Is n8n free? Community vs enterprise limits

Is n8n free to self-host?

Yes, n8n is free to self-host. You run the community edition on a server you own, and the licence sets no limit on how many workflows you build or how often they run. Two things decide whether that free edition is enough for you: n8n is not open source in the sense the Open Source Initiative (OSI) uses that term, and a specific set of features stays switched off until you pay for a licence key.

The licence is the Sustainable Use License, version 1.0. The source code is public, and you may read it, run it and change it. What the licence restricts is who you may serve with it. You may run n8n for yourself or for your own company. You may not turn it into a product that other people pay to use.

What fair-code means, and why n8n is not open source

Fair-code is the label n8n uses for its own model. It describes software whose source is public and freely runnable, but whose commercial use the author restricts. n8n's documentation gives the reason for the wording directly: an OSI-approved open source licence cannot include limits on how you use the software, and the Sustainable Use License contains exactly that kind of limit, so n8n does not call itself open source.

That distinction is not an argument about words. It reaches your procurement team. A policy that reads "we deploy open source tools, or tools we have bought" leaves n8n in a third category, so somebody has to make a real decision about it. Read the licence file in the n8n repository before that conversation rather than after it.

What the Sustainable Use License lets you do

The permission grant itself is broad. The licence gives you a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide licence to use, copy, distribute, make available and prepare derivative works of the software, for internal business purposes or for personal non-commercial use.

In practice that covers:

• Running n8n on your own server for your own company, for example syncing data from a CRM (customer relationship management system) into an internal database.
• Running it at home for personal projects.
• Changing the code, and running your modified version.
• Writing an n8n node for your own product, or any other integration between your product and n8n.
• Selling consulting work, such as building workflows for a client.
• Selling support, such as setting up and maintaining n8n on servers a client owns.
• Using n8n as a hidden backend inside your product, as long as it runs on your company's own credentials.

Nothing in the licence meters your usage. There is no execution quota and no seat count, so the only ceiling on a self-hosted instance is the CPU and memory of the machine it runs on. The AI nodes are not gated either, so building an AI agent workflow in n8n works on the free edition.

What the Sustainable Use License does not let you do

The restrictions are short, and n8n lists them with examples on the sustainable use license page:

• Hosting n8n and charging people money to access it.
• White labelling n8n and offering it to your customers for money.
• Using n8n to collect your end users' own credentials so they can reach their own accounts in other services.
• Altering, removing or obscuring any licensing, copyright or other notice.
• Distributing it commercially. Distribution is allowed free of charge for non-commercial purposes only.

The third restriction is the one that surprises people, so read it twice. A billing job that moves your company's own data using your company's own API keys is internal use, and it is allowed. A product where each of your customers connects their own Google account through your n8n instance is not, because the licence draws its line at whose credentials n8n is holding. The software and the server are identical in both cases. The answer is not.

There is also a second licence inside the same repository. Any source file with .ee. in its filename, or .ee in its directory path, sits outside the Sustainable Use License and is covered by the separate n8n Enterprise License. That code ships inside the same Docker image you pull, so the paid features are present in the build and stay switched off until a valid key activates them. Switching them on any other way is a licence violation, not a configuration trick.

How fair-code differs from MIT and AGPL

An MIT licence permits everything, including taking the code and selling a hosted version of it, with attribution as the only real condition.

The AGPL (GNU Affero General Public License) also permits selling a hosted version. Its condition is disclosure: if you modify the software and let users reach it over a network, you must offer those users your modified source.

The Sustainable Use License works on a different axis. It asks nothing about publishing your changes. It restricts who you may serve. The short summary is that the AGPL controls what you must publish, and the Sustainable Use License controls who you may sell to.

That difference decides what happens to forks. Anyone may fork an AGPL project and run it as a competing hosted service, provided they publish their changes. Nobody may do that with n8n, because the use restriction travels with the code into every copy of it. This is why n8n can publish its entire source and still sell a cloud product without competing against a clone of itself.

Which features need a paid licence key

The community edition contains almost the whole product. n8n documents the exclusions rather than the inclusions, which is the more useful way round. As of August 2026 the compare editions page lists these as paid:

• SSO (single sign-on) through SAML (security assertion markup language) or LDAP (lightweight directory access protocol)
• Sharing of workflows and credentials
• Projects
• Custom variables
• Environments
• Version control using Git
• External secrets
• External storage for binary data
• Log streaming
• Multi-main mode

Sharing is the limit most teams meet first, and it is easy to miss while one person evaluates the tool alone. On the community edition, only the instance owner and the user who created a workflow or credential can open it. Two colleagues on the same instance cannot pass a workflow to each other inside the interface. Teams work around this with one shared login, which removes any record of who changed what.

SSO is the second. If your company requires single sign-on for every internal tool, the community edition fails that requirement on day one, whatever else it can do. The pattern of a free self-hosted app whose authentication feature is the paid one repeats across this whole category, and the SSO tax in self-hosted apps explains why vendors keep drawing the line in the same place.

Environments and Git version control are one feature in practice. Together they let you keep workflows in a repository and promote them from a development instance to a production one. Without them, moving a workflow between instances means exporting JSON by hand and importing it on the other side. That works, and plenty of people do it. It gives you no review step and no history.

Multi-main mode is the one that limits scale. Queue mode with several worker processes runs fine on the community edition. Running more than one main process does not, and the main process owns schedules and webhooks, so it stays a single point of failure that you cannot make redundant without a key.

Log streaming and external secrets are compliance features. Log streaming pushes n8n's event log into a system you already watch. External secrets reads credentials from a vault instead of n8n's own encrypted store. Both are the kind of thing a security review asks for months after the tool reached production, which is an awkward moment to discover the price.

If the gated feature is the one you actually need and the plan is out of budget, compare tools instead of fighting the licence. The self-hosted n8n alternatives are worth reading side by side, because each project draws its own free line in a different place.

Register your community instance for the free licence key

Some free features still need a licence key, which sounds contradictory until you see the flow. Registering an email address gets you a free key. It unlocks three more capabilities at no cost:

• Folders, for organising workflows
• Debug in editor, which copies and pins execution data while you work on a workflow
• Custom execution data, for saving and annotating execution metadata

To get the key:

1. Open the three dots menu in the lower left corner of the editor.
2. Go to Settings, then Usage and plan.
3. Select Unlock, then Send me a free license key.
4. Paste the key from the email into Enter activation key, and select Activate.

On a server you configure from files, skip the interface and set the key as an environment variable before the first start.

docker volume create n8n_data
docker run -it --rm --name n8n -p 5678:5678 \
  -e N8N_LICENSE_ACTIVATION_KEY="paste-your-key-here" \
  -v n8n_data:/home/node/.n8n docker.n8n.io/n8nio/n8n

Open the editor on port 5678, then check Settings, then Usage and plan. That page should name your plan instead of showing the unlock prompt. If the prompt is still there, the usual cause is that the instance was activated before: N8N_LICENSE_ACTIVATION_KEY has no effect on an instance that already holds a licence, so adding it to an existing container's environment can look like it did nothing at all.

Two more licence variables matter on a production box. N8N_LICENSE_AUTO_RENEW_ENABLED defaults to true. Set it to false and you have to renew by hand from the settings menu every ten days, or the licensed features stop working. N8N_LICENSE_DETACH_FLOATING_ON_SHUTDOWN also defaults to true, which releases the entitlement when the instance shuts down so another instance can claim it. On a production instance that restarts during deployments, set it to false so the licensed features come back with it. Both are documented on the manage your license page.

Where the cloud plans sit

n8n Cloud runs the same software on n8n's own infrastructure. The plans are metered by workflow executions rather than by the number of active workflows, so a workflow that sits idle waiting for a webhook costs nothing until it fires.

The detail that matters to a self-hoster is that the enterprise licence key comes attached to a plan rather than sold on its own. You buy a Business or Enterprise plan, you receive a key, and you paste that key into the instance running on your own hardware. Self-hosting and paying are not opposites.

As of August 2026, the entry tiers carry published monthly prices on the n8n pricing page. The higher tiers go through the sales team, and enterprise pricing is not published at all, so any figure printed here would be out of date before you read it. Ask for a quote, and ask specifically whether that quote includes the self-hosted key.

If you are still deciding between running it yourself and paying for a hosted automation product, the comparison of n8n against Zapier and Make works through the cost shape rather than the feature list.

Selling n8n inside your own product

If your customers will see and use the n8n editor itself, you need the embed licence, which n8n also sells as an OEM (original equipment manufacturer) agreement. It permits the white labelling and reselling that the Sustainable Use License forbids. It is a negotiated contract with quote-based pricing, aimed at companies putting workflow automation inside a product they already sell.

Using n8n as a hidden backend is a different case, and it needs no such agreement. If the workflows run on your company's credentials and your users never touch the editor, the standard licence covers it. The dividing line is the credentials and the editor, not the revenue.

So which edition do you need?

For one company running its own automations, with colleagues who are allowed to see each other's work, the community edition is enough. Register for the free key and go and build something. The next step is a server, and self-hosting n8n on a VPS with Docker and HTTPS covers the deployment, the reverse proxy and the certificate.

For a company that requires single sign-on, or separate environments for development and production, the community edition will not get there, and no amount of configuration changes that. Price a Business plan, or pick a tool whose licence matches your budget.

For anyone selling access to other people, the answer is a commercial agreement with n8n. The sooner that conversation happens, the cheaper it is.

FAQ

Is n8n open source?

No. n8n is fair-code, distributed under the Sustainable Use License. The source is public and you may read, run and modify it, but the licence restricts what you may use it for, and an OSI-approved open source licence cannot contain restrictions on use. n8n says this in its own documentation and describes itself as source available instead. Files with .ee. in the name or .ee in the path are excluded even from that licence and fall under a separate n8n Enterprise License.

Can I charge clients money for work involving n8n?

Yes, for services. Building workflows for a client needs no separate agreement, and neither does installing or maintaining n8n on servers the client owns. What you cannot do is charge people for access to an n8n instance that you run, or sell a white-labelled version of it. The test is whether the money is paid for your work or for access to the software.

Why can my team not share workflows on the self-hosted community edition?

Sharing of workflows and credentials is a licensed feature, so it is switched off without a paid key. On the community edition, only the instance owner and the user who created an item can open it, which means there is no way to hand a workflow to a colleague inside the interface. Exporting the workflow as JSON and importing it under the other account works, but credentials do not travel inside that export, and the imported copy becomes a separate workflow with its own execution history.

What happens if my n8n instance cannot reach the licence server?

An activated instance renews its licence against https://license.n8n.io/v1 by default, and N8N_LICENSE_AUTO_RENEW_ENABLED is true out of the box. If you turn automatic renewal off, you have to renew by hand from the settings menu every ten days, or the licensed features stop working. If an outbound firewall blocks the licence server, send the request through a proxy with the lowercase https_proxy_license_server variable rather than disabling renewal.

Do I have to pay to remove the n8n branding?

Yes, if customers will see the result. The Sustainable Use License forbids altering, removing or obscuring licensing and copyright notices, and it names white labelling n8n and offering it to customers for money as a use it does not permit. Rebranding a product you sell needs the embed or OEM agreement. Adjusting the look of an instance only your own staff use is a smaller question, but the clause about licensing and copyright notices applies whatever the audience.