n8n Enterprise Pricing in 2026: Plans, Self-Hosted Costs, SSO and the Licence Terms Buyers Ask About

n8n enterprise pricing is not published: Enterprise is "Contact Sales" on n8n.io, for n8n Cloud or self-hosted. The figures n8n does publish, shown in euros when we checked on 29 October 2026, are Starter at €20 a month and Pro at €50 a month on annual billing (both hosted by n8n), and a self-hosted Business plan at €667 a month for 40,000 executions. The Community edition stays free to self-host. SSO and LDAP start at Business; audit logs, log streaming and external secrets are Enterprise only.

Most teams meet n8n through its free self-hosted edition and only look at the price list when someone asks for single sign-on, an audit trail or a second environment. That is the moment the plan structure matters, because the features a security review asks for are spread across two paid tiers, and the top one has no list price.

Everything below comes from n8n’s own pricing page, its documentation, the licence files in the n8n-io/n8n repository and its security and trust pages, all read on 29 October 2026 (verified October 2026). n8n displayed euro prices to us; it also accepts dollar payment, and its overage line is quoted in both currencies, so expect the figures in your region to differ. If n8n is one of several tools on your shortlist, our wider guide to AI workflow automation platforms puts it next to Zapier, Make, Power Automate, UiPath and others.

n8n plans and prices at a glance

n8n bills by workflow executions. Its pricing FAQ defines one execution as a single run of an entire workflow, however many steps it has and however much data it moves. Every plan, free or paid, includes unlimited users, unlimited active workflows and all integrations.

The Business plan comes in larger execution tiers, each with a monthly and an annual price. The published ladder runs from 40,000 to 500,000 executions a month; the 500,000 tier is €5,245 billed monthly or €52,450 a year. n8n describes Business as being for companies with fewer than 100 employees, and its card shows the plan as self-hosted only, with a waitlist for an n8n-hosted version.

Two smaller offers sit beside the main table. A Startup plan gives companies with fewer than 20 employees 50% off Business if they qualify. The Cloud free trial gives Pro-level features with 1,000 executions, and a Business trial gives 14 days of full Business features; n8n asks for a credit card only for the Business trial.

n8n self-hosted pricing: Community, Business and Enterprise

Self-hosting is where most of the “n8n self hosted pricing” confusion comes from, because the software is the same in every case. What changes is the licence key you apply to it.

n8n’s editions page describes four states of a self-hosted instance:

1. Community edition. Free, no licence key. n8n calls it “almost the complete feature set”.
2. Registered Community edition. Still free. Registering by email unlocks folders, debug in editor and custom execution data.
3. Business. A paid licence key that unlocks Business features.
4. Enterprise. A paid key that unlocks everything, including the governance and scaling features.

The Community edition does not include custom variables, environments, external secrets, external storage for binary data, log streaming, multi-main mode, projects, SSO (SAML or LDAP), workflow and credential sharing, or Git version control. Without sharing, only the instance owner and the user who created a workflow or credential can reach it. Standard logging and queue mode are included.

Execution limits and overages on a self-hosted licence

Self-hosted Community has no execution meter. Paid self-hosted plans do: the licence key “must ping our license server daily to stay active”, and that ping carries the production execution count. The key can be applied to any number of instances, and usage from all of them counts towards one quota.

When a Business or Enterprise customer exceeds its quota, workflows keep running. For Business, the pricing table states the overage fee as €4,000 or $4,800 per extra 300,000 executions, with a note that this figure has applied since 26 October 2026. Enterprise overages are set in the order form. n8n says its sales team contacts annual Business subscribers as they approach 80% of their quota.

On self-hosted instances, the limits that Cloud fixes become yours to set: maximum execution duration is configurable, and concurrent executions are unlimited. You also carry the infrastructure, patching and database costs that n8n Cloud would otherwise absorb.

What Business and Enterprise add for governance

For a security or platform team, the useful question is which tier unlocks each control. This table follows n8n’s self-hosted comparison on its pricing page.

The pattern is clear. Business covers identity and change management: SSO, roles inside projects, environments and Git. Enterprise adds the evidence and secrets controls that auditors usually ask about, plus support with a service level. Business is self-serve; n8n’s FAQ says dedicated support is only in Enterprise and points Business customers to the community forum.

On n8n Cloud, the same split applies with fewer rungs. Starter and Pro do not include SSO, LDAP, audit logging, log streaming, environments or external secrets; the Cloud Enterprise plan includes all of them. Cloud data is stored in the EU, on servers in Frankfurt, according to the pricing FAQ.

n8n SSO: SAML, OIDC and LDAP by plan

n8n’s documentation on configuring SSO says single sign-on is available on n8n Cloud Enterprise and on self-hosted Business and Enterprise, and that n8n supports both SAML and OIDC. An instance owner or admin turns it on. From n8n 2.18.0, SSO can also be configured through environment variables instead of the settings screen, which suits teams that deploy n8n from infrastructure code.

LDAP is grouped with SSO on the pricing page and appears on the same tiers. One inconsistency is worth knowing before a procurement call: n8n’s security page still says SSO, SAML and LDAP come with the Enterprise plan, while the pricing table and the editions documentation also list them for self-hosted Business. The pricing page describes itself, in the docs, as the source of truth for features per plan, so ask n8n to confirm the tier in writing.

Two related controls sit higher up. Enforcing two-factor authentication across the whole instance and creating custom roles are both Enterprise features. On Business you get the standard project roles and instance admins, which n8n’s pricing FAQ describes as role-based access control for sharing workflows and credentials.

The n8n licence: Sustainable Use License and n8n Enterprise License

n8n is source-available, not open source in the OSI sense, and its own documentation says so. Two licences cover the main repository.

The Sustainable Use License. n8n created it in 2022 and moved to it from Apache 2.0 with Commons Clause on 17 March 2022. The licence file grants the right to use, copy, modify and redistribute the software, with three limits: use or modify it only for your own internal business purposes or for non-commercial or personal use; distribute it only free of charge and for non-commercial purposes; and keep n8n’s licensing and copyright notices intact.

The n8n Enterprise License. Any source file with “.ee.” in its file name, or “.ee” in its directory name, is excluded from the Sustainable Use License. Using those files requires a valid n8n Enterprise License. In practice this is the code behind the paid features, unlocked by the licence key.

What “internal business purposes” allows

n8n’s licence FAQ gives concrete examples. Permitted under the free licence:

• running n8n to operate your own business, including several instances;
• building automations for clients on your instance, as long as the clients cannot create or edit them;
• charging for workflow building, setup, maintenance, training and consulting;
• using n8n behind the scenes in your product, where users trigger automations you built and may connect their own accounts.

Not permitted without a commercial agreement:

• hosting n8n as a service where clients build workflows;
• letting external users build or configure workflows through your product, whether through a custom UI, n8n’s API, MCP or an AI agent acting for them;
• forking the code to launch a competing automation product, or white-labelling n8n;
• using features that ask for a licence key without holding the licence.

The test n8n applies is who controls the workflow logic, not which interface the end user sees. A software company that embeds a workflow builder for its customers needs to talk to n8n sales about an Enterprise licence, which n8n’s FAQ says is designed for that architecture. This is a summary of n8n’s published guidance, not legal advice; have counsel read the licence text against your plans.

Questions to put to n8n before you sign

Because the Enterprise price is negotiated, the outcome depends on what you ask. These questions come from gaps in the public material:

• Tier for SSO and LDAP. Confirm in the order form that SAML or OIDC and LDAP are included on the plan you are buying, given the security page wording above.
• Execution forecast. Count executions the way n8n does, one per workflow run. A workflow on a five-minute schedule produces roughly 8,600 to 8,900 runs a month by n8n’s own estimate, before any webhook or chat traffic.
• Overage terms. For Enterprise, get the overage rate per execution block written into the contract rather than left to later discussion.
• Licence server dependency. Paid self-hosted keys check in with n8n’s licence server daily. Ask how an air-gapped or restricted-egress instance is licensed and what happens if the check fails.
• Telemetry. Telemetry is on by default and can be switched off with environment variables, but n8n’s privacy documentation says a paid licence keeps reporting usage counts and the licence identifier regardless.
• Support scope. Business has forum support only. If n8n will run processes your operations depend on, price the Enterprise SLA rather than assuming email support.
• Security patch cadence. Ask which release lines receive fixes and for how long. Our separate review of n8n security and its recent advisories shows why patch speed matters for a self-hosted instance.

When n8n fits, and when a governed agent platform fits better

n8n is a strong choice when the job is integration-heavy automation: moving data between SaaS tools on a schedule or a webhook, with technical builders who are comfortable in a node-based editor and with JavaScript or Python steps. Its execution-based pricing is predictable for long workflows, because a 50-step run costs the same as a 3-step run. The free Community edition makes it easy to start, and the Business plan is a reasonable middle ground for a smaller company that needs SSO and environments.

The calculus changes when the workflows are AI agents working on regulated data. Then the questions shift from “how many executions” to “which documents can this agent read for this user”, “which tools may it call”, “who approved the action” and “where is the per-call record”. In n8n, several of those answers sit in the Enterprise tier with an undisclosed price, and permission-aware retrieval across your document systems is something you assemble yourself.

A governed agent platform starts from those questions. Our VDF AI and n8n comparison goes through the differences feature by feature, and the self-hosted n8n alternative page covers migration considerations.

How VDF AI fits

VDF AI is an enterprise AI agent platform that runs on-premises, in a private cloud or fully air-gapped, with VDF AI Cloud as a hosted option. Agent Hub is its no-code agent builder, with an MCP tool registry and tool grants per role, and steps can wait for a named person’s approval before an agent sends, files or changes anything. The AI Router routes calls across local and cloud models under policies and budgets and records every call, and Private RAG answers from connected systems such as SharePoint, Confluence, Jira and Google Drive while respecting each user’s source permissions.

Identity works like this: on-premises deployments sign users in natively with Microsoft Entra ID, and other SAML or OIDC providers connect through an SSO-aware reverse proxy; VDF AI Cloud offers SSO on its Enterprise Cloud plan. Role-based access control is part of every plan, and audit logs record the user, model, sources and tool calls behind each answer. VDF AI does not publish licence prices on this page; see current pricing for how plans are structured.