n8n Cloud vs Self-Hosted: Upsides vs Downsides
A practical guide to choosing between n8n Cloud and self-hosted.
When considering workflow builders to build out your agentic workflows, you’ve probably heard of n8n by now.
One thing I wish I knew before building on it was choosing between the self-hosted and Cloud versions.
TDLR: From my own experience, if your workflow regularly runs longer than 5 minutes, skip Cloud and go self-hosted immediately.
#1: Execution Run Time
The biggest limitation of n8n Cloud is its max execution runtime.
This is simply the amount of time your workflow is allowed to run before n8n stops it.
Starter = 5 minutes
Pro = 40 minutes
Anything beyond this gets cut off.
What this means is the amount of time that your workflow can run, before n8n caps it and stops it.
This is why any workflow that consistently runs past the 5–40 minute range should go straight to self-hosted.
A short story… When I was building an agentic workflow for Riverside, it kept failing around the 15–40 minute mark. It was super perplexing because I couldn’t figure out why.
I spent hours trying to debug. Kept thinking that there was a failure in my workflow logic.
Turns out it was just a Cloud plan limitation.
I shifted everything to a self-hosted setup, and it ran for more than 4 hours without any issues.
In my most recent test on the n8n Cloud Starter plan (see the image above), the workflow consistently failed around the 20–30 minute mark.
From my experience, anything that crosses the 10-minute range becomes a wildcard. You never really know when Cloud will decide to shut the workflow down.
But… why will you need such a long running workflow?
It usually comes down to two things:
1. The nature of the work itself (scraping, LLMs, slow APIs)
Some workloads are just slow by design:
Scraping websites (pagination, throttling, retries)
LLM creation workflows (image generation, video generation, multi-step prompts)
APIs with heavy rate limits
Polling or waiting on slow upstream services
Any of these add latency, even if you’re only doing them once.
2. You’re doing it at scale (large batch jobs, loops)
If you run the same slow process not once, but 50, 200, or 1,000 times, runtime explodes.
Loops over large datasets
Batch enrichment
Multi-agent cycles
Repeated reflection or planning steps
Processing a full list of URLs / prospects / videos / transcripts
#2: Cost
So if your workflows consistently runs past the 5-40 minute range mark, you have a few options
Go to n8n self-hosted: $5-$20 USD/Month
Go to n8n enterprise: $12k~ USD onwards/Year
Unless you’re a company that needs enterprise-level features like SSO, SOC2, audit logs, or vendor compliance, self-hosted is the most economical choice.
On cost alone, self-hosted is the clear winner.
Note: I didn’t compare self-hosted with the Starter plan because the cost difference is too small.
#3: Private Packages (e.g., Python Libraries, Pandas)
This is something that really caught my eye recently.
I haven’t tested it yet, but self-hosted n8n apparently allows you to use external Python packages and libraries such as Pandas.
This is a big deal because it means you can give your LLM access to far more tools inside your agentic workflows, without having to rebuild everything from scratch inside n8n nodes.
You also save a lot of time as you’re not recreating entire libraries yourself.
#4: Infra Management
From what I’ve seen, there are basically two ways to self-host n8n
Self-hosted (Fully managed): e.g. Render ($19/month)
You get the benefits of self-hosting without touching servers.Self-hosted (You manage the server): e.g. a VPS (Varies, $5-$15/month)
Full control, but you handle updates, scaling, and monitoring.Cloud: no infra to manage at all
Easiest option, but with the limitations mentioned earlier.
It’s true that Render is more “pricey,” but the time and effort you save from not having to maintain your own VPS is worth it.
If you’re not technical like me, paying a bit more to avoid server maintenance is a huge time saver.
Do note that if you’re using Render and your workflows start scaling (more executions or longer runtimes), you’ll eventually need to upgrade your Render instance’s RAM to support the increase.
Wrap Up:
If you’re building agentic workflows, the decision between Cloud and self-hosted n8n isn’t complicated.
Long runtimes, Python packages, or heavy loops? Go self-hosted.
If not, Cloud works fine.
I test AI workflows on real marketing problems.
And turn the useful ones into 10x Playbooks.
So business owners and solo marketers doing it all themselves can skip the guesswork… and copy what actually works.
→ I drop one of these 10xPlaybooks 🚀 every week. Don’t miss the next.
John