Free self-hosted n8n covers internal business use under the Sustainable Use License, and letting customers or partners build workflows needs a commercial agreement. SSO, Git, and environments need a paid Business or Enterprise key, so budget for one before you plan around them.
When you need this
- Legal or procurement asks whether n8n is open source.
- A product team wants to put n8n behind a customer-facing feature.
- IT requires SSO, or engineering wants workflows in Git.
Evaluation criteria
Internal use
Do only people in your organization create or modify workflows?
Look forIf so, the Community license applies for free. Consulting, building workflows for clients on your own instance, and running n8n behind your own product, where users trigger workflows you built, are allowed.
Outside users
Will customers or partners build or configure workflows, through any interface?
Look forThat needs a commercial agreement, whether through n8n's UI, its API, MCP, or an AI agent acting for the user. Hosting n8n as a service, white-labeling it, and forking it into an automation product are ruled out. One founder on Hacker News was quoted US$50,000 for a commercial license to embed n8n in a product.
Open source status
Does your policy require OSI-approved open source?
Look forRecord n8n as fair-code, because n8n does not call itself open source. The source is available under the Sustainable Use License, and files with .ee. in the name are under the n8n Enterprise License. A cloud engineer on Reddit could not propose the free version at work because audits would not allow it.
Features by edition
Which features in your plan need a license key?
Look forThe Community edition leaves out SSO, projects, sharing, environments, Git version control, external secrets, and log streaming. Registering it free by email adds folders, debugging in the editor, and custom execution data. Business adds SSO, environments, and Git. External secrets and log streaming need Enterprise.
Paid plan cost
What will the paid key cost at your volume?
Look forBusiness is €667 a month billed annually for 40,000 executions, with overage at €4,000 per extra 300,000. The Start-up Plan gives companies under 20 employees 50% off Business. Every instance using a key counts toward one quota. One former customer's previous company paid US$13,000 for 50 Enterprise workflows, and the next quote came in far higher.
License server
Can your instances reach n8n's license server?
Look forBusiness and Enterprise keys contact the license server daily and report production execution counts. Air-gapped instances can use a license certificate instead. Telemetry is on by default and can be turned off.
Questions to ask vendors
- Will anyone outside our organization ever build, edit, or configure a workflow?
- Which of SSO, Git, environments, external secrets, and log streaming do our security and audit rules require?
- Do we qualify for the Start-up Plan, and how many executions will our paid instances run in a year?
Red flags
- A customer-facing feature where users configure automations, built on the Community edition.
- Planning a rollout around SSO or Git before budgeting for a Business license.
- Describing n8n as open source in a procurement review.
Products in this piece
Sources
- Official documentation
- 7
- Public source
- 5
- n8n docs: Community license
- n8n docs: License FAQ
- n8n docs: Compare editions
- n8n docs: Manage your license
- n8n pricing
- n8n docs: Configure SSO
- n8n docs: Use external secret stores
- Hacker News comment on a commercial license quote for embedding n8n (Jul 21, 2025)
- Reddit r/n8n: My thoughts on n8n as a Cloud Engineer with 10+ years of experience (May 3, 2026)
- Cameron Eagans: Announcing n8n-oidc (Dec 29, 2025)
- Hacker News comment on shared workspaces needing a paid tier (May 3, 2025)
- n8n Community: Feedback on self-hosted pricing, a former Enterprise customer (Feb 9, 2025)