n8n pricing for a small business: what you pay, and when it is worth it

n8n Cloud starts at €20 a month for the Starter plan and €50 a month for Pro, both billed annually, and the self-hosted Community Edition is free software you run on your own server. For most businesses of 10 to 100 people the real choice is between Starter or Pro in the cloud and the free edition on a server someone in your team (or your consultant) looks after.

Prices checked: 18 October 2026, on the official n8n pricing page. Vendors change prices; check the page before you buy.

n8n prices its plans in euros. Third-party numbers are often converted or out of date, so plan with the official page.

n8n plans and prices at a glance

Source: n8n.io/pricing, checked 18 October 2026. The page states that all plans include unlimited users, unlimited workflows and every integration. It offers monthly or annual billing and says annual billing saves 17%; the prices above are the annual ones shown on the page. Businesses with fewer than 20 employees can check whether they qualify for n8n's Start-up Plan, which the page describes as 50% off Business.

What is an "execution" in n8n?

The pricing page defines it in one line: "An execution is a single run of your entire workflow." It does not matter how many steps the workflow has or how much data passes through it. That is the main difference from tools that bill per step or per task, and it is why n8n can be cheap for long workflows with many steps.

To estimate your own number, list your workflows and how often each runs. A workflow that adds every website enquiry to your customer database runs once per enquiry. How the workflow starts matters too. According to the n8n documentation, a Schedule trigger counts one execution every time it fires, whether or not anything happened, while built-in polling triggers (such as a Google Drive trigger) count only when they find new data, and manual test runs while building do not count at all. A timer that fires every five minutes is the kind of workflow that quietly uses up a plan, so it is worth asking whether it can be started by an event instead.

What happens when you go over? For Business and Enterprise the page says workflows keep running, overage charges may apply, and overages are invoiced 45 days after they occur; for Business the overage price is 4,000 EUR per extra bucket of 300,000 executions. The page does not give overage terms for Starter or Pro, so if you are close to the limit on those plans, ask n8n before you rely on it.

Is n8n free?

The Community Edition is free to use, but "free" needs two footnotes.

The licence. n8n's own documentation describes the Sustainable Use License as allowing use "only for your own internal business purposes or for non-commercial or personal use". The licence FAQ says that if workflows are only created or modified by you or people in your organisation, you can use n8n under the Community license for free. Running your own company's automations is the typical case it covers. Reselling n8n as your own product is not. If your use is unusual, read the licence FAQ or ask n8n; this article is not legal advice.

The server. Self-hosting moves the cost from a subscription to a server and to someone's time: installing updates, keeping backups, watching that it is running. None of that is difficult for a person who does it regularly, and all of it is easy to forget for a person who does it once a year. If nobody in your company will own that job, the cloud plan is usually the cheaper choice even though it has a price tag.

Which n8n plan fits a 10-100 person business?

A rough guide, based on how the plans are built rather than on promises:

• One or two workflows, low volume, nobody technical in-house: Starter in the cloud. The free trial on the pricing page needs no credit card, so you can test your first workflow before paying.
• Several workflows that the business depends on, a few people building or checking them: Pro, mainly for the higher concurrency, workflow history and admin roles.
• Many workflows, single sign-on, separate test and live environments, someone who runs servers: Business, which on the current page is self-hosted only.
• A technical person in the team, or a consultant on support, and a preference to keep data on your own server: Community Edition self-hosted, within the licence terms above.

Whichever plan you pick, the subscription is rarely the largest cost. The work of designing the workflow, connecting your tools and testing it with real cases is where the money goes, which is why I quote that work separately from software. For how consultants price that part, see how much an AI consultant costs.

Before choosing a plan, define the task with the 30-day AI implementation plan, then read where AI agents help a small business.

From our own system: how we run n8n

I run my own work on a system of AI agents and automations, and n8n is one of the tools in it.

For clients I do it the other way round: the n8n account, cloud or self-hosted, is set up on the client's side and paid by the client directly, so they can see the bill and keep the tool if we stop working together. The expected monthly cost is named in the quote before any work starts.

When is n8n worth paying for?

n8n is worth it when you have a repeated task that moves data between tools you already use, such as website form to customer database, order to invoice, or enquiry to task for the team, and someone who can describe that task step by step. It is not worth it when the task happens a few times a month, or when one of your existing tools already has a built-in connection that does the same thing. Check that first; it is often already there.

If you are setting up a customer database at the same time, the CRM setup checklist covers what to decide before you connect anything to it.

Want help choosing and setting it up?

I connect compatible tools so agreed data moves between them automatically, from €800 per connection (one flow between two tools); see connect your systems. If you are not sure whether n8n is the right tool at all, start with a free call.

Sources

• n8n, Pricing, n8n.io/pricing, accessed and prices checked 18 October 2026.
• n8n Docs, Community license, docs.n8n.io, accessed 18 October 2026.
• n8n Docs, Executions, docs.n8n.io, accessed 18 October 2026.
• n8n Docs, License FAQ, docs.n8n.io, accessed 18 October 2026.