n8n pricing: why Business costs 16x for 4x the runs

By Anwar Benhamada · August 17, 2026

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n8n’s pricing page does something most of this category doesn’t bother with: it tells you the unit up front. “Pricing based on monthly workflow executions, regardless of complexity.” No credits, no seats gating features, no vague “usage” line you have to guess at.

Two tiers price that unit consistently. Then the third one doesn’t, and that’s the part worth knowing before you pick a plan.

The tiers

Per month, billed annually unless noted. All plans include unlimited users — n8n charges for what you run, not who’s logged in.

Checked on n8n.io/pricing with billing country set to US, 17 August 2026. Worth flagging: this page geo-prices, and a request from a non-US IP renders the same numbers in euros. If you’re pricing this yourself, check which currency you’re actually looking at before you compare it to anything else.

The jump that isn’t proportional

Starter to Pro is a clean deal: executions go up 4x (2,500 to 10,000) and the price goes up 2.5x ($20 to $50). You get more for relatively less. That’s the kind of tier structure that rewards growing into the product.

Pro to Business breaks that pattern. Executions go up the same 4x, to 40,000. The price goes up 16x, to $800. I ran the numbers because a jump that size looked like a typo the first time I read it — it isn’t. Cost per execution sits at roughly $0.005 on Pro and $0.02 on Business, four times higher per run than the tier below it.

That’s not n8n pricing Business badly. It’s n8n pricing Business as something other than “more executions.” What you’re actually buying at $800 is SSO, SAML, LDAP, audit-friendly insight retention out to 30 days, and self-hosted deployment with scaling options — the stuff a compliance team asks for, not the stuff a workflow needs. If your reason for upgrading is “we’re running out of executions,” Business is the wrong lever. A second Pro account, or trimming what triggers a workflow run, gets you further per dollar.

What’s actually included, and what isn’t

The AI Assistant is listed on every tier as “coming soon” as of this check — don’t budget around a feature that isn’t shipped yet. AI credits, separately, are real and included: 2,300/month on Starter, up to 13,700/month on Pro. Those aren’t the same thing.

Unlimited users on every tier, including Starter, is the detail I’d lead with if I were selling this. Most of the tools we cover charge per seat and let the team-size cap do quiet damage to your bill. n8n doesn’t — a team of ten on Starter still pays $20 a month, and the constraint is executions, not headcount. That’s a real structural difference, not a marketing line.

There’s also a Community Edition: free, self-hosted, open source, no execution cap because you’re running the infrastructure yourself. If you have someone who can maintain a server and don’t need n8n’s cloud, insights dashboard, or support, that’s the actual free tier — not a trial.

Two things worth checking before you commit

The Start-up Plan. Companies under 20 employees can apply for 50% off Business, which would put the compliance tier at $400 rather than $800. n8n gates this behind an application, not a checkbox, so it’s not something to assume you’re getting — confirm it before you budget around it.

Annual vs monthly. The discount is a flat 16.7% across all three tiers (n8n rounds this to “Save 17%” on the page). That’s simpler than most of this category, where the percentage narrows as you go up — Descript’s annual discount drops from 33% to 23% between its cheapest and most expensive tier. n8n doesn’t do that here; the math holds the same shape whether you’re comparing Starter or Business.

What it actually costs you

Count your executions, not your users. A workflow that fires on every webhook hit or polls an API every few minutes burns through 2,500 a month fast — faster than a person manually running a handful of automations a day.

If you’re under 2,500 executions monthly, Starter at $20 is close to free for what it does. If you’re past 10,000 and still on Pro’s $50, you’re either about to hit a wall or about to overpay 4x for capacity you don’t need — model your actual monthly executions before assuming Business is the next step up.

Figures from n8n.io/pricing on 17 August 2026, US pricing. This is a fast-moving category and executions-based pricing in particular tends to get adjusted as usage patterns shift — check before you commit to a year.