n8n Alternatives 2026: 9 Free Options (Tested)

Short answer: do not leave n8n just because a price changed. If you run n8n Community Edition yourself for your own team, n8n's pricing page says it is available on GitHub at no cost, so you are probably already on the free option. Look elsewhere if you want a standard open-source licence (Activepieces, MIT; Node-RED, Apache 2.0), a code-first tool (Windmill), or no servers (Make's free plan).

How we ordered the tools: self-hosted and open-source first, then hosted tools with free tiers, with Zapier as a paid reference. We ran n8n Community Edition and Node-RED on a Mac; the rest come from official docs and pricing pages. None of these products is ours.

What changed at n8n

On October 21, 2026, n8n's pricing page listed Starter at €20 per month, Pro at €50 and Business at €667, all billed annually, with Business described as self-hosted only. Enterprise is custom. The page also says Community Edition is available on GitHub at no cost.

A third-party tracker, Markupwatch, lists a change to the Business plan on October 15, from $667 to $800 per month in dollars, after a drop the day before. We could not match that to n8n's own page, which showed euros, so we do not treat it as confirmed. Check the pricing page for your region and billing period.

What we ran

On macOS 26.5.1 (Apple silicon, 32 GB RAM) we built the same small workflow in two tools: a trigger, an HTTP GET to httpbin.org, and a step keeping the origin and user-agent fields.

n8n Community Edition 2.44.5 installed with npm and needs Node.js 24 or newer; we used 24.22.1. Install took 196 seconds. Importing the workflow took 8 seconds and executing it from the command line took 4, with status success and the default SQLite database. No account was needed for that CLI run. The output was the origin address and the user-agent "n8n". We did not open the editor UI.

Node-RED 5.0.9 installed with npm in 21 seconds on Node.js 22.23.2 (it requires 22.9 or newer) and the server was ready in under 30 seconds. We deployed an inject, HTTP request, function and file flow through the admin HTTP API and got the origin and user-agent written out. One gotcha: giving a node the id "file", the same as a node type, produced a "Circular config node dependency detected" error until we renamed it.

On a Mac, Node-RED was lighter to start, while n8n needed a newer Node version and a longer install. Neither run says anything about the editor, credentials or scheduling.

When staying on n8n is the right answer

n8n's code is published under its Sustainable Use License. The licence text on GitHub grants rights to use, copy and modify the software, mainly for internal business or non-commercial personal use, and it does not cover distributing it for payment. Files marked ".ee" need a separate enterprise licence.

In plain terms: if you run workflows for your own company on your own server, Community Edition is free and nothing here beats migrating nothing. The Business plan is for teams that want features and support on top. Leave only if the licence terms do not fit your plan, for example if you want to embed automation inside a product you sell, or you need an OSI-approved licence for policy reasons.

Node-RED

Licence: Apache 2.0, a project of the OpenJS Foundation. It describes itself as low-code programming for event-driven applications.

Fit: flows that connect devices, MQTT, HTTP endpoints and small APIs. Its README shows an npm install and a browser editor at port 1880. It is less of a SaaS-connector catalogue than n8n.

Activepieces

Licence: the Community Edition is MIT; enterprise features sit under a separate commercial licence in the repository. Its README calls it an open source replacement for Zapier, self-hostable with Docker files provided.

Fit: the closest swap for n8n users who want a visual builder and a permissive licence. Read the enterprise folder before assuming a feature is free.

Windmill

Licence: the README says the core is AGPLv3, and that the Community Edition images include some proprietary code, free to use within limits. It forbids selling or re-exposing Windmill as a product without an agreement, so read it if you embed.

Fit: scripts in Python, TypeScript, Go and other languages that become workflows and internal UIs. Self-hosting uses Docker Compose with Postgres. See the pricing page for paid plans.

Huginn

Licence: MIT. Huginn lets you build agents that watch the web and act on changes, like a self-hosted IFTTT. The repository is large, with tens of thousands of stars, but the page we read showed no releases, and the README says it is maintained in the author's spare time. Check recent commits before depending on it.

Automatisch

Licence: AGPL-3.0 for the Community Edition, with ".ee." files under a separate enterprise licence. It is a self-hosted trigger-and-action tool aimed at people who do not code. We could not tell from its page how recently it was updated.

Make

Make's pricing help page says the Free plan includes 1,000 credits per month. It did not show other free-plan limits or paid prices in our fetch, so see the pricing page.

Zapier

Zapier is the paid reference. Its free plan has 100 tasks per month, two-step Zaps only and 15-minute polling. Professional starts at $19.99 per month billed annually for 750 tasks, or $29.99 billed monthly.

Pipedream

Pipedream's free plan is for development only, with no production environment, and support is community-only. Startup is $99 per month billed annually for 10,000 credits. It suits developers; for a no-code route, Make or Zapier are the easier starts.

Also on other lists

Pabbly Connect: free plan of 100 tasks per month, with paid plans priced in rupees on its page. Microsoft Power Automate: 30-day free trial, Premium $15 per user per month billed yearly; mainly for Microsoft 365 teams.

What migration really costs

Expect to rebuild, not import. Credentials, webhooks and schedules all have to be recreated, and any webhook URL that other systems call will change unless you put the new tool behind the same domain. Self-hosting also adds work that a hosted plan hides: backups, upgrades, a database and an uptime check. For one person running a handful of flows, that upkeep can outweigh the saving, which is another reason staying on a hosted or already-running n8n can be sensible.

Which one to pick

Staying on n8n Community Edition: you run internal workflows on a server you already manage. Activepieces: you want the same visual feel with MIT. Node-RED: devices and event streams. Windmill: your team writes code. Make's free plan: you want zero servers and light usage. Whatever you choose, rebuild one real workflow before moving the rest; none of these documents an n8n JSON importer.

How we checked

We read each vendor's pricing page and each project's licence on GitHub on October 21, 2026, and ran n8n and Node-RED as described above. The other tools were not run, so we say nothing about their setup time or reliability.

Sources

• n8n pricing
• n8n licence
• Markupwatch October 2026
• Node-RED
• Activepieces
• Windmill
• Huginn
• Automatisch
• Make pricing
• Zapier pricing
• Pipedream pricing
• Pabbly Connect pricing
• Power Automate pricing