Moxo vs n8n in 2026: Who Runs the Engine and Who Keeps the Record

Overview

Moxo and n8n both stop a process so a person can decide, and little else about them is alike. n8n is a source-available engine you can run yourself or buy hosted, where an approval is a node wired onto a tool connector and, self-hosted, the execution history is a table in a database you administer. Moxo is hosted: the pause is a first-class step type, and each run is a Flow whose record lives with the vendor. Two questions decide it, and neither is on a feature grid. Who carries the operational burden? Who can still read the evidence a year from now? This guide scores five rounds, from the engine room to retention, using n8n's own documents read 21 to 23 September 2026 and Moxo's documents plus synthetic AutomationAtlas builder tests on 14 and 15 September 2026.

Company Snapshot

The Core Trade-Off: n8n Wins the Engine Room Outright

n8n wins the engine room outright: Community Edition runs on your own server at no licence cost under the Sustainable Use License, and the hosted route is cheap too. Starter is "20€ /mo, billed annually" for "2.5K" executions, about 0.8 euro cents each, against $50 a flow at Moxo Team's allowance (n8n.io/pricing, read 21 September 2026). Moxo is hosted only, lists no free plan and sells Team by the year, so the smallest Moxo commitment is $5,000.

What Moxo does well is the other side of the same line: nobody on your team patches a server, upgrades a database or watches a queue at night. Run n8n yourself and the approval history sits in your database, under defaults you may never have changed. Self-hosted does not mean control; it means control you have to exercise. Self-hosted n8n does not suit a team with nobody to run a server, nor an agency wanting to operate approval flows for clients as a paid service on the free licence.

Moxo can be started by another system, and incoming webhooks exist per template, but not on the plan you can price: "Webhooks", "REST APIs" and "Connect via MCP" are all listed from Scale, a custom quote (moxo.com/pricing, 15 September 2026). The constraint is commercial rather than architectural, and that matters at the negotiating table, because a commercial constraint has a price and a missing capability does not.

Licensing: n8n Lets You Read and Change the Code, Within Two Limits

n8n takes the licensing round, because it hands you the code. The Sustainable Use License, version 1.0, grants a royalty-free licence to use, copy, distribute and modify, and Business adds Git version control over workflows, so a process definition can sit in the same review flow as the rest of your code. Moxo is closed source, and what it exports is a template file, not the engine.

Two limits stay in the round, so read n8n's LICENSE.md before you plan a deployment. The licence confines you: "You may use or modify the software only for your own internal business purposes or for non-commercial or personal use. You may distribute the software or provide it to others only if you do so free of charge for non-commercial purposes." And the same file carves out code: "Source code files that contain '.ee.' in their filename or '.ee' in their dirname are NOT licensed under the Sustainable Use License", and need "a valid n8n Enterprise License" (read 21 September 2026). Enterprise code ships inside the tree you cloned, under terms that tree's own licence does not cover.

Moxo's answer is contractual rather than code. Its Terms and Conditions say "Company is solely responsible for any AI Content", and they also promise that "Moxo will not use AI Content to train Moxo's own AI models". On a hosted product, that promise is the part of the licence a buyer can hold the vendor to.

Who Approves: Moxo Will Not Let a Machine Approve, and n8n Must Be Told Who Can

This is Moxo's knockout: a machine credential cannot complete a human step. complete_step is "PAT-only — step completion is a participant action with audit-trail implications, so org keys are rejected"; review-approve, review-decline and prepare-complete each answer an Org API Key with 403 ASSIGNEE_REQUIRED; POST /v1/actions answers 403 ORG_KEY_NOT_SUPPORTED "for an Org API Key, which has no person behind it"; and list_attention_items returns an empty list to an org-key actor. Four separate enforcements point at one idea, and the log follows it. Roles "resolve to real participants at Flow start", and in synthetic tests on 14 and 15 September 2026 every one of the 17 audit rows read for a single flow carried an actor: a person's name, "AI Agent", "System" or "Public link".

n8n's default goes the other way. Its Slack approvals page warns: "If you leave the approver list empty, anyone who can see the message can approve or decline. In a channel, that's every member." Capture Who Responded and Restrict Who Can Approve close that gap, and both are off until you act; leave them alone and "the output contains only approved and respondedAt" (docs.n8n.io, read 21 September 2026). A record saying something was approved at a timestamp, without saying by whom, is a receipt. Every channel n8n documents is a chat or email service, from Slack and Telegram to Gmail and Outlook, so your approver needs an account there rather than on n8n.

n8n does well on granularity. Approval there is a property of a tool: "You can require human approval before an AI Agent executes a specific tool", after which the workflow "pauses and sends an approval request through your configured channel". Moxo's enforcement, for its part, sits behind an API listed from Scale, not from Team. List-view timestamps in Moxo's log showed minutes while the step activity panel showed seconds and a time-zone offset, which is worth knowing before you promise an auditor precision.

When the Approver Goes Quiet, Moxo Has Named Moves

Moxo takes this round, because a stalled step there has named moves rather than a blank canvas. A manager can remind, reassign, skip, reopen, retry or force-complete a step, and a forced close is recorded as one: force-complete "Records forceCompleted=true with your reason". One call reminds every overdue assignee across up to 50 flows, and a reminder goes by email or SMS according to the participant's primaryChannel, bumping a reminder count and writing a notification log row as it goes (developers.moxo.com, read 23 September 2026). Chasing a quiet client by text is a setting on the person, not a branch you build.

n8n's approval pages document approve and decline, which is why Automation Atlas's human-in-the-loop ranking scores it at approve and deny. Anything beyond that is a workflow you build, and building it is something n8n makes easy: a timeout on the wait and a second message cover the common case, on any channel n8n connects to. Moxo's API route to its verbs needs Scale.

Retention: Moxo Takes the Defaults Round, Narrowly

Moxo takes retention on defaults, narrowly. n8n's scaling documentation is blunt: "n8n enables pruning by default." Finished executions go once they pass EXECUTIONS_DATA_MAX_AGE, "default: 336 hours -> 14 days", or once the total passes EXECUTIONS_DATA_PRUNE_MAX_COUNT, "default: 10,000" (read 21 September 2026). Set that against the floor in Article 26(6) of the EU AI Act, which requires deployers of high-risk AI systems to keep the logs such a system generates automatically, where those are under their control, "of at least six months", read from the artificialintelligenceact.eu mirror. The default deletes at 14 days.

Moxo's documented deletion runs the other way. An organisation may auto-delete file contents after a flow ends while "retaining metadata and audit records" (Description of Services), and a finished flow exports as a ZIP of its data and attachments. The limits stay in the round: Moxo publishes no retention period and lists the audit log from Scale, while n8n's history is yours to keep indefinitely once someone raises the variable, and "Annotated executions (for example, executions with tags or ratings) are never pruned", so tagging an approval run is a habit worth building.

Editor's Note: n8n's approval can be configured to name nobody, and the settings that prevent it ship off. Leave the approver list empty and anyone who can see the message can approve or decline, which in a channel is every member, while "the output contains only approved and respondedAt". Moxo will not let you build that. Its API rejects an organisation key on every route that completes a human step, on the stated ground that completion is a participant action with audit-trail implications and an org key has no person behind it; we note that API is listed from Scale, not from Team. One product asks you to configure who the approver was. The other refuses the request when there is nobody to name. — Rafal Fila, ShadowGen

Governance, Admin Controls, and Compliance

Moxo

Administration here means narrowing a catalogue rather than reviewing code. The Description of Services, read 14 September 2026, lets administrators "disable specific step types or integrations for their Organization, hiding them from the builder without affecting in-flight Flows", and documents SAML 2.0 single sign-on with per-domain enforcement. Both single sign-on and the audit log are commercial questions, because moxo.com/pricing lists them from Scale. Our Moxo profile covers where the security page and the Description of Services differ on compliance wording.

n8n

n8n's governance features are plan features. Its pricing page, read 21 September 2026, puts "SSO, SAML and LDAP" and "Version control using Git" on Business, and "Log streaming" and "External secret store integration" on Enterprise. Its Community Edition documentation lists SSO, log streaming, external secrets and Git version control among the features that edition does not include.

One obligation stays with you either way. Article 26(2) of the EU AI Act assigns human oversight to natural persons with "the necessary competence, training and authority", and NIST's AI RMF asks at GOVERN 3.2 for policies that "define and differentiate roles and responsibilities for human-AI configurations". Neither vendor names your approver. n8n makes you configure the record that proves who it was; Moxo makes you buy it.

Should Every Case Become a Moxo Flow?

No, and the two price lists say why. Moxo meters flows, $50 apiece at Team's list price, while n8n meters executions at under a euro cent, so the design that respects both runs the volume through n8n and hands Moxo only the cases a person has to decide. Your Moxo allowance then tracks your exception rate rather than your transaction count, and the exception rate is the number to take into a Scale negotiation.

Both ends of that seam are already in Moxo's published API (developers.moxo.com/v1/openapi.json, read 23 September 2026). A template's incoming webhook can carry conditions, and a payload that misses them "is accepted with HTTP 200 and status skipped; no flow is started", so the rule deciding what needs a human can live in Moxo, where the approval's owners can read it, rather than inside the n8n workflow that feeds it. Going the other way, a WAIT step parks a Moxo flow until something calls its token URL, "no API key required", so a self-hosted n8n can finish a case's machine work inside your network and resume the flow with nothing but that token.

The same pairing answers this page's retention question. When a flow ends, n8n can pull GET /v1/flows/{id}/audit-log and GET /v1/flows/{id}/export, a ZIP of the flow's data and attachments, into storage you control, so evidence whose retention period Moxo's legal pages never state becomes evidence you keep for as long as you decide. The catch is the plan: Webhooks and REST APIs are Scale features on moxo.com/pricing, so the hybrid starts at a custom quote, not at $5,000 a year.

Selection Framework

Start from what the approval has to withstand, then from what your organisation can operate.

Neither vendor publishes a price for running approval workflows on somebody else's behalf. n8n's licence confines free use to "your own internal business purposes", and moxo.com/pricing listed three plans with one price between them on 15 September 2026. For an agency that is a sales conversation at both.