The short version

Checked against the live pricing pages of all four tools on 2026-09-20 (proxied browser session, each page fetched fresh and its plan table read). This is a terms check — no account was created on any of them and no workflow was run.

The headline: n8n does not have a free cloud plan. Every n8n Cloud button is a no-card trial, and its genuinely free layer is the fair-code Community Edition (Sustainable Use License, not OSI open source) you run on your own server. Across this four-tool shortlist, only Activepieces offers a free hosted tier in any volume worth naming, and only Windmill offers a free self-hosted build — with a license caveat that the pricing page never states and that matters if you ever run it commercially.

How we checked (and what we verified today)

Baseline: our n8n pricing check captured the live n8n pricing page in both billing states on 2026-09-16. Today we re-fetched that same page and all four competitors. Each alternative below is judged on what its free plan verifiably includes on 2026-09-20 and — the part that decides real cost — what its meter counts. “100 free things” means four different amounts of automation across these tools. Every price was read from the vendor page; the one figure we could not anchor to a captured string is flagged rather than filled in.

Tool Free tier (checked 2026-09-20) Cheapest paid What the meter counts
n8n No free cloud — Community Edition, free self-hosted, unlimited executions €20/mo yearly (Starter, 2.5k executions) Whole workflow execution, any number of steps
Make 1,000 credits/mo, 2 active scenarios, 15-min interval $9/mo (Make Plan, 5k credits) Credits = each module action
Activepieces 100 credits/day, forever, no card, unlimited flows $20/mo flat (Plus) AI credits; overage waits for tomorrow on Free
Windmill Community Edition self-hosted, $0, unlimited executions — but restricted license from $170/mo cloud (1 developer seat) Seats + compute units, not executions

Quick takes

Make is the closest visual-builder sibling and holds the cheapest paid entry on this list at $9/mo for 5,000 credits (our Zapier alternatives capture read the same figure on 2026-09-16). Read it the way you read Zapier’s: a Make credit is one module action, so a 6-module scenario consumes 6 credits per run and 5,000 credits ≈ 833 six-step runs. Free gives 1,000 credits a month, only 2 active scenarios, and a 15-minute minimum run interval (paid drops it to one minute). We did not re-capture Make’s page today, so its two numbers are carried forward from 2026-09-16 rather than re-read — treat it as the one figure on this page worth a manual refresh before you buy.

Activepieces is the only free hosted tier here worth naming: 100 credits a day, free forever, no card, unlimited flows, and the plan table still reads exactly as it did on 2026-09-16 (Free $0 / 100 a day, Plus $20 flat / 10,000 a month, Team $200 / 50,000 a month, $0.007 per credit overage) — zero drift across the four-day gap. The catch is the reset mechanic: on Free, going over means waiting for tomorrow instead of being billed on, and the credits are AI-oriented (the FAQ notes AI steps cost more than one credit). Plus is a flat $20/mo, not a slider.

Windmill is the one this list is probably missing on your side of it. It is open source and its free Community Edition is genuinely unlimited on executions — the captured page says “Unlimited executions” for the free self-hosted tier and caps it at only 3 workspaces, 50 users, and “Max 10 users with SSO.” That is a larger free footprint than any tier on this list, and the pricing model is structurally different from n8n’s: Windmill does not meter executions at all. It bills seats and compute units — the captured cloud block starts at $170/mo for 1 developer at $20/mo/dev, operators at $10/mo, and 100 app guests free per 30 days.

The part the pricing page never says: the Community Edition is free but restricted. Windmill’s own LICENSE file (read directly from the repository on 2026-09-20, not the README or its “Open source. Open pricing. No lock-in.” tagline) says the backend is AGPLv3 except for code behind the enterprise flag, which is proprietary, and grants a right to use the Community Edition free — but “not to sell, resell, serve as a managed service, modify or wrap under any form without an explicit agreement.” So Windmill’s free build is not the same thing as n8n’s Community Edition. n8n’s Community Edition is the same open product, unrestricted for running your own automation. Windmill’s is unrestricted for using, restricted for offering as a service.

The n8n side: a small currency trap, and unchanged numbers

Today’s re-fetch of n8n.io/pricing shows the 2026-09-16 figures intact — 20€ Starter / 50€ Pro / 667€ Business at the billed-annually rate, with 2.5k / 10k / 40k executions and “No credit card required” on the trial buttons. Zero price drift in four days.

One presentation detail is worth a line because it explains a class of mismatched third-party quotes: the price renders symbol-after, “20€”, from our network location, where our 2026-09-16 capture of the same page rendered it symbol-before (“€20”). It is the same amount and the same eur-only page — n8n still shows no USD switch and no currency control in the DOM (the same geo-default behavior we documented on Figma and Brevo vs Mailchimp). If a comparison table shows a figure that looks like a typo, check whether it is a symbol-placement or currency artifact before quoting it.

When to switch, and when to stay

  • Stay on n8n’s Community Edition if you can run a server and your workflow count is high — unlimited executions at $0 still beats every free tier here, and its cloud per-execution billing means a 20-step workflow costs one execution, not twenty tasks.
  • Switch to Activepieces if you want the free tier to be hosted rather than self-run: 100 credits a day with no card is the only free hosted allowance on this list, and flat $20 beats n8n’s €20 for a small team that mostly writes AI steps.
  • Switch to Make if you want a visual builder like Zapier at the lowest paid entry ($9) and can accept step-equivalent credit metering.
  • Look at Windmill if unlimited executions with no metering is the point — but read the LICENSE before committing, especially if anything you build with it might be sold or offered as a service.

Verdict

  • n8n’s free tier is really its self-hosted Community Edition. If “free” for you means “no server to run,” n8n’s free tier does not exist — its first real cost is €20/mo yearly.
  • Activepieces is the closest hosted free substitute, and its numbers held exactly across the two captures — the most stable price page of the four.
  • Windmill is the strongest free self-hosted footprint on this list (unlimited executions, no meter), but its free build carries a restriction the pricing page omits.
  • Make stays the cheapest paid entry at $9/mo — the one figure here to refresh manually before buying, since we carried it forward rather than re-capturing it today.

Windmill, Activepieces and n8n pages captured 2026-09-20 in the screenshots above; Windmill’s license reading is from the repository’s LICENSE file on 2026-09-20. Make’s two figures are carried forward from our 2026-09-16 capture in the Zapier alternatives piece and were not re-fetched today. Full method on the n8n pricing check and the head-to-head n8n vs Zapier. See testing methodology.

More of our n8n guides: