n8n alternatives you can host commercially

At a glance

The licence question comes first, and most pages skip it

n8n is not open source in the OSI sense. It ships under the Sustainable Use License, which permits internal business use and non-commercial use but restricts providing the software to others for a fee. Running it yourself, for your own company, is explicitly fine. A hosting company selling it is the case the licence is written about.

Several providers sell managed n8n anyway. Some may hold agreements they do not publish; others are taking a position. We would rather not build a product line on a question we cannot answer with a document, so this catalogue lists n8n and sells the four alternatives below. If you already run n8n yourself, that is entirely legitimate and we will happily host the rest of your stack next to it.

Activepieces — the closest thing to n8n

Triggers, steps, branches, a large library of integrations and AI steps that call whichever model you configure. If a piece is missing you can write one in TypeScript. For most people migrating from n8n or from Zapier, this is the landing spot: the mental model transfers directly and the community edition is MIT.

What you give up against n8n is breadth — n8n has had longer to accumulate integrations — and some of the more baroque node behaviours.

Windmill — for teams who can code

Windmill inverts the trade. You write Python, TypeScript, Go or Bash; it supplies scheduling, retries, secrets, permissions, queuing and a generated UI per script. Flows compose those scripts and an app builder puts a front-end on top.

For a team that already writes code, this removes more glue than any visual builder does. For a team that does not, it is the wrong tool.

Node-RED and Kestra — different problems entirely

Node-RED is the veteran of event-driven flows: MQTT, webhooks, hardware, protocol translation. If your automation is reacting to things rather than calling SaaS APIs, it is probably the best fit and it is very light to run.

Kestra describes workflows as YAML that lives in your repository, with schedule and event triggers, parallel branches, retries and backfills. It is the right answer for data pipelines that need review and version control, and the wrong one for a three-step notification flow.

What about Zapier and Make?

Both are excellent products with a pricing model that punishes success: you pay per task or per operation, so the better your automation works, the more it costs. Self-hosting inverts that — the instance is the cost and throughput is a sizing question.

The honest counterpoint is that Zapier and Make maintain hundreds of integrations for you, and nobody has to patch them. If your automation is five steps and runs twice a day, the hosted service is probably cheaper in total cost of attention.

The verdict

Coming from n8n or Zapier and want the same shape: Activepieces. Comfortable writing code: Windmill. Devices, MQTT and webhooks: Node-RED. Scheduled data pipelines under version control: Kestra. All four can be sold as managed hosting, which — as dull as it sounds — is the difference between a product line and a liability.

Mentioned on this page

Activepieces

Open automation with hundreds of integrations — and no execution quota.

from $5.99/moDetails →

Windmill

Turn scripts into workflows, schedules and internal apps.

from $11.99/moDetails →

Node-RED

Wire events, devices and APIs together on a canvas.

from $5.99/moDetails →

Kestra

Declarative orchestration for data and AI pipelines.

from $11.99/moDetails →