How Much Does n8n Cost in 2025? Cloud Plans vs Self-Hosted Pricing Explained
n8n's pricing confuses people because it has two completely different models: a managed Cloud subscription and a free, self-hosted open-source version. 'Free' isn't the whole story, and neither is the Cloud sticker price. Here's what each really costs in 2025, and how to pick the one that's cheaper for your actual usage.
n8n Cloud pricing, in plain terms
n8n Cloud is the managed option: no servers, no updates, no maintenance. You pay a monthly subscription and n8n runs everything for you. The key thing to understand is that Cloud plans are priced primarily around executions — how many times your workflows run — not the number of workflows you build.
That matters because a single workflow triggered every few minutes can burn more executions than a hundred workflows that fire occasionally. Before choosing a tier, estimate your monthly execution volume honestly: count your busiest scheduled and webhook-triggered flows, not just the total number of automations.
Self-hosting: 'free' with an asterisk
The self-hosted community edition is genuinely free to license — you can run unlimited workflows and executions on your own server. But 'free software' isn't 'free to run.' You pay in infrastructure and time: a VPS (often $5–$20/month for small setups), plus the hours to install, secure, update, and monitor it.
For a technical team that already manages servers, self-hosting is dramatically cheaper at scale and gives you full data control. For a solo operator who just wants automations to work, the maintenance overhead can quietly cost more than a Cloud subscription would.
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Which one should you choose?
A simple rule: if your execution volume is low-to-moderate and you'd rather not touch a server, Cloud is the better deal — the subscription buys back your time. If you're running high-volume workflows, handling sensitive data, or already comfortable with Docker and a VPS, self-hosting wins on cost and control.
One more lever most people miss: the biggest hidden cost in AI-heavy workflows isn't n8n at all — it's the LLM API bills. Routing each task to the right-sized model instead of defaulting to the most expensive one can cut those costs by more than half, often dwarfing the difference between Cloud and self-hosted.
Final thoughts
There's no universally 'cheaper' n8n — it depends on your execution volume, your technical comfort, and how AI-heavy your workflows are. Estimate your executions, factor in your own time, and remember that on AI workflows the model bill usually matters more than the platform bill.
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