n8n Pricing 2026: Cloud vs Self-Hosted, Real Monthly Cost

A free puppy is the most expensive thing you will ever get for free.

Nobody charges you at the door. Then comes the food. The vet. The chewed sofa. The dog walker for the week you're away.

n8n is the same kind of free.

The self-hosted Community Edition costs nothing to download. It runs as many workflows as you like. No execution meter, no per-step fee.

And then comes the server. The updates. The backups. The night it stops answering webhooks and nobody knows why.

This post puts real numbers on both sides, so you can pick with your eyes open.

Short on time? Fewer than 2,500 runs a month and nobody technical on the team: n8n Cloud Starter. Heavy usage, private data, or tired of counting executions: self-host the Community Edition, and set it up properly once. Either way, the executions math below decides it.

n8n pricing in 2026: the plans

n8n bills by executions. One execution is one complete run of a workflow, however many nodes it has. Users and workflows are unlimited on every plan.

Here is what n8n lists as of September 2026, with monthly billing:

n8n lists prices in euros, and it changes plans often. Check n8n.io/pricing for your currency before you commit.

Two details on that table matter more than the prices:

• "Runs at once" is a real limit. Starter runs 5 workflows at the same time. If 20 webhooks arrive in the same second, the rest wait in line. For a form or a CRM sync that's fine. For a busy webhook endpoint it isn't.
• Business is self-hosted. At €800 a month, you still run the server. What you pay for is SSO, Git-based versioning and separate environments, not hosting.

What the Community Edition really costs

"Free" covers the license. It doesn't cover these:

The server. A VPS with 2 vCPUs and 4 GB of RAM handles most small-team n8n setups. Depending on the provider that's a few dollars a month at the budget end and a few tens of dollars at the premium end. Prices moved several times this year, so compare current ones.

The setup. n8n in Docker with Postgres, a reverse proxy, SSL, a firewall, and the right environment variables. It takes an afternoon if you've done it before.

The upkeep. n8n ships updates often. Somebody has to apply them, read the release notes, and check that workflows still run afterwards.

The backups. This is the line most setups skip, and the one that hurts most:

• The database holds your workflows, credentials and execution history.
• The encryption key (N8N_ENCRYPTION_KEY, or the key n8n generated in its data folder) decrypts every stored credential. Lose it, and every credential in your backup is useless. You will be reconnecting every app by hand.

A backup that includes the database but not the key is a safe with the combination thrown away.

A self-hosted setup that doesn't bite back

If you self-host, these five settings are the difference between "free" and "free until Tuesday":

N8N_HOST=n8n.example.com
N8N_PROTOCOL=https
WEBHOOK_URL=https://n8n.example.com/
N8N_ENCRYPTION_KEY=<a long random string, stored somewhere that is not this server>
DB_TYPE=postgresdb

• Postgres, not the default SQLite, once real workflows depend on it. It backs up cleanly with pg_dump and copes better with many runs at once.
• WEBHOOK_URL so n8n shows your real public address instead of localhost:5678. Without it, the webhook URLs you paste into other apps point nowhere. (More on that in n8n 502 Bad Gateway behind a proxy.)
• Execution data pruning. Check EXECUTIONS_DATA_PRUNE and EXECUTIONS_DATA_MAX_AGE so saved execution history can't grow the database until the disk is full.
• Nightly backups off the server, and one real restore test. The Coolify vs Dokploy post has the exact restore commands.

So which one is cheaper?

It depends on two numbers: how many runs a month, and whose time fixes it when it breaks.

A quick sanity check: over a year, Cloud Pro with monthly billing costs €720. A self-hosted setup costs the server, plus whatever the setup and upkeep cost you in time or money. If you have somebody who enjoys that work, self-hosting wins easily. If you don't, the time is the real price.

Coming from Zapier? The math is different again, because Zapier counts every step. See n8n vs Zapier: when switching actually saves money.

The bottom line

n8n Cloud is renting a car. Predictable, someone else changes the oil, and you pay by the mile.

Self-hosting is buying one. Cheaper per mile, as long as somebody checks the tires.

Both are fine choices. The expensive choice is the third one: self-hosting with no backups, no updates and no idea where the encryption key went.

P.S. Not sure which side of the math you're on? Send me roughly how many runs a month you expect and what the workflows touch. I'll reply with which option I'd pick, in one message. Free.