Self-hosted n8n vs n8n Cloud: real costs, security and when to self-host

What each option costs

Prices from n8n’s pricing page on October 14, 2026, billed annually (n8n says annual billing saves 17%), and a small server from DigitalOcean’s published Droplet prices.

Two things matter more than the headline prices.

The gap above 10,000 executions. n8n Cloud’s published plans stop at Pro. A business that grows from 9,000 to 12,000 workflow runs a month has no Cloud plan in between: the options become Enterprise on request, the EUR 667 Business licence, or the free Community edition on its own server.

The Starter plan’s 5-minute limit. A single workflow run on Starter can last at most 5 minutes. Most automations finish in seconds, but AI agent workflows that wait on several model calls, or batch jobs that process large files, can run longer.

What the free Community edition leaves out

n8n’s documentation calls the self-hosted Community edition free “with almost the complete feature set”. These are the features it lists as needing a paid plan:

• Sharing workflows and credentials between users
• Projects
• Environments (separate development and production)
• Version control with Git
• Single sign-on (SAML, LDAP)
• External secrets
• External storage for binary data
• Custom variables
• Log streaming (standard logging is included)
• Multi-main mode (queue mode is included)

For a one-person business this list rarely matters. For a team it does: without sharing, each person’s workflows and app connections stay in their own account. Registering a Community instance with an email address unlocks a few extras for free, including folders and debugging past executions in the editor.

What the licence allows

n8n is “fair-code”, not open source. Its Sustainable Use License lets you use, modify and redistribute the software with three limits (n8n):

1. You may use or modify it only for your own internal business purposes, or for non-commercial or personal use.
2. You may give it to others only free of charge and for non-commercial purposes.
3. You may not remove n8n’s licence or copyright notices.

In practice, a business can self-host n8n for its own operations, and can pay an agency or consultant to set it up and maintain it: n8n says it changed its licence in 2022 specifically so consulting and support services would be allowed. What needs a commercial agreement with n8n is making n8n available to your own customers so they can connect their accounts and build workflows.

The upkeep nobody prices

On n8n Cloud, n8n runs the servers, applies updates and fixes security issues. Self-hosted, all of that is yours. Plan for:

• Security updates. n8n publishes its security advisories on GitHub. On September 30, 2026 alone it published 10, of which 8 were rated high, covering issues from SQL injection in a database node to ways of taking over an owner account (GitHub). An instance that is installed once and never updated collects every one of them.
• Backups. Your workflows, credentials and execution history live in n8n’s database. Back it up automatically, keep copies off the server, and test a restore at least once.
• Monitoring. Set up an error workflow that alerts you when a run fails, and watch the server’s disk and memory. Silent failures are the most expensive kind: orders that were never synced, leads that were never sent.
• The server itself. Operating system updates, HTTPS certificates, a firewall, and restricting who can reach the n8n editor.
• Upgrades. n8n releases often, and major versions change things: installing n8n with npm is deprecated from n8n 3.0, and n8n now points self-hosters to Docker Compose or its one-line setup (n8n).

None of this is difficult for someone who runs servers. All of it is easy to forget for someone who does not.

When to choose which

The arithmetic is simple. n8n Cloud Pro costs EUR 600 a year. A small server costs US$72 to US$288 a year at DigitalOcean’s Basic prices. If the hours spent each year on updates, backups and monitoring, multiplied by what those hours cost you, come to less than the difference, self-hosting is cheaper. Above 10,000 executions a month, the comparison is with Enterprise or the Business licence instead, and self-hosting usually wins by a wide margin.

If you want self-hosted n8n without doing the upkeep yourself, that is a service we provide: n8n on a server in your name, with updates, backups and failure alerts handled. See n8n automation.