n8n Cloud, or your own instance?

Both are reasonable. They fail for different people for different reasons, and the honest version of this comparison is more useful to you than the flattering one.

What n8n Cloud is genuinely better at

It is run by the people who write n8n. Nobody else can say that, and it matters when something is broken in a way that is nobody's fault.
Support for n8n itself. If you want to be able to ask the vendor why your node behaves that way, that relationship is what you are buying.
Nothing to think about at all. No size to choose, no encryption key, no version to pin.
Their newest features first. The people building it ship there first.

Why people go looking anyway

Two reasons, and they arrive in this order. First the execution limits: workflow runs are counted, and an automation that fires every few minutes counts up faster than anyone plans for. Then the price of the tier that stops it counting.

Running your own instance is not metered by anyone. A workflow that runs every minute costs the same as one that runs every week, which is exactly the property people are looking for when they start searching.

The prices, side by side

Ours is $20 a month at the recommended size, and that is a real number computed from what the platform charges rather than a headline. Theirs, checked on the date printed next to it:

measurement pending

We will not publish a competitor's price without the date we checked it. Prices move, and an undated comparison is a stale one pretending not to be.

What you give up by leaving

Being straight about this is the point of the page. You give up the vendor relationship. If your question is about n8n itself, you are asking its community rather than a support desk with an obligation to you. For most self-hosting people that is a preference rather than a cost, and it is why the boundary is on our landing page instead of buried in a policy.

You also take on choosing a size and choosing when to update. Both are small, both are on the setup page, and neither of them is the same as running the machine yourself.

What you keep

Your workflows, exportable at any moment, importable into any n8n anywhere.
Your own address, and the option of your own domain.
No counting. Run things as often as you like inside the capacity you bought.
Capacity you can split with your other apps rather than one plan per product.

Moving across

Export your workflows and credentials from inside n8n Cloud, deploy an instance here, and import them. It is standard n8n on both sides. Reconnect anything that used an address from the old instance, because webhooks you registered elsewhere still point there.

Where this actually sits

Four ways to run n8n. Each of them is the right answer for somebody, and only one of them is us.

Option	Better at	Costs you	Right for
A machine at home	Costing nothing extra and keeping everything on hardware you can touch.	It sleeps, it reboots, and nothing on the internet can reach it without work. Every upgrade and every backup is yours.	Learning, and workflows that can wait until the machine is awake.
A server you rent and manage	Total control. Any version, any extra software, any layout you like.	You are now the operator. Certificates, upgrades, backups, memory limits and the incident at the wrong moment are all yours.	People who enjoy that part, or who already run other things on the same machine.
n8n Cloud	Being run by the people who write n8n, with their support and their own view of what is coming.	Their pricing and their execution limits, which is the reason most people go looking.	People who want the vendor relationship and do not want to think about hosting at all.
Here this page	Owning the instance without operating the machine. Your address, your data, no execution limits, and capacity you can split with your other apps.	A card, and a support boundary: we keep it running, and n8n questions go to n8n's own community.	People who wanted to self-host and did not want the maintenance that comes with it.