CentriWebn8n pricing has two paths: n8n Cloud, a paid subscription charged by executions (each full run of a workflow), and the self-hosted community edition, which is free to use for your own business under n8n’s licence. Self-hosting has no licence fee, but you pay for a server and for the person who keeps it updated, backed up and secure, and that person is usually the largest cost.
A disclosure: CentriWeb builds most client automations in n8n, so we have a view. Every plan, price and licence term below comes from n8n’s own pages as at November 2026. Check their page for current prices.
n8n pricing for the cloud plans
When we opened n8n’s pricing page, it listed these plans, with prices shown for annual billing:
| Plan | Price shown | Executions a month | Hosting |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | 20€ a month, billed annually | 2,500 | Hosted by n8n |
| Pro | 50€ a month, billed annually | 10,000 | Hosted by n8n |
| Business | 667€ a month, billed annually | 40,000 | Self-hosted only |
| Enterprise | Contact sales | Custom | Hosted or self-hosted |
The page showed euro amounts when we opened it. It has a monthly billing toggle, but monthly prices did not appear in the page text, and the currency shown may depend on where you view it from. Confirm both on the page before you budget.
Other limits on the page worth knowing:
- Unlimited users and active workflows on every plan.
- Concurrent executions: 5 on Starter and up to 50 on Pro, which is how many runs can happen at the same moment.
- Longest run: 5 minutes on Starter and 40 minutes on Pro.
- Run history: Starter keeps 2,500 saved executions and Pro 25,000. Workflow history is 1 day on Starter and 5 days on Pro.
- Support: the forum on Starter, Pro and Business. Dedicated support with a service level agreement is Enterprise only.
- Hosting location: data on the hosted plans is stored in the EU, on servers in Frankfurt, Germany.
There is a free cloud trial with no credit card, with 1,000 executions. The page also lists a start-up plan for companies with under 20 employees at 50 percent off Business.
What an execution is, and what happens over the limit
n8n’s pricing page defines an execution as a single run of an entire workflow, whatever the number of steps or the amount of data. That is the main difference from tools that count each step.
Take a workflow that receives a website enquiry, checks for an existing contact, creates or updates the CRM record, creates a job, sends an SMS, emails the team and logs the result. That is about eight steps. At 300 enquiries a month it uses 300 executions on n8n Cloud, inside the Starter allowance. A per-step tool would count most of those eight steps on every run. These numbers are an example; use your own.
The page says reaching your execution quota does not stop workflows. Overage fees are listed as capped on Starter and Pro, and Business and Enterprise customers may be charged overage if they do not move up a tier. The page does not give an overage amount, so check it there.
Is n8n free?
The community edition is free to download and self-host. n8n’s licence FAQ, covering its Sustainable Use License, sets out what that allows for a business:
- You can use it free for your own internal workflows.
- You can have someone build and maintain workflows on your instance, and they can charge you for that work.
- You cannot host n8n as a service where clients build their own workflows, white-label it, or let outside users configure workflows through your product.
The FAQ puts the test this way: what matters is who controls the workflow logic, not whose credentials are used. For an ordinary business automating its own work, the free licence fits. If you plan to offer automation to your own customers, read the FAQ in full or ask n8n.
Some features need a paid licence key even when self-hosted. The pricing page says the Business plan is self-hosted only, and that Business and Enterprise self-hosted features use a licence key that checks in with n8n’s licence server daily, including production execution counts.
The cost of self-hosting n8n
Self-hosting moves the bill from n8n to three other places.
The server
n8n needs a server to run on. n8n’s hosting documentation lists Docker, Docker Compose or a one-line setup on Linux or macOS. Server prices come from your hosting provider. A self-hosted server can sit in an Australian data centre, which some businesses want for privacy reasons.
The setup
Someone installs n8n, connects a database, sets up a domain and a secure certificate, and configures email and backups. n8n’s Docker guide says it stores workflows, credentials and past executions in SQLite by default and supports PostgreSQL. It also says to keep the folder holding encryption keys on persistent storage. Lose that and saved credentials go with it.
The person who looks after it
This is the cost most people leave out. The same guide says self-hosting n8n requires technical knowledge, including server and container setup, resource management, security and configuration. It recommends self-hosting for expert users, warns that mistakes can lead to data loss, security problems and downtime, and recommends n8n Cloud if you are not experienced at managing servers.
Ongoing work includes applying updates, checking backups restore, watching disk space and failed runs, and fixing workflows when connected apps change. Our guide to automation maintenance covers what that looks like week to week.
If nobody in the business has these skills, the practical choice is the cloud plan, or a partner who runs the server for you. A self-hosted instance that nobody updates is a security risk sitting on the internet, and one without tested backups can lose every workflow and saved login in a single fault. Budget for the person before you budget for the server.
Choosing a cloud plan
Most small businesses comparing the cloud plans are weighing Starter against Pro. Three questions settle it.
- How many runs a month? Add up the expected runs of every workflow, including the quiet ones. A workflow on a schedule every 15 minutes runs about 2,900 times in a 30 day month on its own, which is already past Starter’s 2,500. Scheduled checks add up faster than enquiry-driven workflows.
- How many at once? Starter allows 5 concurrent executions. If a batch of form submissions or a bulk import arrives together, runs queue. Pro allows more.
- How long does a run take? Starter stops a run at 5 minutes. Workflows that wait on slow systems or process large files may need Pro’s 40 minutes.
Count your runs before you pick a plan, and recount after adding any scheduled workflow.
Cloud or self-hosted: a way to compare
Put your own figures into this sum, monthly:
- Cloud: the plan that covers your executions, from n8n’s page.
- Self-hosted: the server, plus backup storage, plus hours of upkeep a month multiplied by what that time costs, whether it is yours, a staff member’s or a contractor’s.
If upkeep is two hours a month and that time is worth more than the gap between the server and the cloud plan, cloud is cheaper. Self-hosting tends to make sense when volume is high, when you want data held in a particular country, or when someone technical already looks after your servers.
Is n8n the right tool at all?
n8n suits workflows with many steps, frequent runs, or logic that needs a line of code. It suits less when the person maintaining it is not technical. If that sounds like you, compare it with simpler tools first. Our n8n vs Zapier and n8n vs Make comparisons cover the trade-offs, and the three-way comparison sets the three side by side.
If you want n8n without running it yourself, CentriWeb builds and looks after n8n automations for clients as part of our automation work, including the server, updates and alerts.