Every plan price, execution allowance and license rule below was read off n8n.io and docs.n8n.io on 3 September 2026. Then we cost the other half of the decision that most n8n pricing pages skip: what the server actually costs if you self host the free Community edition instead.
# free plan · no credit card required
Cloud rates verified first-party today. Server rates read off DigitalOcean the same day.
n8n has two prices. The self-hosted Community edition is free forever with no execution limit, so your only cost is the server, which runs about $6 to $24 a month on a small VPS. n8n Cloud starts at 20 euros a month billed annually for 2,500 executions on Starter and 50 euros for 10,000 on Pro. The self-hosted Business plan is 667 euros a month billed annually. n8n bills per workflow run, not per step, so a 60 node workflow and a 3 node workflow both count as one execution.
Last updated September 2026
n8n defines an execution as a single run of your entire workflow. It does not matter how many steps are in the workflow or how much data it processes. That is unusually generous next to per-task competitors, and it is the main reason a heavy n8n workflow can be cheap to run.
Starter is 20 euros a month billed annually for 2,500 executions and 5 concurrent runs. Pro is 50 euros for 10,000 executions and 20 concurrent. Business is 667 euros for 40,000 executions and is self-hosted. Enterprise is quoted.
Users are unlimited on every cloud plan, so n8n does not charge per seat. What the tiers gate is features: SSO, environments, external secrets, log streaming, projects and Git version control all sit behind a paid license key.
The Community edition costs nothing, so the bill moves to infrastructure. A 1 vCPU 2 GB Droplet is $12 a month, a 2 vCPU 4 GB is $24. Add a managed Postgres from $15 if you do not want the database on the same box.
On the Business plan n8n publishes overage at 4,000 euros for extra buckets of 300,000 executions. That is roughly 1.33 cents per execution, and it is billed in whole buckets rather than metered per run.
Starter includes 2,300 AI credits a month and Pro includes up to 13,700. These cover n8n's hosted model calls. If you point nodes at your own OpenAI or Anthropic key instead, that spend lands on the provider's bill, not n8n's.
Take your busiest workflow and count how many times it fires in a month, not how many steps it contains. A workflow polling a mailbox every 5 minutes fires about 8,640 times a month on its own, which already exceeds Starter's 2,500 and lands you on Pro. A workflow triggered by 200 webhooks a day is 6,000 executions. This single number decides your tier.
n8n publishes the paid-only list: custom variables, environments, external secrets, external storage for binary data, log streaming, multi-main mode, projects, SSO through SAML or LDAP, workflow and credential sharing, and Git version control. If none of those are on your list, the free Community edition is genuinely complete for your use.
Self-hosting swaps a subscription for a machine. A 2 vCPU 4 GB Droplet at $24 a month runs a busy single-instance n8n comfortably, and it has no execution ceiling at all. Compare that to Pro's 50 euros for a hard 10,000 execution cap and the arithmetic usually favors the server once you pass Starter.
A self-hosted n8n still needs TLS renewal, Docker image updates, Postgres backups, disk monitoring and a restart policy when a webhook worker dies. Either you do that by hand every month or a panel does it. That is the real comparison, not free against 50 euros.
These are the figures n8n publishes on its own pricing page and docs, not estimates. n8n quotes cloud prices in euros, so a US card is billed the euro amount converted at your bank's rate. Prices shown are the annual-billing rate; paying monthly costs more.
swipe to see all columns →
| Plan | Price | Executions/mo | Concurrency | Hosting |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Community edition (self-hosted) | Free forever | No published limit | Your server's limit | Self-hosted |
| Registered community (self-hosted) | Free, registration required | No published limit | Your server's limit | Self-hosted |
| Cloud trial | Free for 14 days | 1,000 during trial | Pro-level | Hosted by n8n |
| Starter | 20 euros/mo billed annually | 2,500 | 5 concurrent | Hosted by n8n |
| Pro | 50 euros/mo billed annually | 10,000 | 20 concurrent | Hosted by n8n |
| Business | 667 euros/mo billed annually | 40,000 | Not published | Self-hosted |
| Enterprise | Contact sales | Custom | 200+ concurrent | Hosted by n8n or self-hosted |
| Business overage | 4,000 euros per bucket | +300,000 per bucket | n/a | Self-hosted |
Under 2,500 executions a month, Starter at 20 euros is the path of least resistance and you never touch a server. The moment a 5 minute cron enters the picture you blow through that cap, and a $6 Droplet running the Community edition becomes cheaper than upgrading.
Projects and workflow sharing are both paid features, so the cloud path here is Pro at minimum and realistically Enterprise. Self-hosting one n8n instance per client on separate servers sidesteps the feature gate entirely, which is why agencies end up managing a fleet.
SAML and LDAP sit behind a paid license key on both cloud and self-hosted. There is no free path to SSO. Budget for Business at 667 euros a month or an Enterprise quote, and note that Business is self-hosted, so you pay the license and run the server.
At 100,000 executions a month, Pro is exhausted ten times over and Business plus overage is the cloud answer. A self-hosted instance on a 4 vCPU 8 GB Droplet at $48 a month has no cap at all. This is the case where self-hosting stops being a preference and becomes arithmetic.
n8n costs nothing at all if you self host the Community edition, 20 euros a month billed annually for Cloud Starter, 50 euros for Cloud Pro and 667 euros for the self-hosted Business plan. Enterprise is quoted. Those cloud figures buy 2,500, 10,000 and 40,000 workflow executions a month respectively.
The number that surprises people is the gap between free and 667 euros. There is no middle tier that unlocks SSO or environments, so a company that needs one governance feature jumps from a 50 euro Pro plan straight to a four-figure annual commitment. That cliff, more than the execution allowances, is what pushes teams toward running n8n themselves.
n8n publishes its cloud prices in euros rather than dollars. A US company paying by card is charged the euro amount and your bank applies its own conversion rate and any foreign transaction fee, so the dollar figure on your statement moves month to month. Budget with a little headroom rather than a fixed dollar line.
Yes. The self-hosted Community edition is free forever with no execution limit, no workflow limit and no user limit. n8n publishes it under a fair-code Sustainable Use License, which permits internal business use at no charge. What it does not permit is reselling n8n as a hosted service to other people.
Free is not the same as complete. n8n names the features that need a paid license key: custom variables, environments, external secrets, external storage for binary data, log streaming, multi-main mode, projects, SSO through SAML or LDAP, workflow and credential sharing, and version control using Git. Everything else, including every node and every integration, is in the free build.
There is also a middle option most people miss. Registering your free community instance unlocks folders, debug in editor and custom execution data at no cost. It is still free software, it just asks for an email address.
The software is free to self host. The server is not. Running the Community edition costs you a machine, and on DigitalOcean that is $6 a month for 1 vCPU and 1 GB, $12 for 1 vCPU and 2 GB, or $24 for 2 vCPU and 4 GB, read off digitalocean.com on 3 September 2026.
The 1 GB box will run n8n but it is tight once a workflow pulls a large JSON payload into memory or you add a queue worker. Most production single-instance setups sit on the 2 GB or 4 GB tier with Postgres on the same machine. If you want the database separated, DigitalOcean managed databases start at $15 a month, which roughly doubles a small deployment.
Two costs never appear on the invoice. The first is bandwidth beyond the included allowance, billed at $0.01 per GiB, which almost never bites an automation workload. The second is your own time: image updates, certificate renewal, Postgres backups and restarting a worker that died mid-webhook. That is the honest line item people leave out when they say self-hosting is free.
n8n states it plainly: "An execution is a single run of your entire workflow. It doesn't matter how many steps are in the workflow or how much data it processes." A workflow with 3 nodes and a workflow with 60 nodes each consume exactly one execution when they fire.
This is the most commercially important sentence on n8n's pricing page, because most rival automation platforms bill per task, per operation or per step. On a per-step model a 60 node workflow costs 60 units. On n8n it costs 1. If your automations are long and complex but infrequent, n8n is dramatically cheaper than the headline plan price suggests.
The flip side is trigger frequency. Because the meter is per run, a cheap-looking workflow on a fast schedule is what burns the allowance. A cron firing every minute is 43,200 executions a month by itself, which no cloud plan below Enterprise covers.
The tiers separate on three axes: how many executions you get, how many workflows can run at once, and which governance features unlock. Users are unlimited on every plan, so team size does not move the price.
| Plan | Price (annual billing) | Executions | Concurrent | Shared projects | Insights history |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | 20 euros/mo | 2,500 | 5 | 1 | 1 day |
| Pro | 50 euros/mo | 10,000 | 20 | 3 | 5 days |
| Business | 667 euros/mo | 40,000 | Not published | 6 | 30 days |
| Enterprise | Contact sales | Custom | 200+ | Unlimited | 365 days |
Concurrency is the axis people underestimate. Starter's 5 concurrent executions means the sixth simultaneous trigger queues. If your workload is bursty, say 40 webhooks arriving in the same second when a form is shared, you feel that ceiling long before you exhaust 2,500 executions. Self-hosted concurrency is bounded by your server and your worker count, not by a plan.
Self-hosting wins on price almost immediately, and the crossover is lower than most people expect. Here is the same workload costed both ways using the rates above.
| Workload | n8n Cloud | Self-hosted on DigitalOcean | Cheaper |
|---|---|---|---|
| 800 executions/mo, one user | Starter, 20 euros | 1 GB Droplet, $6 | Self-hosted |
| 6,000 executions/mo, small team | Pro, 50 euros | 2 GB Droplet, $12 | Self-hosted |
| 60,000 executions/mo | Business, 667 euros | 4 GB Droplet, $24 | Self-hosted |
| Any volume, SSO required | Business, 667 euros | Business license, 667 euros plus server | Cloud, marginally |
Read that last row carefully, because it is the one that reframes the whole comparison. The Business plan is self-hosted. You pay 667 euros a month for the license key and you still supply the machine. So if you need SSO or environments, self-hosting does not save you the license fee, it just means you were always going to run the server.
Where cloud genuinely wins is when nobody on your team wants to own uptime. n8n Cloud handles patching, scaling and backups. If your automations move money or trigger customer messages, and no one is on call, 50 euros a month is a fair price for someone else's pager.
Self-hosting n8n costs the price of one Linux server plus optional extras. These are DigitalOcean's published Droplet rates, read first-party on 3 September 2026, with the sizes that actually matter for n8n.
| Droplet | vCPU | RAM | SSD | Transfer | Per month | Fits n8n? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | 1 | 1 GB | 25 GB | 1,000 GiB | $6.00 | Testing and light workflows |
| Basic | 1 | 2 GB | 50 GB | 2,000 GiB | $12.00 | Comfortable single instance |
| Basic | 2 | 4 GB | 80 GB | 4,000 GiB | $24.00 | Production with Postgres alongside |
| Basic | 4 | 8 GB | 160 GB | 5,000 GiB | $48.00 | Queue mode with worker processes |
| General Purpose | 4 | 16 GB | 50 GB | 5,000 GiB | $126.00 | Heavy data transformation |
Add-ons, at DigitalOcean's published rates: weekly backups are 20% of the Droplet cost per month and daily backups are 30%, block storage volumes start at $10 a month, a load balancer starts at $12, managed databases start at $15, and bandwidth beyond the included allowance is $0.01 per GiB. Reserved IPs are free while attached to a Droplet.
A realistic production bill: a $24 Droplet, daily backups at $7.20, and nothing else, comes to about $31.20 a month with no execution ceiling. That is under two thirds of Cloud Pro's 50 euros while removing the 10,000 execution cap entirely.
The Community edition is the full self-hosted n8n build, free indefinitely, with what n8n describes as almost the complete feature set. Every node, every integration and unlimited workflows, executions and users are included.
What it leaves out is the governance layer. These are the features n8n lists as requiring a paid plan:
For a solo builder or a small team that list is irrelevant. For a regulated company it is the entire reason to pay. Multi-main mode is the one that catches scaling teams out: without it you cannot run two active n8n main processes behind a load balancer, so high availability is a paid capability rather than a configuration choice.
Not for internal automation. n8n's Sustainable Use License permits free use of the Community edition for your own internal business purposes, which covers the overwhelming majority of commercial use. You need a paid license key only to unlock the gated features listed above, or an Enterprise agreement if you intend to embed or white label n8n inside a product you sell.
The practical detail teams miss is that a paid self-hosted license is not a one-time file. n8n states the license key must ping its license server daily to stay active. If you run in an air-gapped environment, raise that with sales before you architect around it.
Pro costs 50 euros a month against Starter's 20, and buys 10,000 executions instead of 2,500, 20 concurrent executions instead of 5, 3 shared projects instead of 1, five days of insights history instead of one, and up to 13,700 AI credits instead of 2,300.
The honest way to choose is to ignore everything except concurrency and execution count. Both plans give unlimited users and unlimited workflows, and neither unlocks a single gated feature. Pro is Starter with the dials turned up. If you are hitting neither ceiling, the extra 30 euros buys you nothing you will notice.
Yes. n8n Cloud offers a 14 day trial with Pro-level features and a 1,000 execution limit, and no credit card is required. The one exception n8n publishes is the Business plan trial, which does ask for a card.
1,000 executions is enough to validate a workflow but not enough to load test one. If you want to know how n8n behaves at your real volume, spin up the free Community edition on a $6 Droplet for a week instead. It costs less than the coffee you will drink while it runs and it has no cap.
Because the jump from Pro to Business is not an execution upgrade, it is a governance upgrade. Pro at 50 euros and Business at 667 euros differ by 30,000 executions on paper, but what you are actually buying is SSO, environments, projects, external secrets, log streaming and Git version control, priced as a bundle for organizations that need all of them.
Measured per execution the Business plan is cheap: 667 euros for 40,000 runs is about 1.7 cents each, and the published overage of 4,000 euros per 300,000 executions works out at about 1.33 cents. Measured against the free Community edition on a $24 server it looks enormous. Both readings are correct, and which one applies depends entirely on whether a compliance team is involved in the decision.
Four rules cover almost every case.
If you land on self-hosting, the work does not end at docker compose up. The instance needs TLS that renews, Postgres backups that restore, and a process that comes back after a reboot. That is the part VPS management exists to handle, and it is why teams who chose self-hosting for the price often end up paying for a panel rather than a plan. If you are weighing that trade-off more broadly, our comparison of managed vs unmanaged VPS lays out where the operating burden actually falls.
Ready to stop managing servers by hand? DeployManage provisions, deploys and monitors your fleet from one dashboard.
$ get started freen8n costs nothing to self host on the free Community edition, 20 euros a month billed annually for Cloud Starter with 2,500 executions, 50 euros for Cloud Pro with 10,000, and 667 euros for the self-hosted Business plan with 40,000. Enterprise is quoted by sales.
Yes. The self-hosted Community edition is free forever under n8n's fair-code Sustainable Use License, with no limit on executions, workflows or users. Paid plans exist only to unlock gated features such as SSO, environments, projects and Git version control.
The software is free, the server is not. Running the Community edition on DigitalOcean costs $6 a month for 1 GB, $12 for 2 GB or $24 for 2 vCPU and 4 GB, plus optional backups at 20% to 30% of the Droplet cost.
n8n counts one execution as a single run of your entire workflow, regardless of how many steps it contains or how much data it processes. A 60 node workflow and a 3 node workflow each consume one execution per run.
Self-hosted is cheaper at almost every volume. A 6,000 execution workload costs 50 euros on Cloud Pro or about $12 on a 2 GB Droplet. The exception is the Business tier, where the 667 euro license is required even though you host it yourself.
The Community edition is the free, self-hosted build of n8n with almost the complete feature set: every node, every integration and unlimited workflows, executions and users. It excludes the governance features that need a paid license key.
No. The Sustainable Use License permits free use of the Community edition for internal business purposes. A paid license is required only for gated features, or for embedding, white labeling or reselling n8n as a service to others.
n8n lists custom variables, environments, external secrets, external storage for binary data, log streaming, multi-main mode, projects, SSO through SAML or LDAP, workflow and credential sharing, and version control using Git as requiring a paid plan.
Pro costs 50 euros against Starter's 20 and raises executions from 2,500 to 10,000, concurrency from 5 to 20, shared projects from 1 to 3, insights history from 1 day to 5, and AI credits from 2,300 to up to 13,700. Neither unlocks gated features.
Yes. n8n Cloud offers a 14 day trial with Pro-level features and a 1,000 execution limit, with no credit card required. The Business plan trial is the one exception and does require a card.
No. Every n8n Cloud plan includes unlimited users, so adding teammates does not change the price. The tiers separate on execution volume, concurrency, shared projects and which governance features are unlocked.
n8n publishes Business plan overage at 4,000 euros for each additional bucket of 300,000 executions, which works out to roughly 1.33 cents per execution. It is billed in whole buckets rather than metered per run.
A 1 vCPU 2 GB server runs a single n8n instance comfortably at about $12 a month. Move to 2 vCPU and 4 GB at $24 for production with Postgres on the same box, or 4 vCPU and 8 GB at $48 if you run queue mode with separate workers.
DeployManage provisions a server on your own DigitalOcean, Hetzner, AWS or Vultr account, installs the stack, wires up TLS and backups, and deploys with zero downtime. You keep the free n8n license and skip the execution ceiling.
# free plan · no credit card required