n8n pricing

About

n8n is a workflow automation platform aimed at technical teams — developers, IT, and ops engineers who want to build and run integrations and AI agents with code-level control rather than the click-only flows of Zapier or Make. Workflows are assembled on a visual node canvas, but every step can drop into JavaScript or Python, call arbitrary HTTP/GraphQL endpoints, run bash scripts, or import cURL commands, so the product sits between no-code and full custom code. The company markets itself as “the world’s most popular workflow automation platform for technical teams” and claims usage across 34% of Fortune 500 companies.

Founded in 2019 by Jan Oberhauser and headquartered in Berlin, n8n spent its first years as an open-source “Zapier alternative” before the 2023–2025 generative-AI wave turned it into an AI-agent and orchestration layer. That repositioning was rewarded in October 2025 with a $180M Series C at a $2.5B valuation (led by Accel, with NVIDIA’s NVentures, Meritech, and Redpoint participating; ~$240M raised to date) on reported 6× user and 10× revenue growth over the prior year. Its closest comparables are Zapier and Make on the automation side and a growing field of agent frameworks on the AI side.

The product ships in two forms: a managed n8n Cloud (hosted by n8n) and a free, open Community Edition that teams self-host under a fair-code Sustainable Use license. The same codebase powers both, so n8n competes against its own free self-hosted tier on managed hosting, governance, and support rather than on core features. Enterprise deployments lean on self-hosting plus paid governance: SSO/SAML/LDAP, external secret-store integration, environments with Git version control, log streaming, and SOC 2 audited infrastructure.

The defining commercial choice is the value metric. n8n charges by monthly workflow executions — one completed run of a workflow, start to finish, regardless of how many nodes or API calls it triggers — and bundles unlimited users and unlimited workflows into every paid plan. That puts the entire price gradient on a single usage dimension and deliberately avoids the per-seat and per-step meters that competitors use.

Pricing summary : How n8n’s execution-tiered workflow-automation pricing works

n8n uses an execution-tiered subscription built on a single usage dimension:

1. Flat monthly subscription per tier: Cloud plans are Starter, Pro, and Business, billed monthly or annually (annual saves 17%). Billed annually the monthly-equivalent prices are $20 / $50 / $800; billed monthly they are $24 / $60 / $960. Enterprise is custom-quoted.
2. Workflow executions as the value metric: each tier includes a fixed bucket of monthly workflow executions — 2,500 (Starter), 10,000 (Pro), 40,000 (Business) — where one execution is a full workflow run regardless of step count. There is no per-step, per-task, or per-user charge; users, workflows, and integrations are unlimited on every paid plan.
3. Free and discounted entry points: a free cloud trial (no card), a free self-hosted Community Edition, and a Startup plan at $333/mo (50% off Business, 40k executions) for companies under 20 employees and under €5M funding.

What makes this different: n8n runs a tier-bucketed usage model layered on a freemium self-host base — the price gradient sits entirely on completed workflow runs rather than per step or per seat, so a workflow that fans out across hundreds of nodes still counts as one billable execution, and headcount never moves the bill.

Pricing by product

n8n Cloud (subscription plans)

Self-hosted & discounted plans

Sales motions across products: PLG / self-serve for Starter, Pro, Business, the Startup plan, and free Community Edition; sales-led for Enterprise.

The value metric: workflow executions, not steps

A workflow execution is one run of a workflow from start to finish — n8n counts it once no matter how many nodes, API calls, or branches it triggers. This is the structural opposite of per-task (Zapier) or per-operation (Make) metering: a 200-node workflow and a 2-node workflow each consume exactly one execution. Quotas reset monthly, and the included buckets are 2.5k → 10k → 40k across Starter → Pro → Business, with custom volume on Enterprise. Concurrency (how many executions run in parallel) is a separate per-tier limit: 5 → 20 → 200+.

Hidden costs : What execution quotas really cost at scale

The advertised $50 Pro headline understates what a growing automation team pays once execution volume climbs, because n8n’s quotas are step-function tiers, not smooth overage. Two patterns drive most of the surprise: outgrowing the Pro execution bucket, and the gap between “free” self-hosting and its real operating cost.

Archetype 1 — a team that outgrows the 10k Pro quota. A small ops team runs an AI-agent workflow that polls inboxes and triggers a model on each new message. At a few hundred messages a day they comfortably fit Pro’s 10,000 monthly executions. Add a second polling trigger and a Slack bot and they cross 10k mid-month — and because n8n includes a fixed bucket with no smooth per-execution overage, the next step up is the Business tier:

The jump from Pro to Business is the single biggest cliff in n8n’s lineup: a team that needs 12,000 executions pays the same $800 as one running 39,000. Reddit threads on the 2025 repricing flag exactly this — simple polling triggers and chatbots “burn through execution limits in days,” pushing users onto a tier whose price rivals enterprise software.

Archetype 2 — the “free” self-hosted Community Edition. Self-hosting removes n8n’s execution meter entirely, but moves the cost onto your own infrastructure and engineering time. A modest production deployment for a single team:

So “free” self-hosting often lands near the cost of a paid cloud tier once you price the operational burden — which is exactly the value gap n8n sells managed Cloud and the self-hosted Business license into. For high-volume automation, self-hosting still wins on raw cost-per-execution; for low-to-moderate volume, managed Cloud is usually cheaper than the loaded cost of running it yourself.

Want to estimate your own n8n bill? Use the n8n pricing calculator to model your monthly cost based on workflow-execution volume and plan tier.

Pricing evolution : From open-source roots to execution-tiered cloud

n8n’s pricing started as a free, self-host-first open-source product, then layered a managed cloud on top, then in 2025 pivoted the whole model onto a single execution meter and repositioned around AI agents. The dollar amounts on the cloud cards did not render in the Wayback archive across any snapshot (n8n loads the price numeral via client-side localization), so the historical figures are marked unknown; what the archive does preserve clearly is the tier structure, execution quotas, and active-workflow caps.

Cadence

Tracked range: 2022-03 – 2026-06. “unknown” price-change cells mark quarters where the archive preserved structural/quota changes but the cloud dollar figures never rendered in the Wayback snapshot — they were not independently legible and are not guessed.

Notable changes

• 2022-03-17 — License changed from Apache 2.0 + Commons Clause to the Sustainable Use License (based on Elastic License 2.0); n8n coins the term “fair-code.” (n8n blog.)
• 2022 Q2 — Wayback shows the pricing page led with two free self-host options (Desktop, Self-Hosted) and a separate Cloud early-access tab.
• 2023 Q3 — Cloud paid tiers (Starter/Pro/Enterprise) carried execution quotas (5k/10k) and active-workflow caps (5/10); Starter was single-user.
• 2024 Q1 — Starter’s execution bucket dropped to 2.5k; annual toggle advertised 20% off.
• 2025-08-07 — n8n removed active-workflow limits, made users/workflows/steps unlimited on every plan, added the Business tier, and put the entire price gradient on monthly executions. (n8n blog.)
• 2025-10-09 — $180M Series C at a $2.5B valuation (Accel, NVIDIA NVentures); n8n reframes from “Zapier alternative” to AI-agent orchestration. 235-point Hacker News thread.
• 2026-06-02 — Current capture: execution-tiered Starter/Pro/Business at 2.5k/10k/40k; annual saving now 17% (down from 20%); Startup plan $333 (50% off Business, self-hosted).

The 2025 repricing in detail

The August 2025 change is the most consequential moment in n8n’s pricing history and the cleanest example of the platform committing to a single value metric. Before it, every cloud tier bundled three constraints at once: an execution quota, an active-workflow cap (5 on Starter, 10 on Pro), and — on Starter — a single-user limit. n8n’s own framing was that workflow-based caps “discouraged enterprise builders from creating and experimenting,” because every new automation counted against a hard ceiling. The fix was to delete two of the three meters: workflows, users, and steps all became unlimited, leaving only monthly executions to scale the bill. The same release introduced the Business plan to fill the long gap between Pro and Enterprise, initially as a self-hosted license. Community reaction was mixed — builders welcomed unlimited workflows, but a recurring Reddit complaint is that polling triggers and chatbots can exhaust an execution bucket within days, turning a complexity-neutral metric into a volume-sensitive one for always-on AI agents.

What’s unique : Execution-metered, seat-free workflow automation

1. Priced per completed workflow execution, not per step or seat. One execution counts once regardless of node count, so complex multi-node workflows do not cost more per run — the inverse of Zapier’s per-task and Make’s per-operation meters. This is a deliberate value-metric choice: n8n optimizes for a unit the buyer can predict rather than one that maximizes per-action revenue.

2. Unlimited users, workflows, and steps on every paid plan. Since the August 2025 repricing, headcount and workflow count never move the bill; only the monthly execution quota and governance features change across tiers. n8n explicitly deleted the active-workflow caps it had carried since 2023 because they discouraged teams from building.

3. Free, open self-hosted Community Edition on the same codebase. n8n competes against its own free tier, monetizing managed hosting, governance, and support rather than core capability — a fair-code variant of the open-core model that shifts the pricing job from capability to operational convenience.

4. A single execution meter that absorbs AI-agent fan-out. Because one workflow run is billed once no matter how many model calls, tool invocations, or branches it spawns, an AI agent that loops through dozens of LLM calls inside a single workflow still costs one execution — a structurally different bet from the per-call token meters that make AI-agent workflows a cost monster on usage-priced platforms.

5. Self-host removes the meter entirely. Run the Community Edition and you pay nothing to n8n per execution — the inverse of the cloud model. That makes n8n one of the few automation platforms where the cheapest-at-scale option is to opt out of the vendor’s billing meter altogether and absorb the infrastructure cost yourself.

Strengths & weaknesses

Billing UX : Named controls on the n8n pricing and cloud surfaces

• Monthly / Annually toggle — a switch on the pricing page swaps the displayed per-month price between annual (17% cheaper) and monthly cadence (Starter $20↔$24, Pro $50↔$60, Business $800↔$960).
• Execution-quota tier selector — plans are chosen by included monthly executions (2.5k / 10k / 40k), surfaced directly on each plan card.
• Cloud admin dashboard — the n8n Cloud admin surface manages instance version, timezone, concurrency, ownership/username, and workflow downloads (per the cloud docs).
• Insights dashboard — per-tier execution, failure-rate, and time-saved metrics (7 days on Pro, 30 on Business, 365 on Enterprise) for tracking usage and demonstrating ROI.
• Invoice / wire billing — Enterprise (and Business via sales) supports pay-by-invoice and wire transfer; lower tiers run self-serve via Paddle checkout.

Strategic wins : Why the execution metric and free self-host worked

1. Choosing executions as the single value metric

By billing on completed workflow runs rather than steps or seats, n8n made its pricing legible and complexity-neutral — and the right value metric is the one buyers can predict, not the one that maximizes per-action revenue. The August 2025 repricing doubled down by deleting the workflow and seat meters entirely, leaving one dimension. That contrast against per-resolution and per-seat peers is worth comparing across the pricing blueprint.

2. Monetizing hosting and governance, not the core engine

A free open Community Edition de-risks adoption while paid cloud and the self-hosted Business license capture teams that need governance or would rather not run infrastructure. The paid story is operational convenience, SSO/Git/environments, and support — not raw capability — which is the open-core variant of usage-based packaging that lets a free tier feed the funnel instead of cannibalizing it.

3. Bundling unlimited seats to drive whole-org adoption

Because users and workflows are unlimited on every paid plan, automation can spread across a company without per-seat procurement friction, and n8n recovers the value on the execution dimension as usage grows. Removing seat-counting is a deliberate bet that whole-org adoption plus execution growth beats per-seat revenue — the same land-and-expand logic explored for usage-based SaaS.

4. Riding the AI-agent wave to reprice the category

n8n repositioned from “Zapier alternative” to AI-agent orchestration just as agents went mainstream, and its execution meter happens to absorb agent fan-out cleanly: a loop of dozens of model calls inside one workflow is still one execution. That story — plus 10× revenue growth — underwrote a $180M Series C at a $2.5B valuation in October 2025, validating execution-metered automation as an AI-era pricing model.

Areas to improve : Smoothing the tier cliffs and Enterprise opacity

1. Close the Pro-to-Business price cliff

The jump from $50 (10k executions) to $800 (40k executions) is a 16× price step for 4× the quota — the single sharpest cliff in n8n’s lineup and the most-cited Reddit complaint after the 2025 repricing. A mid tier around 20k executions, or a smooth per-execution overage above the Pro bucket, would catch the teams who need 12–15k and currently overpay or churn. Thresholding and alerting on approaching-quota would soften the surprise either way.

2. Publish Enterprise (and Business cloud) execution pricing bands

Enterprise is fully “contact sales,” and the Business tier is self-host-only — so a cloud team scaling past Pro has no transparent next step. Even indicative per-execution or volume bands would reduce buyer friction and shorten procurement, the way the better-documented usage-invoicing playbooks recommend.

3. Clarify what happens at the execution quota

The cards advertise included executions but not the at-quota behavior (hard stop vs. soft cap vs. upgrade prompt). For always-on AI agents that can burn through a bucket in days, making the overage and cutoff policy explicit on the pricing page — and surfacing it in the insights dashboard before the limit hits — would remove a common pre-purchase question and prevent bill shock.

Key takeaways

1. Pick one value metric and commit. n8n puts its entire price gradient on monthly executions, keeping the model legible where per-step and per-task rivals feel arbitrary. The 2025 repricing went further and deleted its other meters (workflows, seats) rather than stacking them.
2. Removing a meter can be a bigger move than adding one. n8n’s most consequential pricing change was subtractive — killing active-workflow caps — because the caps were discouraging the exact building behavior the product depends on. Constraints that suppress adoption cost more than they collect.
3. Unlimited seats can be a feature, not a giveaway. Removing seat counting lets automation spread across an org without procurement friction, with cost recovered on the usage dimension as workloads grow.
4. A free self-hosted tier can be a moat, not a leak. Open-core (here, fair-code) lowers adoption risk and feeds the funnel into paid managed hosting and governance, as long as the paid value story is operational rather than capability-based.
5. Mind the cliff your tiers create. A clean single-metric model still produces a 16× Pro→Business jump; a legible axis doesn’t guarantee legible steps, and the gaps are where churn and complaints concentrate.

UBP implications

1. Complexity-neutral metering reduces bill anxiety. Counting a whole workflow as one unit — regardless of internal fan-out — shows that the “right” usage unit is the one buyers can predict, not the one that maximizes per-action revenue.
2. Tier-bucketed usage trades upside for simplicity. Including fixed execution buckets with no overage keeps bills predictable but creates step-function cliffs, a recurring tension in usage-based packaging.
3. Open-core changes the pricing job. When the engine is free to self-host, pricing must monetize hosting, governance, and support — shifting the value story from capability to operational convenience.

Sources

• n8n pricing page (accessed 2026-06-02)
• n8n Startup plan (accessed 2026-06-02)
• n8n for Enterprise (accessed 2026-06-02)
• n8n Cloud docs (overview) (accessed 2026-06-02)
• n8n blog — new pricing explained (2025-08-07) (accessed 2026-06-02)
• n8n blog — Sustainable Use License announcement (accessed 2026-06-02)
• n8n blog — Series C announcement (accessed 2026-06-02)
• n8n Sustainable Use License (docs) (accessed 2026-06-02)
• n8n pricing page — JS-rendered USD read (independent second-source price validation) (accessed 2026-06-02)
• n8n pricing & startup-plan pages — live cadence re-validation (EUR geo-render confirms per-currency price points; $333 Startup verified as “/mo, billed annually”) (accessed 2026-06-05)

Bottom line

n8n prices workflow automation on a single, complexity-neutral metric — monthly workflow executions — with unlimited users and workflows on every paid plan, a free open self-hosted edition, and sales-led Enterprise on top. It is one of the cleanest examples of putting an entire price gradient on one usage dimension.

Want to compare n8n against other workflow-automation pricing? Browse the pricing blueprint.

Pricing timeline : Major events on a vertical axis

Each milestone below corresponds to a public pricing change, product launch, or material adjustment. Major events use a filled marker; minor adjustments use a faded one.

Execution-tiered cloud pricing (current)

Jun 2026

Cloud plans Starter $20, Pro $50, Business $800 (monthly equivalents when billed annually), each defined by an included monthly workflow-execution quota of 2.5k / 10k / 40k. Annual billing saves 17%. Enterprise is custom-quoted; Startup plan is $333 (50% off Business).

$180M Series C at $2.5B valuation — AI-orchestration repositioning

Oct 2025

Accel-led $180M Series C (with NVIDIA's NVentures, Meritech, Redpoint) valued n8n at $2.5B, total funding $240M, on 6× user and 10× revenue growth. n8n repositioned from 'Zapier alternative' to AI agent orchestration. 235-point HN thread on 2025-10-09. (n8n blog /series-c.)

Repricing: active-workflow limits removed; Business plan added; execution-only metric

Aug 2025

n8n removed active-workflow limits on every plan, making users, workflows, and steps unlimited, and put the entire price gradient on monthly executions. A new Business plan (esp. for self-hosted teams) slotted between Pro and Enterprise. n8n framed the old workflow-based caps as discouraging enterprise builders from experimenting. (n8n blog, 2025-08-07.)

Starter execution quota lowered to 2.5k; annual toggle at 20% off

Jan 2024

Wayback snapshots (2024-01, 2024-10) show Starter at 2,500 executions (down from 5k), Pro at 10k, and a Monthly/Annual toggle advertising 20% annual savings. Still a 3-tier Starter/Pro/Enterprise layout with active-workflow caps; no Business tier yet. Dollar figures did not render in the archive (unknown).

Cloud paid tiers: Starter / Pro / Enterprise with active-workflow caps

Jul 2023

Wayback snapshot (2023-07) shows three cloud tiers — Starter (5k executions, 5 active workflows, single user), Pro (10k executions, 10 active workflows, unlimited users), Enterprise (custom). Pricing combined an execution quota with an active-workflow cap and, on Starter, a single-user limit. Dollar figures did not render in the archive (marked unknown).

Pricing page is self-host first; Cloud in early access

Jun 2022

Wayback snapshot (2022-06) shows the pricing page as a Desktop & Self-hosted / Cloud toggle: Desktop App (Free) and Self-Hosted (Free) are the headline offers; managed Cloud sits behind a separate tab in early access. No paid cloud tiers are surfaced as the primary view.

Apache 2.0 → Sustainable Use License (fair-code)

Mar 2022

n8n replaced its Apache 2.0 + Commons Clause license with the new Sustainable Use License — source-available, based on Elastic License 2.0 — and coined the term 'fair-code'. The self-host engine stays free; commercial hosting-as-a-service is restricted. (n8n blog, 2022-03-17.)