n8n
A workflow automation platform you can either pay n8n to host or run on your own server, priced by how many times your workflows execute rather than by how many people use them.
What it costs
| Tier | Price | For | Includes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Community | Free, self-hosted | Anyone willing to run it on their own server. | A standard self-hosted version of n8n, available on GitHub. |
| Starter | 20€/mo, billed annually | Getting started and seeing whether the workflows hold. | 2,500 workflow executions a month, unlimited users and workflows. |
| Pro | 50€/mo, billed annually | Solo builders and small teams running workflows in production. | 10,000 workflow executions a month. |
| Business | 667€/mo, billed annually | Companies under 100 employees needing collaboration and scale. | 40,000 workflow executions a month, self-hosted. |
| Enterprise | Contact Sales | Organisations with compliance and governance requirements. | Custom execution volume, hosted by n8n or self-hosted. |
Read from n8n's own pricing page on 15 Sep 2026. Vendors change prices without notice.
Where it breaks
Pricing is in euros and by execution count, not by seat, so a chatty workflow is expensive and a busy team is not — the opposite of how most software bills, and the opposite of how most owners budget. The jump from Pro to Business is very large. And the honest warning from people who use it with non-technical colleagues is that the interface reads as programming to anyone who does not already think in terms of nodes and payloads.
The self-hosted edition runs anywhere Docker runs, which in practice means a small cloud server you are responsible for. That is the whole trade — no licence cost, and the uptime, backups and upgrades are now yours.
First entry in this reference. There is no previous check to compare it against.
n8n is the same job as Make with a different bargain. Pricing follows executions rather than seats, every plan carries unlimited users and unlimited workflows, and there is a free self-hosted edition if you would rather own the server than rent the service.
That last option is why it is worth knowing about even if you never take it. An automation platform you can move onto your own infrastructure is an automation platform that cannot price you out of your own operations later.
Who it is genuinely for
Be honest about the interface. A recurring observation from people who deploy this stuff for a living, quoted in our research: “If I show n8n to a small business owner, their eyes will glaze over immediately.” That is a fair description of the first ten minutes.
So the useful split is not n8n versus Make on features. It is:
- You will maintain this yourself, and you are not technical. Start with Make.
- You will maintain this yourself, and you have run a server before. n8n self-hosted costs the price of a small droplet.
- Someone technical maintains it for you. Either works. n8n’s execution-based pricing usually wins as headcount grows.
Why this category did not get eaten
The prediction that AI would make workflow platforms obsolete has run the other way. The platforms became AI’s runtime instead: n8n went from roughly $350M to a $5.2B valuation inside a year, with more than 80 per cent of new workflows involving AI agents, and Zapier repositioned itself entirely as an orchestration platform.
The reason is mechanical rather than commercial. An AI can now write the workflow. It still needs somewhere that stays awake to run it, hold the credentials, retry the failure and record what happened. That somewhere is this category.
Our writing about it
Get n8n
Buying the tool is not the hard part.
The ebook is about what to hand over, in what order, and how you find out when it goes wrong. One payment, no subscription.