The Community edition is free and unlimited, Business costs 667 EUR/month. What the plans really differ in and when an SME needs Enterprise.
n8n comes in four variants: the free Community edition for self-hosting with no execution limit, the Cloud plans Starter and Pro from 20 or 50 euros per month respectively, the Business plan for self-hosting with support from 667 euros per month, and Enterprise with individual pricing. The honest answer for most SMEs upfront: the Community edition fully covers everyday automation, with n8n you mainly pay for team and governance features, not for more automation power. As of: July 2026, prices according to the n8n pricing page.
The line is not drawn at automation, but at team governance: single sign-on via SAML or LDAP, Git versioning with separate environments for development and production, external secret stores such as Vault, log streaming into a SIEM, and fine-grained projects and roles are only available from Business or Enterprise. Anyone who has never needed these terms in operations most likely does not need them in n8n either. The Community edition has a pragmatic substitute for this: export workflows as JSON and back them up in your own Git repository, manage credentials via environment variables.
The paid plan makes sense in three situations. First, when compliance requirements demand SSO and centralized rights management, typically from around 50 automation users or in regulated industries. Second, when multiple teams work on workflows in parallel and need separate development and production environments with a clean deployment process. Third, when a support contract with response times is required. Below these thresholds, an SME paying for Business from around 8,000 euros a year is mainly paying for functions it does not use. The more economical route then is usually: Community edition on your own German server, professionally set up and maintained, with a service provider as a safety net instead of a license agreement.
A calculation example over three years: Cloud Pro costs 1,800 euros, a suitable German server for the Community edition costs 200 to 700 euros depending on size, plus a one-time cost for clean setup with HTTPS, backups and updates. From medium usage onward, self-hosting is significantly cheaper and has no execution limits, but you bear the operations yourself. We handle exactly this setup as an n8n service at a fixed price, including the question of whether Cloud or your own server fits your data protection requirements. How n8n performs overall against the competition is covered in the big tool comparison.
Yes, the Community edition is also free for commercial use within your own company, governed by the Sustainable Use License. What is essentially not allowed is reselling n8n itself as a paid hosting product. Internal automation, including business-critical automation, is explicitly permitted, and executions are unlimited.
n8n counts complete workflow executions, regardless of how many steps they contain. Zapier and Make, on the other hand, bill per individual step, so a 20-step workflow costs twenty times as much there. For more complex automations, the execution model is therefore structurally cheaper, and self-hosted, the counting is eliminated entirely.
The workflows, no, they can be exported and imported as JSON. The stored credentials, however, yes: credentials are encrypted with an instance-specific key and must be recreated on the new instance. Webhook URLs also change and must be updated in the connected systems, so plan the move as a small project.
Yes, the Community edition is developed from the same source code and continuously receives the same core updates, new nodes and bug fixes. The differences lie in the license-required add-on modules such as SSO or environments, not in how up to date it is. When self-hosting, the only important thing is a clean update process with backups, so that a version jump does not become a risk.
Founder of NordFlux. Spent four years automating processes at enterprise scale at Dräger, and now brings that depth to the mid-market — pragmatic and with full data sovereignty.
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Execution limits, enterprise features, and the real cost of cloud versus self-hosting can only be judged once you know your actual usage, not the marketing table. NordFlux advises vendor-neutrally on which n8n plan fits your company size and workflows, with no stake in any particular license tier. In an initial conversation, we work through your concrete cost calculation, cloud versus self-hosted.
