n8n Pricing in 2026: Cloud Plans in GBP and the Real Cost of Self-Hosting

Key takeaways

• Self-hosted n8n is free: the Community edition has unlimited executions and almost every feature. You pay for the server and the upkeep.
• n8n Cloud starts at €24 a month (about £20): Starter covers 2,500 executions; paying annually brings it to €20 a month (about £17).
• You pay per execution, not per step: one run of a whole workflow is one execution, however many nodes it has.
• Business is self-hosted only: SSO, Git version control and environments start at €667 a month billed annually (about £563).
• The hidden cost is maintenance: updates, backups and security patching need an owner, and that time usually costs more than the server.

n8n's pricing page lists euros and assumes you already know what an execution is and whether you want to run your own server. This guide answers the questions a UK business actually asks: what each plan costs in pounds, what you get for free, and when self-hosting is cheaper once you count the time it takes. If you are still choosing between tools, start with our n8n vs Zapier vs Make comparison.

n8n pricing at a glance (October 2026)

All plans include unlimited users, unlimited workflows and every integration, according to n8n's pricing page. The annual price is the monthly equivalent of paying a year upfront, which n8n says saves 17%: €240 a year for Starter (about £203), €600 for Pro at 10,000 executions (about £506) and €8,000 for Business at 40,000 (about £6,751). Pro's 50,000-execution tier costs €145 a month (about £122), or €1,450 a year.

What counts as an execution in n8n?

An execution is one complete run of a workflow. n8n's pricing page is explicit that the number of steps and the amount of data processed do not change the count: a two-node workflow and a forty-node workflow each use one execution per run. That is the main pricing difference from Zapier, which charges tasks for the steps inside a run, and Make, which charges credits per module operation.

To estimate your volume, n8n suggests counting how often each workflow is triggered:

• Scheduled workflows: a daily schedule is 30 or 31 executions a month; one that runs every five minutes is roughly 8,600 to 8,900.
• Webhook workflows: one execution per incoming event, such as a form submission or a new order.
• Chatbots: conversations per week multiplied by the average number of messages per conversation.

The every-five-minutes example is worth noticing. A single polling workflow can use most of a Pro allowance on its own, so on n8n Cloud it pays to trigger from webhooks where the other app supports them, rather than checking for changes on a timer.

n8n Cloud plans in GBP

n8n Cloud is the hosted version: n8n runs the servers, applies updates and handles scaling. n8n says hosted plans store data in the EU, on servers in Frankfurt. There is a 14-day free trial with Pro-level features, capped at 1,000 executions, and no card is needed to start it.

Starter: €24 a month (about £20)

Starter covers 2,500 executions a month with 5 concurrent executions and one shared project, and includes the AI agent and MCP nodes. Each execution can run for up to 5 minutes, and execution logs are kept for 7 days. It suits a small business automating a handful of workflows: lead capture, notifications, a weekly report.

Pro: from €60 a month (about £51)

Pro starts at 10,000 executions, with a 50,000-execution tier above it. It raises concurrency to as many as 50 executions at once, allows executions of up to 40 minutes, adds three shared projects, admin roles, workflow history and seven days of insights. This is the plan most small teams running automation in production end up on.

Enterprise: priced by n8n's sales team

Enterprise can be hosted by n8n or self-hosted. It adds unlimited shared projects, 200 or more concurrent executions, a year of insights, external secret stores, log streaming and dedicated support with an SLA. n8n does not publish a price.

Is n8n free? The self-hosted Community edition

Yes, if you host it yourself. Without a licence key, any self-hosted install runs as the free Community edition, and n8n's documentation describes it as almost the complete feature set. You can run it indefinitely with no execution limit. Registering the instance with an email address unlocks a few more features for free: folders, debug in editor and custom execution data. Queue mode for scaling across workers is included (n8n: Compare editions).

What the Community edition leaves out is mostly team and governance tooling:

• Sharing workflows and credentials with other users (only the instance owner and the creator can access them)
• Projects, environments and Git-based version control
• SSO through SAML or LDAP
• Custom variables and external secret stores
• Log streaming (standard logging is included) and multi-main mode
• External storage for binary data

For a single technical owner, none of that is a blocker. For a team of five sharing credentials and reviewing each other's changes, it usually is, and that is where the self-hosted Business plan comes in.

What the n8n licence lets a business do

Self-hosted n8n is fair-code rather than open source in the strict sense. It is published under n8n's Sustainable Use License, and n8n's Community license FAQ gives a simple rule: if workflows are only created or modified by you or people in your organisation, you can use it for free.

• Allowed: running your own business on it, building automations for clients on your instance as long as the clients cannot create or edit them, charging clients for workflow setup and maintenance, and using n8n behind the scenes in your own product.
• Not allowed: hosting n8n as a service where clients build their own workflows, letting end users configure workflows through your product, forking it into your own automation product, or white-labelling it.

If your plan is to give customers a workflow builder powered by n8n, that needs a commercial licence from n8n, not the Community edition.

What self-hosted n8n really costs

Free software still runs somewhere. These are the cost lines a UK business should budget for before choosing self-hosted over Cloud:

Server figures are from DigitalOcean's droplet pricing on 18 October 2026. The smallest droplet is fine for testing. For production with PostgreSQL alongside, we would start at 2 to 4 GiB of memory and size up from real usage. n8n recommends Docker Compose for production installs, and its docs note that npm installation is deprecated from n8n 3.0 (n8n: Host n8n).

n8n Cloud or self-hosted: which is cheaper?

Take a business running 10,000 executions a month. On n8n Cloud that is the Pro plan: €60 a month, or €50 billed annually, so about £42 to £51. Self-hosted, the same load fits comfortably on a $12 to $24 droplet, about £9 to £18 a month, plus maintenance time. On cash alone, self-hosting wins. Once you price an hour or two of a developer's time each month for updates and checks, the gap closes quickly, and n8n Cloud also takes the risk of a broken upgrade off your hands.

The calculation flips at high volume. Cloud plans cap executions; the Community edition does not. A workload of several hundred thousand executions a month on a well-sized server costs the same whether it runs 100,000 or 500,000 times, which is why agencies and data-heavy teams tend to self-host. The exception is when you need team features: the Business plan's €667 a month (about £563) on annual billing, plus overage of €4,000 per extra 300,000 executions, quickly outweighs any server saving.

Data location can decide it on its own. n8n Cloud stores data in Frankfurt. If a client contract or sector rule needs UK hosting, self-host in a UK region.

n8n vs Zapier on price

Zapier charges tasks for the steps in each run, so a trigger plus five actions running 1,000 times a month uses several thousand tasks. On n8n the same workflow uses 1,000 executions. For simple two-step automations the difference is small and Zapier's larger app library and easier setup may matter more. For long, branching workflows, n8n's per-execution model is much cheaper. The full breakdown, with Zapier's and Make's current tiers, is in our n8n vs Zapier vs Make comparison.

Ways to keep n8n costs down

• Trigger from webhooks, not timers: polling every few minutes burns executions on n8n Cloud even when nothing has changed.
• Combine small workflows: five workflows fired by the same event use five executions; one workflow with branches uses one.
• Pay annually once usage is stable: n8n says annual billing saves 17%.
• Check the Start-up Plan: n8n offers 50% off Business for companies with fewer than 20 employees, if you qualify.
• Self-host the high-volume jobs: some teams keep collaborative work on Cloud and run heavy batch workflows on a self-hosted instance.

How Aristral works with n8n

n8n is the default orchestration tool in our AI automation agency work, because clients can inspect and own what we build. We set it up on n8n Cloud or self-hosted on infrastructure the client owns, depending on volume, data location and who will maintain it after handover. See our n8n integration page for the kinds of workflows we build, or contact us to talk through which set-up fits.