n8n’s cheapest cloud plan is 20€ a month, billed annually, for 2,500 workflow executions. Zapier’s free plan gives you 100 tasks a month for $0. Neither of those numbers is the free, self-hosted option this article focuses on — that option exists, but neither pricing page attaches a dollar figure to it. I pulled both vendors’ own pricing and license pages to see what the comparison actually rests on, checked 2026-08-27.
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What n8n’s own pricing page says
n8n’s pricing page lists four business tiers, plus a separate free option below them. Two of the four are hosted by n8n only:
> 20€ /mo, billed annually 2.5K workflow executions with unlimited steps
That’s Starter. Pro sits above it at 50€/mo for 10,000 executions, also hosted-only. The next tier up switches from hosted to self-hosted:
> 667€ /mo, billed annually 40K workflow executions with unlimited steps
That’s Business, and the page marks it Self-hosted, not Hosted by n8n — it’s the cheapest priced tier where you’re the one running the server. Above it, Enterprise is quote-only and is the single tier offered either way, “Hosted by n8n or Self-hosted.” Below all four sits a fifth option with no monthly figure attached to it at all:
> A standard, self-hosted version of n8n is available on GitHub.
Source: n8n.io/pricing. That Community Edition is the free option, and it isn’t one of the four priced tiers — it’s a separate line pointing to GitHub, with no execution quota or price listed on that pricing page.
What Zapier’s own pricing page says
Zapier has no free self-hosted option — everything runs on Zapier’s infrastructure, priced by tasks rather than executions, and the two units aren’t directly comparable: an n8n execution can contain multiple steps, while Zapier’s own definition of a task counts a successfully completed action in another app, and excludes triggers and some logic steps like Filters and Paths from that total:
> Free forever $0 /month
and:
> Zap workflows, Tables, and Forms included (100 tasks per month).
Above that:
> Professional Starting from $19.99 /month
that entry point covers 750 tasks a month. Zapier’s own task-tier selector on the same page lists task tiers up to 2,000,000 tasks a month, followed by a custom task-limit option. Source: zapier.com/pricing. There’s no “run it yourself for the cost of a server” branch on Zapier’s side at any tier — the option n8n’s Community Edition offers doesn’t exist here.
The free plan comes with a license, not just a price of $0
n8n’s Community Edition is covered by the Sustainable Use License, not a permissive open-source license. Its own FAQ states the limitation plainly:
> You may use or modify the software only for your own internal business purposes or for non-commercial or personal use.
and spells out what that excludes with two concrete examples:
> White-labeling n8n and offering it to your customers for money. Hosting n8n and charging people money to access it.
Source: n8n’s Sustainable Use License FAQ. So the free tier covers running n8n on your own workflows, but not reselling access to a hosted instance — that’s listed as a use the license doesn’t permit. The FAQ does not say that simply selecting Business or the standard Enterprise tier authorizes reselling access to n8n. For a use the Sustainable Use License doesn’t permit, n8n says a separate commercial agreement is required, and which agreement applies depends on the exact use case — that’s not something either pricing page settles.
What a server to run it on costs
The Community Edition itself is free, but it still needs a machine. I did not run n8n myself to measure how much CPU or memory a given workflow volume actually consumes — I have not benchmarked that, and I’m not going to present a number I didn’t measure. What I can cite is what one provider charges to rent a small server, independent of n8n entirely:
| Provider | Spec | Price |
|---|---|---|
| DigitalOcean Basic Droplet | 4 GiB RAM, 2 vCPUs, 80 GiB SSD | $24.00/mo |
| DigitalOcean Basic Droplet | 2 GiB RAM, 2 vCPUs, 60 GiB SSD | $18.00/mo |
| DigitalOcean Basic Droplet | 1 GiB RAM, 1 vCPU, 25 GiB SSD | $6.00/mo |
Numbers pulled from DigitalOcean’s droplet pricing page, checked 2026-08-27 — three example price points from one provider’s line-up, not a floor. DigitalOcean lists a cheaper tier below these, other providers may charge less again, and none of this says how many of your workflows any of these boxes can actually run before it falls behind. DigitalOcean includes basic monitoring and firewalls free with every Droplet; what this price excludes is paid backups, any additional monitoring or alerting tools you choose, and the labor of configuring, patching, and maintaining the instance yourself.
What this comparison does not tell you
Every number above came from a vendor’s own pricing or docs page, not from running either tool at volume myself. That means this comparison can tell you what each option costs on paper and what the license permits — it cannot tell you how many hours a month self-hosting actually takes to keep running, how the two compare on uptime, or how support response time differs once something breaks in production. And because executions and tasks aren’t the same unit, the 2,500-versus-750 numbers above describe two different pricing models, not two prices for the same amount of work.
I build tooling against n8n’s exported workflow JSON myself — this site’s n8n tool listing covers what the platform does before pricing enters the picture — but that’s static analysis of exported files, not a production self-hosted deployment, so it doesn’t answer the operating-cost question either.
One important number neither pricing page can supply is how many hours a month your particular deployment will require, alongside its licensing, reliability, security, and support requirements — none of that is settled by which column has the lower price.
This article was written with the help of AI. The pricing and license quotes above were pulled directly from n8n’s, Zapier’s, and DigitalOcean’s own pages on 2026-08-27, and checked against those pages before publication.