n8n Pricing 2026: Cloud vs Self-Hosted, and What Self-Hosting Really Costs a B2B Team

Searches for "n8n pricing" mostly land on hosting providers arguing that self-hosting costs "$5 a month." That is the server bill, not the cost of running n8n. This guide is for whoever has to sign off on the budget, usually an IT manager or an ops lead. It splits the cost into the three bills you can actually be charged: n8n's subscription, your infrastructure, and the staff hours needed to keep a self-hosted instance patched. Then it runs four realistic team scenarios through those bills.

If you are still choosing a platform, start with our Make vs Zapier vs n8n comparison, which explains why the billing unit matters more than the feature list. If you are pricing the alternative, our Zapier pricing 2026 breakdown uses the same per-tier approach.

n8n pricing at a glance (October 2026)

n8n prices its plans in euros. Visitors from the US see dollar figures on the pricing page: $20 and $50 for Starter and Pro on annual billing, and $800/month for Business. The table below uses the euro list prices from n8n.io and their monthly-billing equivalents from the page's own plan data. Annual billing saves about 17%.

Source: n8n.io/pricing (EUR list prices and embedded plan data), checked October 15, 2026. Excludes VAT. n8n states that Cloud data is hosted in Frankfurt, Germany.

Business has larger execution tiers. They are listed in the page's plan data but are easy to miss in the slider:

Two discounts and conditions are worth knowing before you talk to sales:

• Start-up Plan: 50% off Business for companies with fewer than 20 employees and less than €5M in total funding. It lasts one year, or longer if you still qualify.
• Business is pitched at companies with under 100 employees, and it is not available on Cloud yet (n8n runs a waitlist). If you want SSO and want n8n to host it, you need an Enterprise quote today.

How n8n counts executions, and what drains the quota

n8n bills per workflow execution: one run of a workflow from trigger to finish, however many steps it has. A 40-node workflow that enriches a lead, writes to a CRM and posts to Slack is one execution. On Zapier the same run would be billed as several tasks. That difference is why n8n is often far cheaper for long workflows.

According to n8n's documentation, only production executions count: published workflows triggered by a schedule, webhook or other trigger. Manual test runs in the editor are excluded. Sub-workflow runs are also excluded from n8n's Insights counts, and n8n's community staff say they don't count toward the Cloud quota.

The quota is drained by how often a workflow fires, not by how complex it is. Polling schedules are the usual cause:

n8n's own FAQ gives 8,600–8,900 executions/month for a 5-minute schedule, depending on month length.

A single every-minute poller uses about 86% of the largest Pro tier on its own. Before you buy a tier, list every scheduled workflow. Then move anything the source system can push to a webhook trigger, so it fires only when something actually changes.

Cloud limits that matter as much as price

The execution count isn't the only thing that pushes teams up a tier. Check these limits against your workloads before choosing a plan:

• Concurrency: 5 parallel executions on Starter, 20 on Pro 10K, 50 on Pro 50K. Extra runs wait in a queue. Each turn of a chat agent counts as one execution, so busy AI chatbots hit this limit first.
• Maximum run time: 5 minutes on Starter, 40 minutes on Pro. Long batch jobs and slow LLM chains can hit the Starter cap.
• Execution history: Starter keeps 2,500 saved executions (2.5 GB) for up to 7 days. Pro keeps 25,000 (25 GB) for up to 30 days. If your auditors want 90 days of run history, neither plan covers it.
• No SSO on any self-serve Cloud plan. SSO and LDAP start at Business (self-hosted) or Enterprise.

Self-hosted n8n: the software is free, but there are three bills

The Community Edition runs without a license key and has no execution or concurrency limits. Hosting providers quote "$5 a month" because they are only counting the server. A B2B team self-hosting n8n actually pays three separate bills:

Bill 1: Infrastructure (the small one)

A single n8n container with PostgreSQL runs comfortably on an entry-level VPS. Hetzner, the host n8n's own docs include a deployment guide for, sells its cheapest cloud server, the CX23, at €5.49/month. That figure comes from third-party price trackers after Hetzner's June 2026 repricing, its second increase this year. Add off-box backup storage.

If you scale with queue mode (a main instance, separate workers and Redis), plan for three or more servers. Queue mode itself is included in the free edition. Even then, infrastructure rarely goes above a few tens of euros a month for internal workloads. This line on its own really is cheap.

Bill 2: Staff hours (the one that decides it)

n8n moves fast. We counted the tags on n8n's GitHub releases page: between July 15 and October 14, 2026, n8n published 130 tagged releases and 14 new minor versions (2.31 through 2.44), roughly one minor version a week.

The security record is the bigger reason to budget staff time. We queried GitHub's advisory list for the n8n repository on October 14, 2026: 211 advisories have been published in 2026, 19 rated critical and 94 high. The critical ones include CVE-2026-21858, an unauthenticated file-access flaw in webhook handling disclosed in January, and a run of remote-code-execution and sandbox-escape fixes in February. Because n8n stores the credentials for every system it connects to, an unpatched instance is a direct path into your CRM, finance tools and cloud accounts.

Source: GitHub Security Advisories for n8n-io/n8n, by publication date, retrieved October 14, 2026.

To turn that into money we need an hourly rate. The BLS reports a median wage of $47.66/hour for network and computer systems administrators (May 2025). Wages make up 70.0% of private-industry employer compensation costs (BLS ECEC, June 2026), so the fully loaded cost is about $68/hour. The hours below are our working assumptions, not measured figures. Swap in your own.

Add a one-time setup of roughly 8–16 hours: reverse proxy, TLS, Postgres, backups and access control. That is about $540–$1,090 at the same rate. If your platform team already runs Docker hosts with patch automation, the extra effort for n8n is smaller. Just don't count it as zero.

Bill 3: The license (if your team needs to collaborate)

This is the bill most "self-host for free" articles skip. The free edition is built around single owners: per n8n's docs, only the instance owner and the user who created a workflow or credential can access it. Here is how the self-hosted editions compare on the features IT departments usually ask about, taken from the pricing page's feature matrix:

Note that the "€0 and unlimited" edition and the "SSO and Git" edition are €8,000 a year apart at the lowest tier. Business also bills by executions, counted across every instance that uses the license key. The key has to reach n8n's license server daily, and n8n's docs say to allowlist Cloudflare's IP ranges for that. Air-gapped installs need a conversation with sales.

Four scenarios: total monthly cost, Cloud vs self-hosted

The scenarios below use annual-billing prices in EUR for n8n, euro VPS prices, and USD for staff hours from the BLS-based rate above. We keep the currencies separate rather than apply an exchange rate.

Scenario A: one ops admin, ~6,000 executions/month, no SSO requirement

Cloud wins unless an engineer's time is already paid for and spare, which is rarely true. Starter (2,500) would be too small at this volume.

Scenario B: rev-ops team of six sharing credentials, ~35,000 executions/month

The free edition can't share credentials or projects, so self-hosting this team means buying Business.

This is the biggest price jump in n8n's lineup: Pro 50K costs about €121 a month, while the cheapest Business tier costs €667 a month for fewer executions (40K). Unless you need SSO or Git, Cloud Pro is the obvious choice. A qualifying startup would pay half for Business, about €333 a month, which still costs more than Cloud Pro once staff time is added.

Scenario C: IT policy requires SSO and Git-based change control, ~40,000 executions/month

No self-serve Cloud plan has SSO, so the real options are self-hosted Business or Enterprise (quote).

Before signing, check whether your security policy also requires audit logs or centrally managed secrets. Business includes neither, so those would put you on Enterprise. Get the Enterprise quote with hosting by n8n included, and compare it with this line, staff hours included.

Scenario D: engineering team, ~250,000 executions/month, one owner, no SSO need

This is the case self-hosting is built for. At high volume with a single owner, the free edition saves thousands per month even after a generous labor allowance. The license still has to allow it, though, which means internal use only (see the next section).

The license question: what "free" self-hosting allows

n8n is "fair-code," not open source. The Community Edition is licensed under the Sustainable Use License, which lets you use and modify n8n "only for your own internal business purposes or for non-commercial or personal use." In practice:

Code in files or folders marked .ee is covered by a separate Enterprise license and isn't usable without a paid key. Before you build a client-facing service on a self-hosted instance, email n8n's licensing team. The free edition's price is fine; it's the terms that rule this use out.

Which should you choose?

• Choose n8n Cloud Starter or Pro if you run under 50,000 executions a month, don't need SSO, and don't have spare platform-engineering time. This covers most ops, rev-ops and marketing teams.
• Choose self-hosted Community Edition if one team owns everything, volume is high or unpredictable, you need custom nodes or bash steps (self-hosted only), and you already run patched container infrastructure.
• Choose self-hosted Business if you need SSO and Git-based environments, have fewer than 100 employees, and can accept forum-only support.
• Get an Enterprise quote if you need audit logs, log streaming, external secret stores, an SLA, or SSO hosted by n8n.

Already running another platform? Our Zapier-to-n8n migration playbook covers the execution-count trap when you move polling Zaps across. If the license is the sticking point, our n8n vs Activepieces self-hosted comparison covers an MIT-licensed alternative. Microsoft 365 shops should also check what is already included in their tenant in our Power Automate pricing guide. For production scaling details, see our upcoming n8n queue mode production setup guide.

FAQ

Methodology

We took prices and plan limits from n8n.io/pricing on October 15, 2026, including the plan data embedded in the page, which lists every Business tier and monthly-billing price. US dollar figures are as the page displays them to US visitors. Edition and license rules come from n8n's documentation and the LICENSE.md file in the n8n GitHub repository. We counted security advisories and release tags through the GitHub API on October 14, 2026. Labor costs use BLS occupational wage data loaded with the ECEC benefits share, and the hours per month are stated assumptions, not measurements. We did not run paid production workloads on each tier.

Ken Hayashi

Technology consultant with 10+ years in the Japanese tech industry. Specializing in SaaS evaluation, workflow automation, and B2B tool integration.