Is n8n or Pipedream cheaper?

n8n starts at About $24/mo (Cloud Starter, 2,500 executions; roughly $20 on annual billing) (free plan available). Pipedream starts at Free (100 credits per month, hard-capped); paid plans from $29 per month billed annually, or $45 month-to-month (free plan available).

n8n vs Pipedream

An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.

The short answer

Editorial assessment

Pipedream compared with n8n

The closest comparison, and the decision usually comes down to hosting and pricing shape. n8n is source-available and can be self-hosted for the cost of a server, with a node-graph canvas that handles branching and merging more visually than Pipedream's linear-with-branches builder. Pipedream is hosted only, has more pre-built connectors, and bills compute rather than executions. Teams with infrastructure and a strong preference for owning their data pick n8n; teams that want to write code without running anything pick Pipedream.

Choose n8n if

Technical or semi-technical teams building long, multi-step automations, enrichment waterfalls, AI agents, and internal integrations, who want per-execution economics in the cloud or full data control self-hosted, and who are comfortable reading JSON when something breaks.

Choose Pipedream if

Technical GTM and RevOps engineers, and small product teams, who want the connector catalog and hosted auth of an iPaaS but refuse to express real logic as configured boxes. Also strong for SaaS companies that want to ship integrations to their own customers without building each one, via Connect.

Side by side

13 attributes

Attribute	n8n	Pipedream
Category	GTM Engineering	GTM Engineering
Starting price	About $24/mo (Cloud Starter, 2,500 executions; roughly $20 on annual billing) (free plan available)	Free (100 credits per month, hard-capped); paid plans from $29 per month billed annually, or $45 month-to-month (free plan available)
Pricing model	Two paths. Cloud: subscription tiers metered by workflow executions per month (a run is one execution regardless of step count), with unlimited workflows and steps on every tier. Self-hosted: the Community edition is free under the fair-code Sustainable Use License, with paid Business and Enterprise self-hosted tiers adding collaboration, SSO, environments, and support. Prices are quoted in euros; dollar figures shift slightly with exchange rates.	Subscription plus usage. Every plan includes a monthly allowance of credits, where one credit is 30 seconds of execution at the default 256 MB of memory, and credit burn scales with the memory you configure. Plans also include AI token allowances for the AI-assisted builder. Tiers gate active workflow count, connected accounts, event history retention, schedule granularity, retries, GitHub sync, and security controls. Prices below are the annual rate; monthly billing costs meaningfully more.
Free plan	Self-hosted Community edition is free and unmetered on your own infrastructure	100 credits per month with a hard usage cap, 3 active workflows, 3 connected accounts, 1M AI tokens, 7-day event history, 5-minute minimum schedule interval, and no auto-retry
Free trial	Cloud trial, no card required	No time-limited trial of paid tiers; the permanent Free plan is the trial. Business plan trials are handled by sales.
Best for	Technical or semi-technical teams building long, multi-step automations, enrichment waterfalls, AI agents, and internal integrations, who want per-execution economics in the cloud or full data control self-hosted, and who are comfortable reading JSON when something breaks.	Technical GTM and RevOps engineers, and small product teams, who want the connector catalog and hosted auth of an iPaaS but refuse to express real logic as configured boxes. Also strong for SaaS companies that want to ship integrations to their own customers without building each one, via Connect.
Setup time	Cloud: minutes to sign up, and a first webhook-to-Slack workflow the same hour. Self-hosted: a Docker one-liner for a test instance; a hardened production deployment with backups and HTTPS is a half-day for someone who has run containers before.	A first working workflow takes 10 to 20 minutes: sign up, create a trigger, connect one app, add a step. A production-grade workflow with retries, concurrency limits, error alerting, and GitHub sync is a half day. Connect implementations are a genuine engineering project, typically one to two weeks for a first customer-facing integration.
Learning curve	Steeper than task-based tools: expect a few days to internalize items, expressions, and node data mapping, typically via imported templates. Engineers acclimate almost immediately; operators without API experience need the templates and patience.	Low for anyone who writes JavaScript or Python; the platform mostly gets out of the way. The parts that take longer are the ones specific to the model: understanding what a credit actually costs at your memory setting, deciding when to use a data store rather than an external database, and structuring long work as queued events instead of one long execution.
Platforms	Web app (cloud), Self-hosted (Docker, npm), Embedded (commercial license), REST API	Web application, REST API, CLI, Node.js and Python SDKs for Connect, Hosted and self-deployed MCP servers
Compliance	SOC 2, GDPR	SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA (Business plan)
Founded	2019	2019
Headquarters	Berlin, Germany	San Francisco, California
Ownership	Venture-backed, founder-led	Acquired by Workday (announced November 2025, closed early 2026)

Strengths and limitations

n8n

Strengths

Per-execution pricing inverts the category's cost model; long, complex workflows, exactly the kind GTM engineering produces, are where it is cheapest relative to rivals.
Free self-hosted Community edition provides a permanent exit ramp and full data sovereignty, a structural negotiating position no closed rival offers.
Code nodes and the HTTP Request node remove the capability ceiling; if an API exists, n8n can drive it without leaving the canvas.
LangChain-based agent nodes made it one of the fastest paths from 'AI idea' to 'AI in production', with approvals, retries, and logging around the model.

Limitations

The learning curve is real: items, expressions, and JSON structure confront you in week one, and non-technical users often stall where Zapier would have carried them.
The integration catalog (400+) is an order of magnitude smaller than Zapier's; long-tail SaaS tools frequently mean building against the raw API via the HTTP node.
Fair-code is not open source by OSI definition, which complicates some corporate policies and community expectations, and the license debate resurfaces periodically.
Cloud Starter's 2,500 executions can pinch for high-frequency polling triggers; trigger design (webhooks over polling) becomes a cost skill.

Pipedream

Strengths

Arbitrary Node.js, Python, Go, and Bash inline with configured actions, so no logic problem forces you off the platform.
Managed authentication across 3,000+ apps removes the single most tedious part of building integrations, and code steps get the same credentials as configured ones.
Compute-based pricing is unusually favorable for high-volume, high-filter workloads where most events are discarded early.
Bi-directional GitHub sync with branches and pull requests makes automation reviewable like the rest of the codebase, which very few tools in this category offer.

Limitations

Cold starts of several seconds after roughly five minutes of inactivity make Free-tier workflows unsuitable for interactive triggers such as Slack slash commands; warm workers are a paid-tier feature.
The 750-second execution ceiling (300 on Free) means genuinely long batch jobs must be chunked into queued events rather than run as one pass.
Advanced includes no more credits than Basic, which surprises buyers who upgrade expecting headroom and get feature unlocks instead.
Paid-plan overages are uncapped, so a retry loop against a slow API can burn thousands of credits overnight and appear on the next invoice.

Pricing compared

n8n

Two paths. Cloud: subscription tiers metered by workflow executions per month (a run is one execution regardless of step count), with unlimited workflows and steps on every tier. Self-hosted: the Community edition is free under the fair-code Sustainable Use License, with paid Business and Enterprise self-hosted tiers adding collaboration, SSO, environments, and support. Prices are quoted in euros; dollar figures shift slightly with exchange rates.

Community (self-hosted)Free
Starter (Cloud)~€20 to €24
Pro (Cloud)~€50 to €60
Business / EnterpriseCustom

For long workflows, nothing in the category touches n8n's economics: the per-execution meter makes a 40-step enrichment waterfall cost the same as a 2-step alert, and the same pipeline on task or operation pricing can cost ten to fifty times more at identical volume. Against that, the true cost is skill: n8n assumes you can read JSON, debug an HTTP call, and occasionally write a line of code. Teams with that skill get Zapier-class capability at a fraction of the spend, plus a free self-hosted exit ramp that caps vendor risk permanently. Teams without it will burn the savings in time.

Pipedream

Subscription plus usage. Every plan includes a monthly allowance of credits, where one credit is 30 seconds of execution at the default 256 MB of memory, and credit burn scales with the memory you configure. Plans also include AI token allowances for the AI-assisted builder. Tiers gate active workflow count, connected accounts, event history retention, schedule granularity, retries, GitHub sync, and security controls. Prices below are the annual rate; monthly billing costs meaningfully more.

Free$0
Basic$29
Advanced$49
Connect$99
BusinessCustom

For a technical buyer, Pipedream is one of the better value propositions in this category, because the pricing axis rewards writing efficient code instead of punishing you for having many steps. A team replacing a per-task automation bill that scales with record volume often sees the number fall sharply, since filtering happens inside one credit-cheap step rather than across a dozen billed actions. The caveats are real: the included credit allowance stops improving between Basic and Advanced, overages on paid plans are uncapped, and the cost of a workflow is a function of upstream API latency you do not control. Compared with self-hosting n8n, you are paying roughly $600 a year to not run infrastructure, which is a straightforward trade for most small teams and a bad one for teams that already have a Kubernetes cluster and a spare engineer.

Editorial verdict on each

n8n

Momentum

n8n is what the automation category looks like when it is priced and licensed in the buyer's favor: pay per run instead of per step, read the source, and leave for your own server whenever you like. For the GTM engineer building long enrichment waterfalls and AI-agent workflows, those three facts compound into the category's best deal, and the LangChain-native agent tooling has made it the default engine of the DIY stack. The honest cost is skill: it asks more of you in week one than Zapier ever will, and its integration catalog still leans on the HTTP node for the long tail. Teams with a technical operator should default here; teams without one should pay the Zapier tax knowingly.

Read the full n8n profile

Pipedream

Pipedream is the automation platform for people who can write code and are tired of pretending they cannot. The combination of a 3,000-app connector catalog, managed authentication that your own code can use, a hosted runtime with no infrastructure to operate, and GitHub sync with pull requests is not matched by anything else at this price. Compute-based pricing is the right shape for GTM workloads that ingest a lot and keep a little, and the published tiers stay honest all the way to $99 a month before sales gets involved. The reservations are specific rather than generic: cold starts rule out latency-sensitive triggers on lower tiers, the 750-second ceiling forces awkward chunking on batch work, Advanced buys features rather than credits, and uncapped paid-plan overages punish a retry loop. Weigh those against the ownership change, since Workday closed its acquisition in early 2026 and an independent developer platform is now a component of an enterprise agentic strategy. For a technical small team today it remains an excellent buy; keep an eye on the roadmap and the renewal terms.

Read the full Pipedream profile

n8n profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Pipedream last reviewed 2026-08-23. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.