Is n8n free? What actually is, Community Edition limits, and the traps to know

"Is n8n free?" calls for a two-part answer that surprises Zapier and Make users: n8n Cloud has no permanent free plan, but the self-hosted Community Edition is free, with no limit on executions or workflows. In other words, free n8n genuinely exists — as long as you host it yourself. This guide details exactly what the free version contains, what's reserved for paid plans, what the license permits, and the costs that remain once the subscription disappears.

n8n Cloud: a free trial, not a free tier

On n8n.io, the hosted offering starts with a time-limited free trial, no credit card required — enough to test seriously, not enough to run a production automation indefinitely. After the trial, you pick a Starter, Pro or Enterprise plan; we break down the per-execution billing logic in our n8n Cloud pricing guide.

That's a different positioning from Make or Zapier, which offer a permanent but narrow free tier (a few hundred tasks or operations per month). n8n's philosophy is the reverse: unlimited free usage exists, but through self-hosting — consistent with the tool's open source model, compared in detail in our n8n vs Make vs Zapier comparison.

The Community Edition: free and quota-less

The Community Edition is the version you install yourself — typically in five minutes with Docker. What it includes, with no quota or time limit:

• Unlimited workflows and executions: the only bound is your server's capacity (CPU, RAM);
• All standard nodes: hundreds of native integrations, the AI and LangChain nodes, the Code node, webhooks — nothing in the automation core is functionally crippled;
• Community nodes: freely installable, and self-hosted-only anyway;
• Encrypted credentials, basic user management, and queue mode with Redis for horizontal scaling — yes, the multi-worker production architecture is available in the free version.

For a technical team automating its own processes, the Community Edition covers the vast majority of needs. That's the scenario we cost out in our analysis of the real cost of self-hosted n8n.

What's reserved for paid plans

Community Edition restrictions aren't about volume but about governance — features that matter mostly when several teams share the instance:

• SSO (SAML/OIDC) and LDAP to plug in enterprise authentication;
• Projects, roles and granular permissions: in the Community Edition, fine-grained control over who sees and edits what remains basic — our guide to users and permissions on self-hosted n8n details what's doable without paying;
• Separate environments with built-in Git deployment: the native dev/staging/prod feature is paid, but an equivalent pipeline can be built by hand — see our dev/prod environments and versioning workflows with Git guides;
• Centralized variables, external secrets (Vault, AWS Secrets Manager), log streaming to a SIEM;
• Vendor support with an SLA.

The exact list evolves across releases: n8n.io/pricing and the official documentation are the source of truth. The stable part is the logic: the engine is free, the enterprise tooling is paid.

The Sustainable Use License: what "free" allows

n8n isn't under a classic open source license (MIT, Apache) but under the Sustainable Use License, a fair-code license. In practice:

• Allowed for free: any internal use, including commercial — automating your company's processes, or your clients' if you're a consultant or agency (with each client hosting or owning their instance);
• Forbidden without a commercial agreement: offering n8n itself as a hosted service to third parties, reselling it, or white-labeling it inside your SaaS product (n8n has a dedicated embed offering for that).

This hybrid model isn't an n8n quirk: the reference economic analysis by Josh Lerner and Jean Tirole, "Some Simple Economics of Open Source", published in 2002 in the Journal of Industrial Economics (see on Google Scholar), already showed that open-code projects stay viable through value-capture mechanisms complementary to the free code — services, hosting, enterprise features. The Sustainable Use License is exactly that: it guarantees your free internal use is sustainable because the vendor funds itself elsewhere.

The real costs of a "free" n8n

Removing the subscription doesn't remove the bill, it changes its shape:

• The server: a VPS is enough to start, sized to your workflows (AI workflows and file processing are RAM-hungry);
• Human time: installation, updates that don't break things, PostgreSQL backups, monitoring, incident recovery. This is the most underestimated line item, and often the most expensive;
• Third-party APIs: free on the n8n side doesn't mean free on the OpenAI or Anthropic side — AI calls are still billed per token by their provider, worth tracking workflow by workflow.

The free-vs-paid choice is therefore less "save money or not" than "pay in subscription or in admin time". Our self-hosted vs Cloud comparison gives the full decision grid by profile.

In short

Free n8n means the self-hosted Community Edition: unlimited executions and workflows, all nodes, queue mode — a complete automation engine whose only bounds are your server and your admin time. n8n Cloud can be tried for free but is paid per use. If you're starting out: take the Cloud trial to validate your use cases, then make an honest trade-off between subscription and self-hosting once you know your volume — and if the answer is self-hosting, our Docker installation guide is the place to start.