n8n Self-Hosted vs Cloud: Which Should You Actually Pick?

The question "should I self-host n8n or use n8n Cloud?" has a different answer depending on your volume, your team, and what else you are running. Self-hosted gives you unlimited executions at the cost of maintaining infrastructure. Cloud gives you a managed service at per-execution pricing. Here is how to pick without regretting it six months later.

Quick Verdict

Use n8n Cloud if you run fewer than 20,000 executions per month, your team does not have dedicated DevOps capacity, or you need a BAA (available on the cloud enterprise tier). Use self-hosted if you exceed 50,000 executions per month, you need full control over where data lives, or your team already manages Docker workloads comfortably. The crossover where self-hosted becomes cheaper than cloud is typically around 30,000 to 50,000 executions per month.

Cost Breakdown

n8n Cloud Starter is around 20 dollars per month for roughly 2,500 executions and 5 active workflows. Pro is around 50 dollars for 10,000 executions. Team and Enterprise tiers scale up to hundreds of thousands of executions. Above 100,000 executions per month the cloud pricing gets expensive.

Self-hosted cost is your infrastructure cost. A small Hetzner VPS (4GB RAM, 2 vCPU) runs about 6 dollars per month and handles roughly 30,000 to 50,000 executions depending on workflow complexity. A dedicated server handles hundreds of thousands. Add your time for setup and maintenance, which is real cost not reflected in the server bill.

Feature Parity

Self-hosted and cloud have the same core nodes and same workflow builder. The gap is in enterprise features. Cloud enterprise gets SSO, advanced RBAC, log streaming to external SIEMs, and priority support. Self-hosted community edition does not. If you need SSO or RBAC at the organizational level, you need cloud enterprise or the self-hosted Enterprise edition (separately licensed).

Maintenance Burden

Cloud: zero. Updates are rolled out automatically, backups are handled, scaling happens transparently. Self-hosted: real. You manage OS updates, n8n version upgrades, database backups, disk space, TLS certificates, log rotation. For a team with an experienced DevOps person this is 2 to 4 hours per month. For a team without one, this is where self-hosted projects quietly die.

Reliability

n8n Cloud has standard SaaS uptime (typically 99.9 percent). Their incidents are rare but do happen. Self-hosted reliability is as reliable as your infrastructure. A single VPS without redundancy will have more downtime than cloud over a year. A properly-architected self-hosted setup with health checks and standby replicas is more reliable than cloud.

If your workflows are business-critical and downtime costs money, factor in the engineering cost of achieving comparable reliability on self-hosted.

Data Sovereignty and Compliance

Self-hosted wins for strict data control. You choose exactly where the data lives, how it is encrypted, and who has access. For healthcare, financial services, or government work, this is often a hard requirement. Cloud stores execution data in their infrastructure, which may or may not match your compliance requirements.

n8n Cloud has SOC 2 Type II and offers enterprise data region selection, which covers most compliance needs. For the most sensitive data, self-hosted is still the safer bet.

Integration Performance

Self-hosted can sit next to the systems it integrates with (CRM, database, APIs), dramatically reducing latency for tool calls and API round-trips. For a voice agent where every 100ms of webhook latency matters, self-hosted in the same region as Vapi saves noticeable time.

Cloud has less flexibility here; you rely on n8n's hosting region choices. For most non-voice workflows this does not matter.

Scaling Patterns

Cloud scales automatically; you just pay for more executions. Self-hosted scales by adding queue workers. The production architecture for high-volume self-hosted n8n is main instance plus Redis queue plus multiple worker nodes. This is more complex but scales to millions of executions per month at much lower cost than cloud.

Credentials and Secrets

Cloud stores credentials encrypted in their infrastructure. Self-hosted stores credentials in your database with an encryption key you manage. For highly sensitive credentials (production API keys, payment processor keys), self-hosted with an external secrets manager like HashiCorp Vault or AWS Secrets Manager gives you tighter control.

The Hybrid Approach

A common pattern is to start on Cloud while validating workflows, then migrate to self-hosted once volume or cost justifies it. Migration is straightforward because workflows export as JSON and import cleanly. Credentials need to be re-entered. The main friction is swapping webhook URLs, which requires updating every external service pointing at n8n.

Another pattern is to run cloud for non-critical workflows and self-hosted for compliance-critical or high-volume ones. This adds operational complexity but can be the right answer for larger teams.

The Honest Answer

Most teams should start on Cloud. The maintenance burden of self-hosting is real and easy to underestimate. When you hit the point where cloud costs exceed 200 dollars per month and you have someone on the team who can responsibly run a Docker host, then migrate. Not before.