n8n Production Playbook

Look forRecord the hosting decision before the first production workflow. Cloud runs in Frankfurt, with updates on a Stable or Beta track. Self-hosted Community is free for internal use, and Business (€667 a month billed annually) is self-hosted only. Stepstone ran one shared Community instance for four years and moved to Enterprise in early 2025, once credentials were shared across users and workflow ownership had blurred.

Look forName an owner and a backup in each workflow's description, and group workflows into projects with roles. One former employee on Hacker News watched flows built by non-engineers break after their last owner left, until engineering was asked to fix them.

Look forSet an error workflow in each production workflow's settings, because error handling is opt-in per workflow, and add a Stop And Error node where wrong data must fail the run. One builder found error coverage on an instance had decayed and a workflow had failed 24 times in 71 hours unnoticed. Another workflow scored every lead zero for six weeks while every run succeeded.

Look forSize workflow history to your plan (1 day on Starter, 5 on Pro), or use Git source control and environments on Business and Enterprise. Without them, Malte Buttjer moved Code node source into Git so changes can be reviewed.

Look forShare credentials only within a project, and review them before a workflow goes live. On Enterprise, an external secret store keeps credentials from being shared user by user. Stepstone's IT security team also runs its own instance for sensitive workflows.

Look forTrack production executions in the Insights dashboard, filter triggers before the workflow starts, and set polling intervals on purpose. A schedule every 5 minutes runs about 8,600 times a month.