n8n's biggest structural difference from Zapier and Make is that you get to choose: run it yourself, or let n8n run it for you. Neither is objectively better - they trade cost, control, and maintenance against each other in different ways.
Self-hosted: what you're actually signing up for
The Community Edition is free and open-source, with no execution limits and no per-task billing - you're only paying for the server it runs on, which for a low-to-moderate volume instance is typically a few dollars a month on a basic VPS. In exchange, you own the maintenance: applying updates, managing backups, handling uptime, and setting up HTTPS for webhooks to work reliably (see the credentials guide for why HTTPS matters for OAuth, too).
Self-hosting also means your workflow data and credentials never leave infrastructure you control - a meaningful factor for anything touching sensitive customer data or internal systems with strict data-residency requirements.
n8n Cloud: what you're paying for
n8n Cloud removes all of the hosting and maintenance burden - no server to patch, no uptime to monitor, automatic updates. Pricing is tiered by plan (Starter, Pro, Business, roughly in the tens to hundreds of dollars per month depending on execution volume and team size) and billed per workflow execution rather than per individual step inside a workflow, which tends to stay reasonably affordable even for fairly complex multi-step automations.
Team and collaboration features
n8n Cloud's paid tiers add things that are harder to self-manage: shared credential permissions across a team, environments (separate staging vs. production instances), and role-based access control. Self-hosted setups can replicate most of this with enough DevOps effort, but Cloud gets you there without building it yourself.
A reasonable way to decide
Choose self-hosted if you're comfortable with basic server administration, want to minimize recurring cost at scale, or have data-residency requirements that rule out a third-party cloud. Choose n8n Cloud if you'd rather pay a predictable monthly fee than manage infrastructure, need built-in team features without extra setup, or are still validating whether n8n is the right tool before investing time in hosting it yourself.