n8n pricing 2026: cloud plans, executions and self-hosting

It's Tuesday night and you finally have the workflow you wanted on paper. A lead fills out the form on your website, the details go into a spreadsheet, you get a text, and the customer gets a thank-you email within a minute. Someone told you n8n does this for less than Zapier, and you're on its pricing page trying to figure out which plan you'd actually need and what the bill looks like once the whole office starts using it.

This post covers n8n pricing from the owner's side: what each plan costs, how n8n counts usage, what happens when you go over, and what "free if you host it yourself" means in practice. Every price and limit below comes from n8n's pricing page, which I checked on October 23, 2026. n8n changes its plans now and then, so look again before you buy.

n8n pricing at a glance

A few things on that page catch people out. The prices are in euros, and there are no US dollar prices anywhere; the only dollar sign is on a link to a separate form for paying in dollars. Only the annual price is printed. The page says annual billing saves 17% but never shows a monthly price, so expect a monthly commitment to cost more than the table above and confirm the number at checkout.

Business isn't on n8n's cloud yet. The page lists it as self-hosted only, with a waitlist for the cloud version. Companies with fewer than 20 employees can apply for a startup discount of 50% off Business.

The cloud trial needs no credit card and includes 1,000 executions, 5 concurrent executions, a 180-second timeout and one team project. The Business trial runs 14 days with full access and does ask for a card.

What Starter and Pro include

Most small businesses compare Starter and Pro, so here are the rows where they differ, from n8n's comparison table.

The execution count gets the attention, but the rows I'd look at first are the log and the history. When a lead goes missing, you find out what happened by opening the failed run and reading it. On Starter, that run is gone after seven days, and you can only roll a workflow back to how it looked one day ago. If nobody checks on the automations every week, Pro buys you time to notice.

Neither plan comes with a support line. Both list the community forum. Dedicated support with a service agreement starts at Enterprise.

What counts as an execution in n8n

n8n's page defines an execution as "a single run of your entire workflow." Steps don't matter and data volume doesn't matter. A workflow with three steps and a workflow with thirty steps each use one execution per run.

This is the biggest difference from Zapier, which charges per task, meaning each action step that completes. My Zapier pricing breakdown walks through that model. With n8n, you can add a step (a second text, a CRM update, a note in the job file) without changing the bill, because the bill follows how often the workflow runs, not how much it does.

What you do have to watch is what starts the run. A workflow started by an event (a form submission, a new booking, a webhook from your field software) runs once per event, so 150 web leads in a month is 150 executions. A workflow on a schedule runs every time the timer fires. If it checks an inbox or a spreadsheet every 15 minutes, that's 96 runs a day and 2,880 in a 30-day month, which is more than Starter's whole allowance spent on one workflow, most of whose runs found nothing new.

So if the app you're connecting can send an event, use that instead of a timer.

How to estimate your own n8n bill

Write down each workflow you plan to run and how it starts, then do the arithmetic.

Add up the column. If the total sits well under 2,500 and you don't need longer logs, Starter covers it. If it's close to the line, or one scheduled workflow is eating most of it, either move that workflow to an event trigger or price Pro.

On going over: the page says reaching a limit "does not stop your workflows from running." The only overage price it lists is for Business and Enterprise, at 4,000 EUR per extra bucket of 300,000 executions, invoiced 45 days later if you don't respond or upgrade. For Starter and Pro the page doesn't say what overage costs, so ask n8n before you plan around running past your allowance.

Is n8n free if you self-host it?

The software is free, but running it costs you something. n8n's page says a standard self-hosted version is available on GitHub, and its hosting docs say that without a license key, n8n runs as the free Community edition, on the same core product as the paid self-hosted editions. The one-line setup in those docs needs Docker.

Instead of a subscription, you pay for a server that runs around the clock, from whichever host you pick. Someone has to install new versions when they come out and check that nothing broke afterward. You need backups, so a dead server doesn't take your workflows and saved logins with it, and you need to keep that machine locked down, because it holds the keys to your email, your calendar and your customer list. And when the server stops at 2 a.m., nothing sends until someone notices. Nobody at n8n is going to call you about it.

For a business with an IT person, or an owner who enjoys this kind of thing, self-hosting is a real option and the savings are real. For a five-person service company where the owner is also the estimator, I'd start on the cloud. I go deeper on that tradeoff in DIY automation vs bringing in an engineer.

Is n8n cheaper than Zapier?

For workflows with many steps, usually yes, because n8n charges per run and Zapier charges per action. For workflows that run constantly on a timer, the gap closes, because every check counts as a run on n8n. My n8n vs Zapier comparison puts the two side by side, including who fixes things when a step breaks, and that's often the bigger cost.

What stays with a person

An n8n plan gets you the engine. It won't decide what the text to a new lead says, which leads get a phone call from you instead, or what happens when a customer replies "can you come Thursday instead?"

Someone still sets the rules: which jobs get a quote follow-up, how many reminders an invoice gets, and the point where a person takes over. Replies still need a person. Automation can confirm, remind and route, but a customer with a question or a complaint should reach you or your office.

Someone also has to watch for failures. A connected app changes its login or a field gets renamed, and a workflow quietly stops. Whoever gets that alert needs the time to act on it. And the accounts should stay yours. Your logins, your data and your customer list belong in your name, no matter who builds the workflows.

If you'd rather not run it yourself

This is the work I do for small businesses around Illinois. For a freight forwarder, I built intake for quote, import, export and general inquiries, so each request arrives sorted instead of piling up in one inbox. Sometimes the right answer is a 20€ n8n plan and an afternoon of setup, and I'll tell you when it is. When it isn't, builds start at $500 one-time, then a flat monthly from $99 after an included run-in period, cancellable, and part of that monthly is me noticing when a step breaks. If you want help working out which plan your workflows need, or whether you need n8n at all, book a free 20 minute process audit.