n8n Review

Zapier bills by the task and n8n bills by the run, and past a couple of steps that stops being an academic difference. One execution is one pass through the whole graph, so a fifty node workflow costs exactly what a two node one costs, which inverts the economics of anything genuinely complicated. Add the part that made it the default over the last two years: AI agent nodes, tool calling and vector stores sit next to the ordinary HTTP and database nodes, so the thing routing your Slack messages is also the thing running your retrieval pipeline. Jan Oberhauser founded it in Berlin in June 2019, SAP invested this May, and the valuation roughly doubled on the strength of that bet.

The fair code licence is an honest middle ground and worth understanding before you commit. The Community Edition is free to run and to modify, with no execution cap and no user cap, and the restriction is on reselling it as a hosted service. That is the free path and it costs you a server: a small VPS, Docker Compose, backups, upgrades and the debugging that comes with all three. Nobody should pretend that is the same as signing up for a SaaS, and the setup grade says so.

The cloud side dropped its free tier and now starts around twenty four euros a month for Starter with twenty five hundred executions, climbing to roughly eight hundred for Business. Every plan carries unlimited workflows and unlimited users, so only volume moves the bill, which is refreshingly legible after a decade of per seat arithmetic. The interface still assumes you can think in graphs. If you can, nothing else hands you this much for this little.