n8n vs Make: Self-Hosted, Cloud, and the License
n8n ships under the Sustainable Use License, which is fair-code rather than OSI open source: run it for your own business, but do not host it for paying clients. On cost, n8n bills one execution per workflow run while Make bills one credit per module, so short workflows favor Make and long ones favor n8n.
Two things decide this, and neither is the feature list. First, n8n is not open source in the OSI sense — it ships under the Sustainable Use License, which lets you run it for your own internal business purposes but bars you from providing it to others for a fee. Second, the two platforms meter completely different things: n8n bills one execution per workflow run no matter how many steps it has, while Make bills one credit per module run. That single difference decides which is cheaper for you, and it flips depending on how many steps your workflows have.
Everything below was checked against the vendors' own pages and repositories in September 2026.
The license, stated precisely
n8n's marketing uses the phrase "fair-code." That is not a license, and it is not a synonym for open source. The actual license is in the repository.
n8n's LICENSE.md grants a copyright license under the Sustainable Use License, Version 1.0, and then limits it in one sentence:
"You may use or modify the software only for your own internal business purposes or for non-commercial or personal use. You may distribute the software or provide it to others only if you do so free of charge for non-commercial purposes."
Read that against what you plan to do.
Running n8n to automate your own company's work is squarely permitted. "Your own internal business purposes" covers a plumbing contractor automating invoices, an agency automating its own intake, a retailer syncing inventory. Commercial does not mean forbidden here.
Hosting n8n for clients and charging them is not permitted under this license. If you are an agency planning to spin up n8n instances for customers as part of a retainer, that is providing the software to others without it being free of charge, and you need a commercial arrangement with n8n rather than the Sustainable Use License.
Two further wrinkles the file spells out. Content in branches other than master is not licensed at all. And source files with ".ee." in the filename or ".ee" in the directory name are excluded from the Sustainable Use License and require a separate n8n Enterprise License.
Fair-code versus open source
Faircode.io, the site behind the term, is direct about what it is: "Fair-code is not a software license. It describes a software model where software: is generally free to use and can be distributed by anybody; has its source code openly available; can be extended by anybody in public and private communities; is commercially restricted by its authors."
The last clause is the one that matters. Commercial restriction by the author is exactly what the Open Source Definition does not allow. The Sustainable Use License does not appear on the Open Source Initiative's list of approved licenses.
So the accurate sentence is: n8n's source is publicly available and free to run for your own business, under a license that is not OSI-approved open source. If your procurement policy or your legal team has a rule about open source specifically, that distinction is not pedantry — it will come up.
Cloud prices, dated
From n8n's pricing page, as of September 2026, quoted in euros and billed annually: Starter is €20/mo for 2,500 workflow executions and 5 concurrent executions. Pro is €50/mo for 10,000 executions and 20 concurrent. Business is €667/mo for 40,000 executions and 30 concurrent. Enterprise is custom. All plans include unlimited active workflows and unlimited steps per execution. n8n advertises 17% off for annual billing.
From Make's pricing page, as of September 2026, in US dollars on monthly billing at the 10,000-credit tier: Free is $0 for 1,000 credits with two active scenarios and a 15-minute minimum interval. Core is $12. Pro is $21 and adds high-priority execution and full-text log search. Teams is $38. Core and above get unlimited active scenarios and a 1-minute minimum interval.
Note the currency mismatch before you build a spreadsheet. n8n publishes in euros, Make in dollars, so any comparison carries an exchange-rate assumption that neither vendor is responsible for.
The metering difference is the real cost driver
n8n counts one execution per workflow run, however many nodes it contains. Make counts one credit per module run, and its documentation on operations makes clear the trigger counts and that modules process each bundle separately.
Put the same 10,000-unit allowance side by side.
| Workflow shape | n8n Pro (10,000 executions) | Make Pro (10,000 credits) |
|---|---|---|
| 2 steps | 10,000 runs | 5,000 runs |
| 3 steps | 10,000 runs | 3,333 runs |
| 6 steps | 10,000 runs | 1,667 runs |
| 12 steps | 10,000 runs | 833 runs |
That is division from the published rules, not a benchmark. Now price it. Make Pro at $21 for 10,000 credits is about 0.21 cents per credit. A six-module scenario therefore costs about 1.3 cents per run. n8n Pro at €50 for 10,000 executions is about 0.5 euro cents per run regardless of size.
Roughly speaking, Make is cheaper for short workflows and n8n is cheaper for long ones, with the crossover somewhere around two to three steps. If your automations are ten-node monsters, n8n's flat execution pricing is not a small edge.
What self-hosting actually costs
The community edition license is free. The bill is not zero.
n8n's own documentation on choosing how to use n8n is blunt about the trade. Self-hosting means "You must provide and manage infrastructure," maintenance is "Your responsibility," technical expertise is required for installation and configuration, and it takes longer to set up. n8n recommends Cloud for anyone without technical expertise.
Price the infrastructure at list. From DigitalOcean's Droplet pricing, as of September 2026, a Basic shared-CPU Droplet with 2 vCPUs and 4 GB RAM is $24.00 a month. A 2 GB / 1 vCPU Droplet is $12.00. Add a managed database if you want your execution history to survive a rebuild, plus backups, plus a domain and TLS.
So the honest comparison at the low end is $24 a month of server against €20 a month of n8n Cloud Starter, before you have spent one minute on Docker, reverse proxies, upgrades, or the 3 a.m. reboot. Self-hosting is not the cheap option at small scale. It becomes the cheap option at volume, because the server does not care whether you run 2,500 executions or 250,000, and n8n Cloud's tiers do.
The other reason to self-host is data residency. If the records moving through your workflows cannot leave your infrastructure, that decides it, and the price comparison is beside the point.
What the free self-hosted edition leaves out
Per n8n's edition comparison, the Community edition "includes almost the complete feature set of n8n." What it excludes: custom variables, environments, external secrets management, log streaming, external storage for binary data, multi-main scaling mode, Projects, SSO via SAML or LDAP, workflow and credential sharing, and Git-based version control.
Registering an email address on the free Community edition unlocks folders, debug-in-editor, and custom execution data at no cost. Everything else on the exclusion list is a paid plan.
For a small business, the two absences that bite are credential sharing and SSO. If more than one person needs to touch the automations and you care about who has which API key, the free edition is not built for that.
Where it is a tie
On raw capability for ordinary small-business automation — move data between apps, transform it, branch on a condition, retry on failure — these two are close enough that neither is a reason to pick the other. Both do it.
It is also a tie on the free tiers being unsuitable for production. Make's free plan caps you at two active scenarios and a 15-minute interval. n8n's free self-hosted edition has no execution cap but hands you the ops work and leaves out credential sharing. Different reasons, same conclusion: budget for a paid tier.
Decide it this way
If you are going to resell or host automation for clients, read the Sustainable Use License first and talk to n8n. That is a licensing question, not a pricing one, and it does not have a workaround.
If you are automating your own business, count the average number of steps in your three busiest workflows. Two or three steps points to Make. Eight or more points to n8n on cost.
If nobody on your team is comfortable maintaining a Linux server, use a cloud plan from either vendor. n8n's own documentation says as much, and the $24 Droplet does not save you money at small scale anyway.