n8n

About n8n

n8n is a workflow-automation and AI-orchestration platform that connects applications and services through a visual, node-based editor while allowing arbitrary code inside any step. It was founded in 2019 by Jan Oberhauser and is based in Berlin, Germany. Its defining characteristic is the fair-code model: the source is publicly available and free to self-host, which sets it apart from the fully proprietary, cloud-only design of Zapier and Make.

A workflow in n8n is a graph of nodes, where each node is either a trigger, an app integration, a logic operation, or a code step. Code nodes run JavaScript or Python and can import libraries, so a builder is never boxed in by the visual layer when a transformation needs real logic. The platform lists more than 1,830 integrations as of 2026, and because the node framework is open, integrations that a vendor has not built can be added by the community or written in-house. Billing on n8n Cloud is counted per workflow execution: one execution is a single run of an entire workflow regardless of how many nodes it contains or how much data passes through, which is a materially different cost model from per-task or per-operation competitors.

From 2024 onward n8n repositioned from "workflow automation" toward "AI orchestration." The flagship addition is the AI Agent node, which bundles a chat model, a system prompt, memory, and callable tools into a single step, and an AI Workflow Builder that generates flows from natural-language prompts using a per-tier credit allotment. This direction is the reason n8n is now frequently evaluated alongside dedicated AI-agent platforms rather than only against integration tools.

n8n ships in two main forms. The Community edition is free to self-host, distributed on GitHub under the Sustainable Use License (source-available, free for internal and personal use, with resale as a hosted service requiring authorization). n8n Cloud is the managed offering: as of June 2026 Cloud Starter is €20 per month for 2,500 executions, Cloud Pro is €50 per month for 10,000 executions, Business is €667 per month, and Enterprise is custom-priced. The permanent free Cloud plan was discontinued in favour of a time-limited trial, so the genuinely free path is self-hosting the Community edition.

flowchart TD
  A[Choosing an n8n deployment] --> B{Data must stay in your infrastructure?}
  B -- Yes --> C[Community edition: self-host, free, Sustainable Use License]
  B -- No --> D{Need SSO, Git sync, shared projects?}
  D -- Yes --> E[Cloud Business EUR667/mo or Enterprise]
  D -- No --> F{Monthly executions}
  F -- Up to ~2,500 --> G[Cloud Starter EUR20/mo]
  F -- Up to ~10,000 --> H[Cloud Pro EUR50/mo]

n8n competes with Zapier, Make, Pipedream, and Power Automate, and increasingly with AI-agent platforms. Its commercial momentum is unusual for the category: the company raised a $180M Series C in October 2025, led by Accel with participation from NVIDIA's NVentures, at a post-money valuation reported around $2.5 billion, on the back of steep 2025 growth in users and revenue. The trade-off buyers weigh is operational: self-hosting removes per-execution cost but adds the work of running, upgrading, and monitoring the system, while n8n Cloud removes that work in exchange for execution-based billing.

Editor's Note: Across our n8n self-hosting deployments at ShadowGen in 2024-26, the recurring win is cost and the recurring trap is data retention. One mid-market SaaS client ran roughly 2,300 executions per day on a single 2 vCPU / 4 GB VPS for about $12 per month, replacing a Zapier plan several multiples of that. The caveat that bit us once: the execution-log table grew past 40 GB before anyone set EXECUTIONS_DATA_MAX_AGE and pruning, which quietly degraded the Postgres backing store. Set retention on day one, not after the first slowdown. — Rafal Fila, ShadowGen