n8n Review: What to Settle Before Running Automations and Agents on It

Who it fits

• Your automations touch data that must stay on your own infrastructure: the Community edition runs self-hosted with Docker or Docker Compose, on premises or in a private cloud.
• Your workflows are long or branch heavily: n8n bills one execution per production run, whatever the number of steps, and sub-workflows and error workflows do not count.
• Someone on the team writes code: Code nodes run JavaScript and Python, and the HTTP Request node reaches any API without a prebuilt integration.
• You want AI agents inside workflows with controls around them. The AI Agent node calls tools you connect, human approval can gate individual tools, and the Guardrails node checks text before and after the model.

Where it falls short

• The Sustainable Use License limits the free edition to internal business use: you may not host n8n as a service or let outside users build or edit workflows without a commercial agreement.
• Git source control, environments, and SSO need a Business or Enterprise license, and external secret stores need Enterprise. n8n's security page places SSO on Enterprise alone, so confirm SSO in the Business quote. In a case study n8n published, Stepstone reports that hundreds of workflows on one shared Community account became unsustainable, and the company moved to Enterprise for version control and separate environments.
• Self-hosting makes your team the operator: database, updates (n8n recommends at least monthly), task runner isolation for Code nodes, and queue mode with Redis to scale.
• On n8n Cloud, Starter caps an execution at 5 minutes and 5 concurrent runs, and Business, the first plan with Git and SSO, is not offered as a hosted plan.