n8n Pricing Teardown
We've laid out pricing model for the most popular OSS tool in the last couple of years – even accountants talk about it.
n8n is a workflow automation tool for technical teams. It sits between Zapier (user-friendly & expensive) and writing everything yourself (free but painful).
You connect apps, databases, APIs, and AI models into automations called workflows.
With 180,000+ GitHub stars it’s the most-starred workflow automation project in the world — and it’s been accelerating lately as every dev team discovers they need to productionize AI agents.
• Website
Disclosure: we use n8n at Beton for our core GTM automation pipeline. More on that tomorrow.
The interesting bit: execution-based pricing
Most automation tools charge per step. Zapier calls them “tasks” — a 15-step zap costs 15 tasks.
n8n charges per workflow execution — one run from trigger to finish, regardless of how many steps are inside.
For simple automations this barely matters. For complex ones — AI chains, multi-API enrichment pipelines, conditional branching — it’s a massive structural advantage.
A workflow that runs 40 steps in n8n costs the same as one that runs 2. They lean into this hard in their messaging and they’re right to.
Plans
Starter — €20/month (annual)
• 2,500 executions/month
• 5 concurrent executions
• 1 shared project, 50 AI Workflow Builder credits
• Cloud-hosted by n8n
Pro — €50/month (annual)
• Custom execution quota (you configure your own number — no preset)
• 20 concurrent executions
• 3 shared projects, 150 AI credits
• Workflow history, global variables, admin roles, execution search
• Cloud-hosted
Business — €667/month (annual)
• 40,000 executions/month
• 6 shared projects
• SSO, SAML, LDAP, Git version control, multiple environments
• Self-hosted only
Enterprise — contact sales
• 200+ concurrent executions, unlimited projects
• Log streaming, external secret store, 365 days of execution logs
• Cloud or self-hosted
Annual billing saves 17%. Startups under 20 employees get 50% off Business — linked directly from the pricing page, not buried.
The pricing cliff
Pro is €50/month, cloud-hosted. Business is €667/month, self-hosted only.
That’s a 13x price jump where you also take on hosting yourself. If you need SSO, multi-environment setup, or Git-based version control — all Business features — you pay €617/month more and manage your own infrastructure.
This is a deliberate choice to push enterprise buyers toward a specific profile: organizations that already have DevOps capacity and just need a license.
The license question
Community Edition runs under n8n’s Sustainable Use License — not MIT, not Apache, not OSI-approved.
The key restriction: you can self-host it for your own team, but you can’t build a product that competes with n8n or use it as a managed service for customers.
This matters because license type directly shapes monetization options. Apache 2.0 or MIT would let anyone fork and sell n8n-as-a-service.
The Sustainable Use License prevents that — it’s how n8n protects their cloud business while still letting the community use the tool freely.
Compare this to something like AGPLv3, which takes a different route: it forces anyone who distributes a modified version to open-source theirs, but also blocks embedding AGPL code in commercial products your customers use (without a commercial license).
Both approaches achieve similar commercial protection through completely different legal mechanisms.
For most n8n users — teams automating their own stack — the Sustainable Use License is a non-issue.
For anyone thinking about building a product on top of n8n, it’s a hard stop.
Worth paying for?
Almost always, if you’re self-hosting and need SSO or multiple environments. Those aren’t vanity features.
For individuals and small teams: start with Community Edition self-hosted. It’s genuinely complete — all integrations, unlimited workflows, unlimited users.
Graduate to cloud Pro (€50/month) when you need parallel executions or workflow history. It’s cheap for what it does.
The part I’d watch: AI Workflow Builder credits are a second metering layer on top of executions.
Right now the limits are generous enough that they don’t bite — but as agentic workflows become the primary use case, this is clearly the next monetization lever.
This post is a part of series on commercial open source software pricing. See full list of articles here: