n8n Enterprise License Cost: Quotes and Tiers (2026)
Oct 26, 202614 min read
Enterprise license cost and quotes
The short answer, with the date checked
Look for the enterprise price on n8n's pricing page, checked on 26 October 2026, and you will find none: it's custom and quote-based.
Any number you see quoted elsewhere, whether in a forum thread or a comparison with tools like Activepieces, is someone's past quote or a guess, not n8n's published rate.
Treat every figure you find, including any in this article, as unverified until n8n's sales team puts it in writing against your own requirements.
What the enterprise license is
If you want single sign-on (SSO), audit logs or environments, you need the paid commercial enterprise license, which unlocks the features n8n gates behind a contract. Community Edition provides none of them.
Take each in turn, because each answers a different control question. SSO lets your identity provider decide who can log in, so offboarding an employee removes access in one place.
Audit logs give a reviewer a record of who did what. Environments separate development from production, so a change is tested before it reaches live workflows.
I won't call any of this "compliant." A feature is evidence for a specific control, such as access revocation or change management, and you must name the control before you accept the feature as satisfying it.
What it is not: Community Edition and Sustainable Use License
Two things get confused with the enterprise license, and it is neither: Community Edition, and the Sustainable Use License that governs n8n's source-available code. Community Edition is the free, self-hosted version and lacks the gated features above.
Before you rely on any summary, read the Sustainable Use License itself. It is the licence text that sets what you may do with that free code, and it limits use in ways an open-source licence wouldn't.
Everything below works on Activepieces' free plan. Start without code or a credit card.
What n8n publishes for each tier
On the check date, n8n's pricing page puts a monthly price on three tiers and none on Enterprise: Starter is $20/mo, Pro is $50/mo and Business is $800/mo, all billed annually, so customers moving from Pro to Business face a leap beyond one order of magnitude in cost.
So any Enterprise figure you see elsewhere isn't n8n's.
n8n pricing tiers compared side by side
Read every "not published" below as a question to put to sales, not as zero. The table shows what n8n states per tier, and every cell I couldn't confirm from the page carries that label.
| Tier | Monthly price | Executions | User/project limits | SSO and LDAP | Audit logging | Support |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | 20 € | not published | not published | not published | not published | not published |
| Pro | 50 € | not published | not published | not published | not published | not published |
| Business | $800 | not published | not published | not published | not published | not published |
| Enterprise | not published | not published | not published | not published | not published | not published |
The same gap covers every control a security review would ask about. I won't call a tier adequate for SSO, LDAP or audit logging until the page, or a written quote, names the control and the tier that includes it.
Why n8n pricing depends on executions, not seats
If seats drove the price, the published tiers would show a per-seat rate. None does, so seat count isn't what I can show moving the price.
Volume is the variable n8n's pricing structure is built around. Two teams with the same headcount can land in different tiers because one runs far more workflows.
Before requesting a quote, therefore, estimate your monthly executions and keep the estimate, since it's the number the quote will rest on.
What the enterprise license actually unlocks in practice
Past the published prices, which are the easy part, the enterprise license buys a set of gated features, and only some of them are requirements.
The table below maps each feature to the problem it solves, the plan n8n's documentation lists it under, and whether a typical buyer must have it.
Read the last column as a judgment, not a vendor claim.
Check the plan column against n8n's current docs before budgeting, because plan placement is the part The only text after your instructions is "most likely to change.", which is a fragment with no competitor, product name, number, or compliment to remove.
Could you paste the full sentence you want rewritten?
| Feature | Problem solved | Plan per n8n docs | Required or nice-to-have |
|---|---|---|---|
| SSO via SAML/LDAP | Staff sign in through the corporate identity provider, and leavers lose access when their directory account is disabled | Check n8n's docs; listed as a paid-tier feature | Required where an access-control audit demands central identity |
| Log streaming | Sends workflow and audit events to your own monitoring or SIEM | Check n8n's docs; enterprise-oriented | Required if you must retain evidence outside n8n |
| External secrets | Keeps credentials in a dedicated vault rather than in n8n | Check n8n's docs; enterprise-oriented | Required if policy bars secrets in application databases |
| Git version control | Tracks workflow changes in a repository | Check n8n's docs; paid-tier feature | Nice-to-have for one builder, required for change control |
| Environments | Separates development from production | Check n8n's docs; paid-tier feature | Nice-to-have for small teams |
| RBAC and projects | Limits who can see and edit which workflows and credentials | Check n8n's docs; paid-tier feature | Required once teams share an instance |
| Queue mode | Spreads executions across worker processes | Check n8n's docs; a deployment option | Required at high execution volume |
SSO, log streaming and external secrets each answer a specific audit question:
- SSO answers who has access
- log streaming answers what happened
- external secrets answers where the credentials live
I wouldn't call a deployment compliant with anything on the strength of owning them. Name the control you must satisfy, then check whether the feature evidences it.
When more than one person edits production workflows, Git version control, environments, and RBAC with projects start to matter. A solo builder can skip most of them. A team handing workflows to contractors can't reasonably skip role separation.
Once execution volume forces queue mode on you, self-hosting costs appear in your own infrastructure bill. Support terms are negotiated in the quote, so read the actual SLA wording and ask what happens to your workflows when n8n's cloud is down and yours isn't.
Easier to see it running than to read about it: set it up free, no card.
Five costly mistakes buyers make with n8n licensing
Trust a number or an assumption that n8n's own pages don't support, and you have made one of the five errors buyers repeat.
Removing the subscription line by self-hosting doesn't remove the license terms. n8n's source-available license restricts some commercial uses.
Miscounting executions
Count the workflows you built and you will undercount the runs those workflows trigger. A polling trigger runs whether or not anything has changed. Polling frequency, not workflow count, drives the total.
According to Solostacklab, a trigger polling every minute produces 43,200 executions a month, so a single workflow can dominate your usage. Every 5 minutes gives 8,640, and every 15 minutes gives 2,880, which means the shorter interval triples the volume.
Measure your intervals before you size a quote.
Activepieces charges for the run and ignores what happens inside it: a ten-step flow costs 1 credit, the same as the two-step workaround it replaced, so breaking work into smaller, more reliable steps never raises the bill.
Zapier's pricing page bills per task and Make's per module, which taxes that discipline; polling frequency still decides how many runs you buy, but flow design doesn't.
Ignoring self-hosting labour
Servers, upgrades, backups and someone on call: a self-hosted instance needs all of it, and that labour never appears on a license quote, yet it belongs in the comparison. Estimate the hours and price them at your own internal rate.
Servers, upgrades, backups and someone on call: a self-hosted instance needs all of it, and that labour never appears on a license quote, yet it belongs in the comparison.
Buying enterprise for the brand
Don't buy enterprise for the brand; a requirement has to justify it. List the features you need, then check n8n's pricing and feature pages to see which plan includes each. If one gated feature is the only reason, ask whether a lower tier covers it.
Trusting third-party enterprise figures
If you find an enterprise figure in a blog or forum, it is someone else's contract, possibly out of date, because n8n publishes no enterprise price.
Take list prices only from n8n's pricing page on the day you budget, and treat everything else as unverified until the vendor puts it in writing.
When another tool fits better than n8n enterprise
When your need is smaller than enterprise governance, or when you want someone else to run the infrastructure, another tool fits better. In both cases, the vendor's own pages should settle the comparison, not a list-price table.
The table below sets the lower n8n tier beside two hosted rivals. Read it as a map of what each charges for and where it runs, since the two entry prices aren't like-for-like and cells marked unverified need checking before you budget.
| Option | Best fit | Hosting | Pricing model | Entry price (date) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lower n8n tier | Teams that need n8n's workflow model but not SSO or audit controls | Unverified for each tier | Unverified | Unverified; take from n8n's pricing page |
| Zapier | Non-technical teams wanting hosted, per-task billing | Vendor-hosted | Per task | $19.99/mo, billed annually; date not verified |
| Make | Visual, multi-step scenarios at a low entry cost | Vendor-hosted | Usage-based; unit unverified | $9/mo, billed annually; date not verified |
| Activepieces | Teams that want an open source, MIT-licensed core with 744 integrations and unlimited flows on every plan | Activepieces Cloud or on-prem; every plan can run on either | Credit-based; a run is 1 credit however many steps it has | $0 Free plan, 1,000 credits a month (checked 2026-10-23) |
If the controls you need are ones a lower tier already lists on n8n's pricing page, enterprise buys you nothing. List each enterprise-gated feature you'd use, then check whether the lower tier names it.
Hosted per-task alternatives to n8n enterprise
If you want the vendor to carry uptime, Zapier and Make suit. The trade is that when their cloud goes down, your automations stop, and you hold no environment to fall back on.
Read each vendor's SLA line by line for the credit it gives for downtime, and compare how each counts a billable unit, because a task and an operation aren't the same measure.
Self-hosted open-source alternatives to n8n enterprise
Choose this route only if your requirement is running the engine inside your own boundary, with the ability to embed it in your product. "Open source" describes a license, not a control.
Quote the license text before relying on it, and confirm which features are outside the open core.
This route won't necessarily cost less than n8n enterprise; you take on hosting, patching and incident response yourself.
What Activepieces does about this
The problem in this article is a price you can't read off a page. Enterprise cost is a quote, and it moves with execution volume, gated features and where you host. Activepieces tries to remove two of those three variables.
Its billing unit is the run, and a ten-step flow costs 1 credit, the same as the two-step workaround it replaced. Estimating spend then comes down to how often your triggers fire, which is the one number you can measure before talking to anyone.
The polling arithmetic above still applies to us. Flow design is the part that stops mattering.
On licensing, the Activepieces core is released under the MIT license, which is an open-source license and not a source-available one. You can read the text in the repository and give it to counsel without relying on a summary, including this one.
Some enterprise features sit outside that open core under a commercial license, so the check I recommended for any open-source option applies to us as well.
Take the list of features you need and confirm each against the repository and our pricing page on the day you budget.
Self-hosting is a supported path, so you can run the engine inside your own boundary and embed it in your product. That doesn't make it free.
You still carry hosting, patching, monitoring and incident response, and you should price those hours at your own internal rate before comparing us with any quote.
Here is how I'd use us in the process above. Run the same five steps against Activepieces, with the same feature list and the same monthly run estimate. Then compare the written answers side by side rather than a list price against a quote.
If we can't show a control in writing, don't count it, and apply the same rule to n8n.
Frequently asked questions
Does n8n publish an enterprise price? No. n8n lists prices for its cloud tiers on n8n.io/pricing, but the enterprise license is handled through a sales conversation.
Treat any enterprise price you find on a third-party site as unverified, because the real figure depends on your execution volume, the gated features you need and whether you self-host.
Can I get enterprise features on the free self-hosted version?
Some, as n8n currently defines it. The free community edition has offered a limited set of otherwise paid features through a registered license key, but that set changes.
Check n8n's current documentation for the exact list before you assume a feature you need is included. Single sign-on, advanced permissions and similar controls are the features most likely to sit behind the paid license, so verify those first.
Is n8n free for commercial use?
Under n8n's source-available license, internal business use is generally permitted. But the license isn't an open-source license, and it restricts certain commercial arrangements, such as offering n8n to others as a hosted service.
Read the license text on n8n's repository yourself and ask counsel whether your use case falls inside it. Don't rely on a summary, including this one.
Does an n8n enterprise license include support? That depends on what your contract states. Support terms, response commitments and any uptime language belong in the written quote, not in a marketing page.
If you self-host, ask what happens when your own infrastructure fails: a vendor support commitment doesn't cover an outage in a system you operate.
How do I get an accurate n8n quote? Work through these steps in order, and keep the record of each.
- Record the date you read n8n.io/pricing, so you can show later which published terms you compared against.
- List the gated features you need, such as access controls or single sign-on, and confirm each one against n8n's documentation.
- Estimate your monthly executions, including retries and scheduled workflows, since volume drives the quote.
- Get the quote in writing, with limits, included features and support terms stated.
- Add your own self-hosting operations cost if you run it yourself: hosting, patching, monitoring and incident response.
Skipping the last step is how a quote that looks cheap turns out expensive.
