The billing model that decides everything

Start with the meter, because it is the reason people move to n8n in the first place. Zapier bills per task and Make bills per operation, so a single automation that touches ten apps burns ten units every time it runs. n8n bills per execution: one full run of a workflow counts as one, whether that workflow has three nodes or forty.

Play that out on a real automation. Say you sync new Shopify orders to a spreadsheet, tag the customer, post to Slack, and fire a webhook. On a per-task tool that is four to five units per order. On n8n it is one execution per order, full stop. For anyone running high-volume or many-step flows, that difference is not a rounding error. It is the whole bill.

What n8n actually is

n8n is a workflow automation platform built by a Berlin company of the same name. You wire nodes together on a visual canvas, each node being an app action, a trigger, a transform, or a piece of logic. Around 400 native integrations ship in the box, and an HTTP Request node reaches anything with an API.

The part that pulls in developers is the Code node. Drop in JavaScript or Python mid-flow and manipulate the data directly, instead of fighting a no-code tool's formula boxes to do something it was never meant to do. n8n also leaned hard into AI: it has native LangChain-style nodes for building agents, chaining models, and querying vector stores, so an "AI agent that reads my inbox and drafts replies" is a first-class build here rather than a bolt-on.

Pricing, checked August 2026

n8n Cloud has three public tiers plus Enterprise, priced in euros. Checked on the n8n pricing page in August 2026:

• Starter: €24/month for 2,500 executions.
• Pro: €60/month for 10,000 executions.
• Business: €800/month for 40,000 executions, plus SSO and Git-based environments.
• Enterprise: custom, with dedicated infrastructure and unlimited executions.

Two things worth knowing. There is no permanent free cloud plan; you get a 14-day trial with no card required, and then you pay. And in the April 2026 refresh n8n dropped active-workflow limits across every tier, so you can leave hundreds of workflows switched on and still only pay for the runs. That quietly removed the most annoying cap the platform used to have.

The self-hosted route is a different economy entirely, which is the next section.

Self-hosting: free, with an asterisk

You can run n8n on your own server for nothing. The Community Edition installs via Docker or npm, and a small VPS at €5 to €20 a month will handle a serious amount of automation with unlimited executions. No per-run meter, ever.

Here is the asterisk most reviews skip. n8n is not open source in the OSI sense. It ships under a "fair-code" Sustainable Use License, which lets you self-host, modify, and use it internally for free, but bars you from repackaging n8n as a hosted product you sell to others. For 95% of teams that changes nothing. If your plan was to white-label n8n and resell it, read the license first. Some genuinely enterprise features (SSO, log streaming, external secret stores) are also gated behind the paid Enterprise tier even when you self-host.

The other cost is you. Self-hosting means you own the upgrades, the backups, the database, and the 2 a.m. page when a queue backs up. That is a fair trade for the price, but it is not free of effort.

Where it falls short

The learning curve is real. n8n assumes you are comfortable with concepts like JSON, arrays, and referencing data from an earlier node. A marketer who just wants "new lead goes to CRM" will find Zapier gentler and faster to a first result. n8n rewards you once the automation gets complicated, not before.

Debugging large workflows can also be fiddly: pinning data, re-running single nodes, and reading error output on a 30-node flow takes patience. And the execution model, generous as it is, can bite in one spot. If you build tight polling triggers that fire every minute, each poll can count as an execution, so a "cheap" schedule quietly eats your allowance. Event-driven webhooks avoid this; polling does not.

Verdict

n8n is the right tool for a technical team, or a solo builder who can read a bit of code, running automations that are either high-volume or many steps deep. Self-host it and the running cost drops close to the price of the VPS, which no per-task competitor can match. The AI agent nodes make it one of the better places to build real LLM workflows right now.

It is the wrong tool if you are non-technical and want a handful of simple two-app zaps with the least possible friction. You will spend the setup time you saved on money elsewhere and get frustrated on the way. For that job, buy Zapier and don't look back. If you want the same self-hostable freedom under a proper open-source (MIT) license with no resale clause, look at Activepieces instead.