n8n Pricing Explained: Cloud Plans vs Self-Hosted Cost

n8n pricing looks simple on the pricing page and gets complicated the moment you try to forecast a real bill. The cloud plans are priced per workflow execution, the Community Edition is self-hosted with no license fee, and the self-hosted Business plan costs more than most teams expect. Which one is cheapest depends almost entirely on how your workflows are shaped, not on how many you have.

This guide breaks down n8n cost the way an ops team actually has to budget it: what each plan includes, what an execution is, what self-hosting really costs once you count people-hours, and a worked example you can adapt.

All prices below are taken from n8n’s pricing page as of October 2026, billed annually in euros. Pricing in this category changes often, so check the live page before you sign anything.

n8n pricing at a glance (October 2026)

Plan	Hosting	Price (billed annually)	Executions / month	Concurrent executions
Community Edition	Self-hosted	No license fee	Unlimited	Your hardware
Starter	n8n Cloud	€20 / month	2,500	5
Pro	n8n Cloud	€50 / month	10,000	Up to 50
Business	Self-hosted only	€667 / month	40,000	Your hardware
Enterprise	Cloud or self-hosted	Contact sales	Custom	200+

A few details that matter more than the headline numbers:

All paid plans include unlimited users and unlimited active workflows. You are not penalised for building lots of small workflows.
Starter caps a single execution at 5 minutes; Pro at 40 minutes. Long-running jobs (big batch syncs, slow AI chains) can hit this before they hit any volume limit.
Log retention differs: 7 days on Starter, 30 days on Pro. If you debug by looking at last month’s runs, Starter will frustrate you.
The Business plan is self-hosted only and its feature list adds SSO/LDAP, Git-based version control, multiple environments and queue mode. A cloud-hosted Business tier is listed as waitlist-only.
Overages on Business are sold in buckets (n8n lists €4,000 per extra 300,000 executions) and workflows keep running if you exceed quota.

What counts as an execution

This is the single most important thing to understand about n8n pricing, and it is the opposite of how Zapier and Make bill.

An n8n execution is one run of an entire workflow, regardless of how many nodes it has or how many items it processes. A 3-step workflow and a 40-step workflow both cost one execution per run.

Compare that with the per-step models:

Zapier counts a task for each successful action step. Triggers, filters, paths and formatter steps don’t count, but every real action does (Zapier pricing).
Make consumes credits per module action, with most actions costing one credit (Make pricing).

The practical consequence: n8n gets cheaper relative to the alternatives as your workflows get longer, and more expensive as they get more frequent. A workflow that runs once an hour and does 30 things is very cheap on n8n. A webhook that fires on every page view and does one thing will burn through 2,500 executions in a morning.

The batching trick that changes your bill

Because n8n charges per run rather than per item, a workflow that processes 500 records in one run costs the same as one that processes a single record. If you can move a high-frequency trigger to a scheduled batch (every 5 minutes, pull everything new, process the list), your execution count drops by orders of magnitude. We cover when that trade-off is acceptable in cron vs event-driven.

The Community Edition is not “free”

The self-hosted Community Edition has no license fee and no execution cap. That is genuinely valuable. But teams routinely compare “€0” to “€50/month” and pick self-hosting without pricing the parts that are not on an invoice.

Self-hosting n8n means you own:

Infrastructure. A VM or container host, a Postgres database (SQLite works for testing but is not recommended for production or queue mode), backups, and ideally Redis if you want queue mode for scaling.
Upgrades. n8n ships frequently. Major versions (like the move to 2.0) can deprecate settings and change behaviour. Someone has to read release notes, test critical workflows and roll forward.
Security. n8n stores credentials for every system it connects to. A self-hosted instance is a single box holding your CRM, billing and email tokens. Patching, TLS, access control and the encryption key are your problem.
Incidents. When the instance goes down at 2am, your workflows stop and nobody at n8n is paged.

The license caveat

The Community Edition is licensed under n8n’s Sustainable Use License, not an OSI-approved open-source license. Per the license text, you may use and modify it for your own internal business purposes or for non-commercial use, and you may only distribute it to others free of charge for non-commercial purposes. Files marked .ee. require a separate enterprise license. For most internal ops teams this is fine. If you plan to embed n8n in a product you sell, or run it as a service for clients, talk to n8n before you build.

The real total cost of self-hosting n8n

Here is the cost model we recommend using. Fill in your own numbers.

Cost line	What to estimate
Compute	VM or container host for main instance (+ workers in queue mode)
Database	Managed Postgres, or self-managed with backups
Redis	Only needed for queue mode
Backups and monitoring	Snapshot storage, uptime monitoring, log shipping
Initial setup	Hours to deploy, configure TLS, SSO/reverse proxy, secrets
Ongoing maintenance	Hours per month for upgrades, patching, disk, DB tuning
Incident time	Hours per quarter spent on outages and stuck executions

Infrastructure is usually the smallest line. A small single-node setup on a mainstream cloud provider is typically tens of euros per month. The people-hours are the big number. If an engineer spends 4 hours a month on upgrades and maintenance, and their loaded cost is €80/hour, that is €320/month — already well above the Pro plan — before any incident time.

That is the core of our opinion: self-hosting n8n is a privacy, control or volume decision, not a cost-saving decision, unless your execution volume is high enough that cloud plans would cost hundreds of euros a month.

Worked example: a 6-person RevOps team

Assume a RevOps team running these workflows:

Lead routing: webhook on new form submission, enrich, score, assign owner, notify Slack. About 1,500 runs/month.
CRM hygiene: nightly batch that checks 2,000 records for missing fields. 30 runs/month.
Meeting follow-up: triggered when a meeting ends, drafts a summary with an AI step, logs to CRM. About 800 runs/month.
Churn alerts: hourly check of product usage. 720 runs/month.

Total: roughly 3,050 executions/month.

On n8n Cloud: that is above Starter’s 2,500, so Pro at €50/month (10,000 executions) is the realistic fit, with headroom for growth. Pro’s 30-day log retention also matters here; lead routing failures are often noticed days later.

Self-hosted Community: infrastructure might be €30–60/month for a small VM plus managed Postgres. Add maintenance at even 3 hours/month and the total exceeds the Pro plan. The only reasons to self-host here would be data residency, wanting to run custom nodes, or internal policy.

Per-step pricing for comparison: the lead routing workflow alone has about five action steps. On a per-action model that one workflow is roughly 7,500 billable actions a month. This is why teams migrating from Zapier often see the biggest savings on their longest workflows — see also migrating from Zapier: the real cost.

Where this example breaks

If the lead routing webhook were instead triggered by every product event (say 200,000/month), n8n Cloud stops being cheap and self-hosting or batching becomes the right answer. Always model your highest-frequency trigger first.

What most people get wrong about n8n cost

They count workflows instead of runs. Workflow count is unlimited on every plan. Runs are the only thing that drives your bill.
They forget the duration cap. The 5-minute limit on Starter quietly kills long AI or batch jobs. You will see this as failed executions, not as a pricing problem.
They assume self-hosted Business is “Pro but on our servers.” It is a much bigger plan at a much higher price, aimed at organisations that need SSO, environments and Git versioning. Many small teams self-hosting Community never need it.
They ignore the license. “Free and self-hosted” is not the same as “open source.” It matters if you resell.

How to forecast your n8n bill in 30 minutes

List every workflow and its trigger type (webhook, schedule, poll, manual).
For each, estimate runs per month from the source system’s real volume (form submissions, CRM updates, events), not from guesses.
Flag any workflow that runs more than 1,000 times a month and ask whether it could batch.
Flag any workflow that could run longer than 5 minutes.
Add 30% headroom for growth and retries.
Compare against Starter and Pro limits. If you are above 10,000/month, model Business, Enterprise and self-hosted Community side by side, including people-hours.

A simple spreadsheet with those six columns is more useful than any calculator, because it forces you to look at trigger frequency. For the wider budgeting picture, see workflow budgeting 101.

Where Automatite fits

If you are evaluating n8n, it is worth comparing how each platform counts usage and what you get for error handling and versioning at each tier. We keep an honest side-by-side at Automatite vs n8n, and a broader list of n8n alternatives if per-execution pricing does not suit your workload.

FAQ

Is n8n free?

The self-hosted Community Edition has no license fee and no execution limit, but you pay for hosting and maintenance, and it is licensed under the Sustainable Use License rather than a standard open-source license. n8n Cloud plans are paid.

How much does n8n Cloud cost?

As of October 2026, n8n lists Starter at €20/month and Pro at €50/month when billed annually, with 2,500 and 10,000 workflow executions per month respectively. Enterprise is priced by quote.

Does n8n charge per step or per workflow run?

Per workflow run. One execution is a full run of a workflow, regardless of how many nodes or items it processes.

Is self-hosting n8n cheaper than n8n Cloud?

Only at high execution volumes, or if you already run infrastructure and have spare engineering time. Once you price maintenance hours, small teams usually spend more self-hosting than they would on a cloud plan.

Do I need the Business plan to self-host?

No. The Community Edition is self-hosted. Business adds features such as SSO/LDAP, Git version control and multiple environments, which require a license key on a self-hosted instance.