Stars measure interest, though, not support. Nobody at n8n is on call for your instance. ### What n8n Community Edition is and isn't Four facts define the edition: - It's free to download, with no licence fee for running it. - It's self-hosted, so it runs on a server you provide, not on n8n's cloud. - It's source-available under the Sustainable Use License, which means you can read the code but your use is restricted. - You operate it, including updates, backups, uptime and security. The licence line is the one that trips people. **Source-available isn't the same as open source**, so check the licence file before building a product or a client service on top of it. [Activepieces](https://www.activepieces.com) takes a different route on the self-hosted build: the governance controls that separate n8n Community from Enterprise, from single sign-on and SCIM provisioning to custom roles, audit logs, release management and secret manager connections, run in its air-gapped edition the same way they do in its managed cloud, so a self-hosted buyer isn't handed a smaller product. Regulated and public-sector organisations have that air-gapped edition in production, and MoneyGram, Moneypenny, Alan and FundingSocieties run Activepieces as well. What Community Edition isn't is a trial of Enterprise. It's a complete product for one team, and what separates it from Enterprise is governance and scale, which later sections cover. Everything here was checked on 16 October 2026 against three primary sources: n8n's pricing page, n8n's documentation and the licence file in its repository. The star counts come from [GitStarClub](https://gitstarclub.com/n8n-io/n8n), which tracks repository growth. Pricing and licence terms change, so if you're reading this long after that date, reopen those three pages before you commit. ## Criteria for judging Community against Enterprise Judge Community, Cloud and Enterprise on seven criteria: cost, execution limits, who administers it, access control and sign-on, collaboration and environments, support, and licence terms. Since prices and terms move, the criteria are what you keep, and the figures you re-check each time. The list below shows the seven criteria, each with the question it answers: - Cost: what do you pay in licence fees and in infrastructure to run the workflows you have today? - Execution limits: does the edition cap how much work runs, and what happens at the cap? - Who administers it: who patches, backs up and restarts it, and is that person on your team? - Access control and sign-on: can you control who sees which workflow, and connect your company login system? - Collaboration and environments: can several people work safely, and can you separate testing from production? - Support: when it breaks at an awkward hour, who answers, and on what terms? - Licence terms: what are you allowed to do with the software, and what would push you into a paid agreement? Each criterion lands differently depending on the edition, so here's how they group. ### Cost and execution limits These two belong together because they trade against each other. Community has no licence fee, but you pay for the server and for the hours spent keeping it healthy. Cloud moves that bill into a subscription and ties it to execution allowances, so a busy workflow can raise the price or hit a cap. Enterprise is priced by agreement. Ask what an unexpected spike costs you in each case. On Community, you're the operator: updates, backups, uptime and recovery are yours. That's workable if one person owns it and writes down how it runs. If nobody does, the free price is misleading, because the cost shows up as a failure later. Cloud hands most of this to the vendor. This is where the editions separate most. Fine-grained permissions, single sign-on, shared projects, separate environments and vendor support are the controls a larger organisation needs for audits and handovers. A single team may never miss them. A company with several teams and a compliance reviewer will. Read the licence before you build anything customer-facing. Community is source-available under terms with limits on commercial use, not an unrestricted open-source licence, so check whether your intended use fits. ## What Community Edition includes and requires You get the editor, integrations, code and AI nodes, and webhooks at no license cost. You supply the server and everything that keeps it running, so the real price is your own upkeep.  The table below splits each criterion into what ships and what you provide. | Criterion | Included or you supply | What n8n docs say | |---|---|---| | Editor | Included | Visual canvas for building workflows | | Integrations | Included | Built-in nodes, plus an HTTP Request node for anything else | | Code and AI nodes | Included | Code node runs JavaScript or Python; AI nodes are built in | | Webhooks | Included | Webhook node starts a workflow from an incoming request | | Server | You supply | You install and host n8n yourself | | Database | You supply | SQLite by default; Postgres is supported | | Backups | You supply | Back up your database and encryption key | | Updates | You supply | You upgrade the instance yourself | | SSL | You supply | Put HTTPS in front, usually via a reverse proxy | Nothing you build with is held back, so a single team loses no capability on day one. ### What you must run yourself The bottom five rows are a standing job that someone on your team has to handle. Someone has to patch the server and prove a restore works before you need one. Skip that and you've saved a license fee by paying in outages. Memory is the first bill. [TrackVPS](https://trackvps.com/vps-for-n8n) puts trying it out at 2 GB of RAM, which means a cheap entry-level VPS is enough to evaluate n8n but not to depend on. **A small team needs 4 GB**, so budget for the next server size up once real workflows run.  Heavy workloads need 8 GB, which means a host that costs several times the starter box and deserves monitoring.  It fits one team with one person who owns the box: internal automations and webhook-driven syncs for a single group's processes. Once you need to hand that ownership to many administrators or separate access across teams, you're in governance territory, which is where Enterprise differs. ## What Enterprise and Cloud add When ownership has to be shared, Enterprise and Cloud add the controls an administrator needs. Those are single sign-on, directory login, finer roles, separate environments, Git-based source control, log streaming and external secrets, plus support and execution allowances. ### Feature gaps Read the table below as a list of what you would have to build or go without on Community. "Higher plans" means the capability is not available on every Cloud tier. | Criterion | Community | Cloud | Enterprise | |---|---|---|---| | SSO/SAML | Not included | Higher plans | Included | | LDAP | Not included | Higher plans | Included | | RBAC | Basic roles only | Expands on higher plans | Full project-level roles | | Environments | Not included | Higher plans | Included | | Source control | Not included | Higher plans | Included | | Log streaming | Not included | Higher plans | Included | | Secrets | Environment variables | Higher plans | External secret stores | | Support | Community forum | Varies by plan | Dedicated | | Concurrent executions | No default cap | Capped per plan | Not published | | Price | Free | Published per plan | Not published | None of these rows stops one team from running real workflows. Each one matters once a second team, an auditor or a contractor needs separate access. ### n8n Cloud plans and execution limits On Cloud, the server goes away and a monthly bill and a ceiling arrive. Each plan carries an execution allowance and a limit on how many runs happen at once, so a burst of webhooks queues instead of running in parallel. Self-hosted Community has no default concurrency cap, which means your limit is your hardware. That's cheaper at volume, but you carry the upkeep, including the 2 a.m. restart. ### Enterprise pricing and support You can't budget for Enterprise from the pricing page, because **n8n publishes no Enterprise price**. You get it from a sales conversation, and you should expect a quote shaped by your deployment rather than a list price. The same goes for its concurrency terms. Support is where the tiers separate most plainly: Community leans on forum answers and your own debugging, while Enterprise adds a contracted channel. ## Mistakes people make with Community Edition Treat a self-hosted server as if someone else were running it and you get these mistakes, which is why the real price of Community Edition is your own admin time. **Five cause most of the trouble**, and each carries a consequence: - Reading free as unrestricted commercial use, which puts you in breach of the licence if you resell or host n8n for clients. - Running SQLite in production, which struggles under concurrent executions and is painful to migrate away from later. - Keeping no backups and no stored encryption key, so a lost disk means lost workflows and credentials nobody can decrypt. - Exposing the instance without authentication, which hands strangers a tool built to call your APIs and run logic. - Falling behind on updates, which leaves published security fixes unapplied. All five are cheap to avoid on day one and expensive to repair after an incident. Under the Sustainable Use License, **internal business use is allowed**. Selling n8n as a service or charging others for hosting it is not. Use Postgres rather than the default SQLite, and back it up on a schedule. Set the encryption key yourself through the N8N_ENCRYPTION_KEY variable and keep a copy away from the server. **Without that key, a perfectly restored database still holds credentials you can't read.**  Put the instance behind a reverse proxy with TLS, keep user login enabled, and never leave the port open to the internet unprotected. Update on a calendar, because each skipped release makes the eventual jump larger and riskier to test. Choose Community if a named person will own the server, Cloud if nobody will, and Enterprise when you need SSO, role-based access control, or a contract. Monday morning, check that: 1. The database is Postgres. 2. You have restored a backup at least once. 3. The encryption key lives somewhere other than the server. 4. Every route to the instance requires authentication. 5. You know the date of your last update. ## When Activepieces fits better than n8n Community ### Why Activepieces suits the licence and upkeep concerns If the Sustainable Use License, server upkeep or building AI agents is what bothers you about n8n Community, Activepieces fits better. Its core is MIT-licensed, it has a free cloud plan that needs no card, and you can still self-host if you want to.  If you plan to build a product or client service on top of automation, the licence point matters most. MIT has no usage restrictions to read around, so the question "are we allowed to do this?" doesn't come up with the core. Check the terms of any paid features separately before you rely on them. If you'd rather skip the server, the cloud plan is the one to look at. You sign up without a card and get a $0 plan with 1,000 credits a month and up to 5 users, on Activepieces' hosting, and nobody on your team has to patch or back up a machine, so you're freed from infrastructure maintenance.  If you later want the data on your own infrastructure, self-hosting is available, so starting on the cloud doesn't lock you out of that. ### A concrete workflow in Activepieces Take a concrete job: a message lands in [Gmail](https://www.activepieces.com/pieces/gmail), an AI step decides whether it's urgent, and only the urgent ones go to a [Slack](https://www.activepieces.com/pieces/slack) channel. In Activepieces that's a trigger, an AI step and an action, laid out in sequence in the builder, and Gmail and Slack are two of its 741 integrations, meaning the platforms you rely on are almost certainly supported. The screenshot below shows the same pattern with different apps: a "Calendly Tracking" flow where a cancelled Calendly event triggers both a Slack message and a Gmail email. The trigger's settings are in the right panel.  Read it as a template for the shape: one trigger, then actions you can open and test one at a time, with sample data beside each step. That's what makes a flow easy for the next person to maintain. ### Moving from n8n I'm not claiming Activepieces imports or converts n8n workflows. It doesn't, as far as I can point to, so moving means rebuilding, though with unlimited flows on every plan, including free, the rebuild never runs into a flow cap. If your n8n flows already run well on a server you look after, Community may serve you better than a rebuild. If you're starting fresh, or the licence or upkeep is what's holding you back, [sign up for Activepieces](https://www.activepieces.com) and build the Gmail-to-Slack alert first; the core is under the MIT licence, so the licence question is settled before you start. Activepieces is the better fit for teams that want to build a product or client service on automation and need to settle the licence question up front, because its MIT-licensed core carries no usage restrictions to read around. The article's lead claim also holds on this point: the enterprise feature list is the same whether you run air-gapped or on the managed cloud, so choosing self-hosting costs you no capability and choosing cloud costs you no control over that list.  Teams that are comfortable with n8n's Sustainable Use License and its upkeep may reasonably stay with n8n Community, but where licence clarity and a free no-card cloud entry point matter most, Activepieces is the better choice (with any paid features' terms checked separately before you rely on them). ## Frequently asked questions Is n8n Community Edition really free? Yes, there's no licence fee to run it on your own server. What you pay for is the server, backups, updates and whoever's time keeps it alive. For a small team that cost is usually modest, but it's real, and it lands on a person rather than an invoice. ### Can I use n8n Community Edition for my business? Yes, for your own internal operations. The Sustainable Use License permits using and modifying n8n to run your company's workflows. It restricts selling n8n itself, or hosting it as a paid service for other people. If you're automating your own sales, support or reporting, you're inside the terms. If you plan to build a product around n8n or run it for clients, read the licence text first and get a written answer from n8n. Does n8n Community Edition have an execution limit? On a self-hosted Community install, n8n doesn't cap executions. Your ceiling is your hardware: memory, CPU and the database underneath. Heavy or bursty workloads will make you think about queue mode and scaling, which is operational work you take on yourself. Execution caps are a feature of the hosted Cloud plans, not of the self-hosted edition. ### Can I upgrade from Community Edition to Enterprise later? Yes, and you don't have to rebuild. Enterprise is a licensed tier of the same software, so an existing self-hosted instance can move up by applying a licence, keeping its workflows and credentials in place. Moving to n8n Cloud instead means migrating your data to a different environment. Plan that move before your workflow library gets large, because untidy credentials and ad-hoc naming become expensive to untangle later. ### Does n8n Community Edition include SSO? No. Single sign-on through providers such as SAML or LDAP sits in n8n's paid tiers, so Community users sign in with their own n8n accounts. For a handful of people who all know each other, that's fine. Once someone in IT needs to onboard and offboard staff from a central directory, or an auditor asks who can see which credentials, you have found your reason to move up. That's a governance question, so ask who administers the instance before you count workflows. ## Related reading - [Automated Discord Community Management with ChatGPT and Activepieces (Video Tutorial)](https://www.activepieces.com/blog/automated-discord-community-management) - [Cost of Self-Hosting AI: Staffing and TCO in 2026](https://www.activepieces.com/blog/cost-of-self-hosting-ai-staffing-and-tco-in-2026) - [GPU Requirements for Self-Hosting Mistral Large via API](https://www.activepieces.com/blog/gpu-requirements-for-self-hosting-mistral-large-via-api) ## References - [TrackVPS](https://trackvps.com/vps-for-n8n) - [GitStarClub](https://gitstarclub.com/n8n-io/n8n)The licence fee is zero, and your cost is the server and the hours that person spends on it.