And at the end of it you still have no answer.
What actually decides your bill at the end of the month is not in those tables. And if you are working from Iran there is one more condition a foreign user never has to think about: being able to pay for it at all.
The integration count is a distraction
The first thing everyone puts in front of you is that Zapier connects to around seven thousand apps and n8n to a few hundred ready-made connectors, plus whatever the community has built.
The number is correct, but your decision should not rest on it. A real small business usually runs on five to ten tools, something like a payment gateway, an SMS service, Telegram, a spreadsheet and a CRM, and both platforms connect to all of those.
The total only matters when you need one rare connector that one of them has and the other does not, and that is the exception, not the rule.
Zapier charges per step, n8n charges per run
This is the difference almost nobody spells out, and in practice it decides your cost more than anything else.
Zapier’s unit is the “task”. By its own definition, every step that runs successfully counts as one task, and only the first trigger is free. So a five-step workflow that runs a thousand times costs you five thousand tasks.
n8n’s unit is the “execution”. One run of the whole workflow counts as one execution, whether that workflow has five steps or twenty. The same thousand runs are a thousand executions.
Picture a small online shop where you want four things to happen automatically with every new order: it gets logged in a spreadsheet, the customer gets a text, the team’s Telegram group gets a notification, and a record is created in the CRM. You have a thousand orders a month.
On Zapier that is four steps times a thousand, so four thousand tasks, while its professional plan starts at around seven hundred and fifty tasks a month and you have to climb to more expensive tiers. On n8n the same scenario is a thousand executions, and its entry cloud plan gives you around two and a half thousand, so you still have room.
The point is that every step you add to a workflow multiplies your total cost on Zapier and leaves it untouched on n8n. So the more multi-step your work gets, the wider that gap grows.
Hosting it yourself, which matters more to you than to a foreign user
Zapier is cloud-only and runs on its own servers. That means paying monthly in dollars, needing a foreign card to do it, and for an Iranian user, a real risk of the account being banned under sanctions.
n8n’s code is open and the version you install on your own server is free, so you only pay for the server. For you that means you can install n8n on a local server and pay in rials, and several Iranian cloud providers already offer one-click installs that sidestep the whole foreign card problem.
But free is not free, the cost just moves. When you host it yourself, updates, security, keeping the server up and taking backups all land on you or on whoever maintains the server for you. Zapier takes more money and takes the maintenance off your hands, n8n asks for less money and hands you a technical responsibility.
So when should you pick Zapier?
There are three situations where Zapier is the wiser choice.
- You are not technical and have nobody who can look after a server for you.
- Your volume is low and your workflows are one or two steps, in which case the task model never bothers you.
- You specifically need a ready-made connector that Zapier has and you would have to build yourself on n8n.
The simple rule: the more technical, higher-volume and multi-step you are, the more the scale tips towards n8n, and the simpler and fewer-step you are, the more it tips towards Zapier.
Before choosing a tool, take a step back
The common trap is starting from the choice of tool, when the tool is always the last step. First you need to know which process you are automating and whether that process is even worth automating.
So map the path and the pain first, then pick one of the two. Their real difference is not the integration count, it is how the cost is calculated: Zapier per step, n8n per run. That, plus Zapier’s requirement to pay in dollars, makes n8n the default for most Iranian users whose work is multi-step, except where you are running something simple and low-volume and having no hassle matters more to you than the money.