n8n pricing starts at nothing: the self-hosted Community edition is free, and you pay only for the server it runs on. n8n's hosted cloud starts at €20 a month billed annually for 2,500 workflow executions (Starter), then €50 for 10,000 (Pro). The self-hosted Business plan is €667 a month billed annually for 40,000 executions, and Enterprise is quoted by n8n's sales team. Those are the prices on n8n's pricing page, checked on 23 October 2026. n8n bills per execution, which is one run of a whole workflow however many steps it has. That single fact is why n8n is often far cheaper than Zapier or Make for complex workflows, and the rest of this guide shows by how much.
Every n8n plan and its price
n8n shows its prices in euros or US dollars depending on where you view the page. Starter and Pro carry the same number in both currencies; Business does not. Here is what each page showed on 23 October 2026, per month and billed annually.
| Plan | Euro page | Dollar page | Executions a month | Runs on |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Community edition | Free | Free | Unlimited (your server's limit) | Your server |
| Cloud Starter | €20 | $20 | 2,500 | n8n's cloud |
| Cloud Pro | €50 | $50 | 10,000 | n8n's cloud |
| Cloud Pro, larger tier | Not shown | $120 | 50,000 | n8n's cloud |
| Business | €667 | $800 | 40,000, with larger tiers | Your server only |
| Enterprise | Quoted | Quoted | Custom | Your server or n8n's cloud |
Billed monthly, the dollar page showed $24 for Starter, $60 for Pro and $960 for Business. n8n says annual billing saves 17%. Every plan includes unlimited users and unlimited active workflows, so you are never paying per seat.
What each tier adds
Starter is for a first workflow: 5 concurrent executions, one shared project and 1,600 Assistant credits a month for n8n's AI building assistant. Pro adds admin roles, workflow history, evaluations and up to 9,600 Assistant credits; concurrency is 20 on the 10,000 tier and 50 on the 50,000 tier, and anything over the limit waits in a queue. Business is self-hosted only and adds SSO and LDAP, multiple environments, Git version control and six shared projects. Enterprise adds external secret stores, log streaming, extended data retention, 200 or more concurrent executions and support with an SLA, on your server or n8n's.
Two discounts are worth knowing. Companies with fewer than 20 employees can apply for n8n's Start-up Plan, which takes 50% off Business. And there is a free cloud trial with 1,000 executions and no card, plus a 14-day trial of Business.
n8n enterprise pricing and overages
n8n does not publish Enterprise prices; you get a quote. It does publish how overages work on Business and Enterprise: workflows keep running when you pass your quota, the sales team contacts you, and unresolved overages are invoiced 45 days later. On Business the overage price is €4,000 for each extra bucket of 300,000 executions. The dollar page's Business tiers run from $800 for 40,000 executions to $5,245 for 500,000, billed annually.
What an execution is, and why it changes the maths
n8n's definition is short: an execution is a single run of your entire workflow, and it does not matter how many steps it has or how much data it processes. A workflow that receives an order, loops over 40 line items, calls three systems and an AI model, then posts to Slack, is one execution.
The other two big tools count differently. Zapier bills tasks: every successful action step is one task, while the trigger, failed actions and built-in tools such as Filter, Formatter, Paths and Looping are free. An action inside a loop costs a task on every pass. Make bills credits (it replaced operations with credits in August 2025, one for one): almost every module action costs a credit, including the trigger reading data, while routers and error handlers are free, and Make's own AI Provider can cost more than one credit per action.
So the same workflow converts into very different numbers. A five-step workflow (one trigger, four actions) that runs once is 1 n8n execution, 4 Zapier tasks and 5 Make credits. Add a loop and the gap widens with every item.
Worked examples: what n8n costs at 5,000 and 50,000 runs
Three workloads, priced on each vendor's page on 23 October 2026, per month and billed annually. The conversions into tasks and credits, and the tier each lands on, are our arithmetic. n8n figures are the same in euros and dollars except where marked.
| Workload | n8n | Zapier | Make |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5,000 runs of a five-step workflow | 5,000 executions: Cloud Pro, 50 | 20,000 tasks: Professional, $189 | 25,000 credits: Core on the 40,000 tier, $29 |
| 50,000 runs of the same workflow | 50,000 executions: Cloud Pro, $120 | 200,000 tasks: Professional, $769 | 250,000 credits: Core on the 300,000 tier, $182.16 |
| 2,000 orders a month, 20 line items each, two actions per item | 2,000 executions: Cloud Starter, 20 | About 82,000 tasks: Professional on the 100,000 tier, $489 | At least 86,000 credits: Core on the 150,000 tier, $99 |
Example 1: a team running 5,000 executions a month
Starter's 2,500 executions are too few, so this team is on Pro at €50 a month billed annually, or $60 billed monthly. The same workload is $189 a month on Zapier and $29 on Make Core. At this size Make is the cheapest hosted option. If you choose n8n here, it is for its code steps, AI nodes or the option to self-host later.
Example 2: a team running 50,000 executions a month
On the cloud, Pro's 50,000 tier is $120 a month billed annually. Business, at 40,000 executions, is too small, and its 50,000 tier is $985 a month on the dollar page, so Business is a purchase for SSO, Git and environments. The same workload is $769 a month on Zapier and $182.16 on Make Core. Self-hosted on the free Community edition, n8n's licence costs nothing and the bill is your hosting.
Example 3: loops
The third row is where per-execution billing matters most. Each order is one n8n execution, so 2,000 orders fit inside Starter at 20 a month. On Zapier each of the 40 line-item actions is a task, so one order costs 41 tasks and the month lands on the 100,000-task tier at $489. On Make it costs at least 43 credits per order, which lands on the 150,000-credit tier at $99. Count your loop passes before you compare plans.
The real cost of self-hosting n8n
The Community edition costs nothing to license. Running it costs four things: a server, a database, backups and somebody's time.
Server and database. As one example of list prices on 23 October 2026, a DigitalOcean droplet with 4 GB of memory and 2 vCPUs is $24 a month, weekly backups add 20% of the droplet price, and a managed PostgreSQL database starts at $15.15 a month. By our arithmetic, a single production instance is therefore about $44 a month in infrastructure.
Scaling. n8n stores data in SQLite by default. For volume you run queue mode: a main instance receives triggers, worker instances run executions, Redis passes jobs between them, and PostgreSQL holds the data, because n8n does not support queue mode on SQLite. A main instance and two workers at $24 each, a $12 droplet for Redis, backups and the managed database come to roughly $100 a month by our arithmetic. One catch: in queue mode, workflows that handle files need S3 external storage, and n8n lists external binary storage as a paid feature.
What the free edition leaves out. Community has no SSO, no Git version control, no environments, no external secrets, no log streaming beyond basic logging, and no projects. Workflows and credentials can be seen only by the instance owner and the person who created them. Registering for a free key unlocks folders, debugging in the editor and custom execution data.
Someone's time. This is the real line item. Upgrades should be tested on a copy before production, the encryption key for stored credentials must be backed up, execution data needs pruning, and an error workflow should alert a person. n8n's own guidance is plain that self-hosting needs technical expertise and that you provide and maintain the infrastructure. As an illustration, if an engineer spends four hours a month on it at $100 an hour, that is $400 a month, more than Cloud Pro. Self-host when volume, data control or custom nodes justify that time, or when the time is already paid for.
What the licence lets agencies and SaaS products do
n8n is fair-code under its Sustainable Use License, and the free licence covers self-hosted use only. The licence FAQ draws the line by who controls the workflow logic.
Allowed: using n8n for your own business, personal projects and research; an agency or consultant building, running and maintaining workflows for a client and charging for that work, as long as the client cannot create or edit workflows; and using n8n behind the scenes in your own product, where users trigger automations you built.
Not allowed without a commercial licence: hosting n8n as a service where clients build their own workflows; letting outside users build or configure workflows through your product, which rules out an embedded workflow builder in a SaaS app; forking n8n to launch your own automation product; white-labelling it; and using enterprise features that ask for a licence key. For those, n8n points you to its sales team for an Enterprise licence.
When to pay Gigabit, and when not to
Do not pay anyone if one person can build what you need on Starter or Pro and keep it running. n8n is designed for that. Pay for help when a workflow touches money, stock or customers and has to keep working when an API changes at 2 a.m. That is a build problem more than a licence problem: retries, idempotent steps, validation between stages, alerts and a human approval where a mistake is expensive.
- One workflow: our AI Quick Win Sprint is $8,000 fixed over 3 weeks. One workflow scoped, built and deployed on your instance, with up to three tool integrations, error handling and 30 days of light support.
- An AI agent in a workflow: from $8,000, flat per agent.
- Several workflows, a migration from Zapier or Make, or a self-hosted set-up: an embedded pod at $3,000–$7,500 per engineer per month.
- Running them afterwards: Managed AI Operations from $3,000 a month for one system, covering monitoring, fixes and vendor-change response.
We build on your n8n instance under your licence, so the workflows and the relationship with n8n stay yours. If you are still choosing a tool, our n8n vs Zapier vs Make comparison puts the three side by side, and our Zapier and Make page covers when to stay where you are. All of our prices are on the pricing page.
