n8n Commercial Use: Which Licence You Actually Need (2026)
n8n's licence permits client work but forbids reselling n8n. What decides it is whose instance runs the workflow and whose credentials it uses.
By Ali Ilyas · · Updated September 2, 2026
Making money with n8n is fine. Making money from n8n is not.
That one distinction resolves most n8n licensing questions, and it is not the distinction people expect. The licence does not care how much you charge, whether you invoice monthly, or whether the word "hosting" appears on your invoice. It cares about two things: whose instance the workflows run on, and whose credentials they use.
Get those two right and you can charge whatever you like. Get them wrong and you need a commercial agreement, even if you are charging almost nothing.
What's on this page
- The licence, and why it isn't open source
- The three conditions, including the two people forget
- The two questions that decide your case
- Freelancers and agencies: the case n8n answers directly
- The pattern that stays compliant
- Building a product on top of n8n
- Where "internal business purposes" gets blurry
- What actually happens if you're offside
- Getting a real answer from n8n
- Frequently asked questions
The licence, and why it isn't open source
n8n's source code is public on GitHub. n8n is still not open source, and its docs say so plainly. The project calls itself fair-code: n8n's own definition is software that is "source-available, but restrict[s] commercial use of their source code." It switched from Apache 2.0 on 17 March 2022, which is why older blog posts and forum threads confidently say things that stopped being true four years ago.
The licence is the Sustainable Use License. It grants "the free right to use, modify, create derivative works, and redistribute" — with three limitations that a genuine open-source licence, by definition, could not have.
Practically: you can read the code, patch it, fork it, and run your patched version in production. What you cannot do is build a business whose product is n8n.
The three conditions, including the two people forget
Almost every discussion of this licence covers the first condition and ignores the other two. All three bind you, and the second and third catch people who are nowhere near reselling anything.
1. Internal use. "You may use or modify the software only for your own internal business purposes or for non-commercial or personal use." Internal business purposes is a broad allowance, not a hobbyist carve-out — a company automating its own operations on free Community n8n is fine at any scale and any revenue.
2. Free distribution only. "You may distribute the software or provide it to others only if you do so free of charge for non-commercial purposes." This one bites if you package n8n into something you ship — a preconfigured VM image, a Docker bundle, a "deploy your automation stack" product. Handing someone a copy of n8n is only permitted when you do it for free and non-commercially. Both, not either.
3. Notices and trademarks. "You may not alter, remove, or obscure any licensing, copyright, or other notices of the licensor in the software. Any use of the licensor's trademarks is subject to applicable law."
That third one is worth sitting with, because it is a violation entirely independent of money. Stripping n8n branding out of the editor because it looks cleaner in a client demo breaches the licence on its own — you can be charging nothing, hosting nothing, reselling nothing, and still be offside. The trademark sentence is also separate from the notices sentence: removing the logo and using the logo are governed by different rules.
The two questions that decide your case
n8n's permitted and prohibited examples look like a list of scenarios. They aren't — they're the same two tests applied repeatedly. Work through these in order and you will land on the right answer for almost any arrangement.
Question 1: whose instance do the workflows run on?
If the answer is the customer's own instance, you are on the permitted side, and n8n's own examples say so. "Providing consulting services related to n8n" is listed as allowed. So is "supporting and maintaining n8n on internal servers" — which is precisely the maintenance retainer most agencies worry about. Setting up, configuring, debugging, monitoring and being paid for it, on infrastructure the client owns, needs no licence at all.
If the answer is your instance, keep going.
Question 2: whose credentials does it use?
This is the test people miss, and it is the one that separates a legitimate backend from a prohibited one.
Running n8n on your own infrastructure using your company's credentials, as invisible plumbing behind your product, is on n8n's permitted list — "embedding n8n as backend using company credentials." Your users never see n8n, never log into it, and never hand it their own API keys.
Running your own instance that holds your users' or clients' credentials is on the prohibited list — "collecting user credentials to access their data within your application." Once you are storing a customer's Google token so that your instance can act on their behalf, you are operating n8n as a service for them, whatever the interface looks like.
That is why an agency consolidating twelve clients onto one instance crosses the line while the same agency maintaining twelve separate client instances does not. The workload is identical. The credentials are not.
For completeness, the two things the licence names outright as not allowed:
- "Hosting n8n and charging people money to access it"
- "White-labeling n8n and offering it to your customers for money"
Freelancers and agencies: the case n8n answers directly
This is the real question hiding behind "is n8n free for commercial use," and n8n's help centre answers it explicitly rather than leaving it to interpretation:
| What you're doing | Licence you need |
|---|---|
| Helping clients set up and run their own n8n instances | None on your part — though the client may need a paid tier for their own feature requirements |
| Hosting and managing your clients' workflows and credentials inside your own instance | An Enterprise licence |
| Embedding n8n inside your product, white-labelled | An Embed licence — a separate commercial agreement |
That first row is more generous than the community usually assumes. Building, deploying, maintaining, monitoring and charging a monthly retainer for automations that run on infrastructure your client owns needs no licence at all. There is no revenue ceiling on it and no client-count ceiling on it.
The second row is where the trouble is, and note what it is not about. It is not about charging for hosting. You could host twelve clients' workflows on your instance and charge them nothing for the server, billing only for your labour, and it would still require an Enterprise licence — because the arrangement, not the invoice, is what converts it into providing access to n8n.
The pattern that stays compliant
Straightforward, if less tidy than one big instance:
- One instance per client, on infrastructure in the client's name, with billing in the client's name. A small VPS runs €5–8/month and the client pays it directly. See what self-hosting actually costs for the full line items.
- You hold admin access, not ownership. You are administering their system, which is exactly the shape n8n permits.
- You charge for setup and a maintenance retainer — which is the part with the margin anyway. Nobody's automation business was ever built on the €6 server markup.
Two side benefits, both real and both worth more than the tidiness you gave up. The client's credentials stay in the client's instance, so you are not holding a dozen companies' API keys in one place you would have to disclose after a breach — the same argument the workflow templates guide makes about what credential names alone leak. And the engagement is cleanly transferable: when it ends you hand over admin access, rather than negotiating an extraction from a shared instance while the relationship is already going badly.
If you are setting up client instances regularly, the self-hosting walkthrough and the Docker setup are the repeatable version of this.
Building a product on top of n8n
If n8n is the engine behind your own SaaS rather than a tool you operate for clients, there are three routes and the docs are specific about which is which.
n8n as an invisible backend. Your users never see any n8n UI, workflows run under your service's credentials, and n8n is one component of a product whose value doesn't come substantially from n8n. Per n8n's docs this is "available on all paid plans under the standard license, with no separate agreement needed." Note paid plans — this route needs a subscription, not the free Community edition. And note the credential test from earlier: the moment your users supply their own third-party credentials to your instance, you have left this category.
Surfacing the n8n editor inside your product, so your users build their own workflows without leaving your app, is an OEM deployment and requires a separate commercial agreement. Under an OEM agreement n8n branding stays visible — your users experience it as n8n embedded in your product, not as a feature of yours. If your product concept depends on customers not knowing what is underneath, OEM is not the route.
Fully white-labelled — your branding, no visible n8n — is the Embed licence, also a separate agreement. Neither OEM nor Embed has published pricing; both are negotiated individually.
The test to apply to your own idea, in one sentence: if your users log into n8n, or hand it their own credentials, or your product would have nothing left without it, you are in agreement territory.
Where "internal business purposes" gets blurry
The clean cases are clean. These are the ones that come up repeatedly and don't have a one-word answer.
Contractors and freelancers working inside your instance. People doing your company's work on your company's instance are doing your internal business. A contractor building your workflows is not a third party being sold access.
Subsidiaries and group companies. Usually fine as internal use within one corporate group, but "usually" is doing real work in that sentence — a holding company running automations on behalf of portfolio companies that are separately owned starts to look like the prohibited row of the table, not the permitted one. Worth an email rather than an assumption.
Clients who log into your instance to check on things. Read-only access for a client to view their own executions is where a permitted arrangement quietly turns into providing access to n8n. The safe version is that they log into their instance.
Nonprofit and internal-tools use. Non-commercial use is permitted outright, and a nonprofit automating its own operations is comfortably inside both that and internal business purposes.
Selling the workflows themselves. Entirely yours to sell. The licence governs n8n the software, not the JSON you produce with it — so you can sell, publish, or hand a client a workflow without asking anyone.
What actually happens if you're offside
Worth being straight about this, because the internet is not.
The licence text specifies no enforcement mechanism, no penalty schedule, and no audit right. n8n is not scanning the internet for unlicensed instances, and there is no meaningful public record of them pursuing small agencies. Anyone telling you otherwise is guessing.
That is a description of enforcement risk, not of legal risk, and they are different things. The realistic ways a licensing problem actually surfaces are all downstream:
- Acquisition due diligence. A buyer's counsel reviews your stack, finds that your core delivery infrastructure breaches its licence, and it becomes a price adjustment or an indemnity — discovered at the single worst moment to discover it.
- An enterprise client's legal review. Larger customers ask what you run and under what terms. "We're not sure" is a bad answer in a procurement questionnaire.
- Your own investors or insurers, for the same reason.
So the case for getting this right isn't fear of a letter from n8n. It is that the fix is cheap now — one instance per client, in the client's name — and expensive later, when someone else is setting the timetable.
None of this is legal advice. The licence text is genuinely short and worth reading in full rather than trusting anyone's summary of it, including this one.
Getting a real answer from n8n
If your arrangement sits near a line, ask the licensor and keep the reply. An email from n8n is worth more than a forum consensus, and it is free.
license@n8n.io— interpretation questions about the Sustainable Use License.sales@n8n.io— Enterprise, OEM and Embed licensing.
One caveat from n8n's own help centre, and it explains why answers can feel evasive: the support desk states it "cannot grant permission to use our license for your specific use case." Support can tell you which licence a use case needs. Only the commercial team can actually grant one, so send anything load-bearing to sales@ and get it in writing.
Frequently asked questions
Can I use n8n for free commercially? For your own or your company's internal purposes, yes, at any scale and any revenue. What's restricted is selling access to n8n itself — hosting it for paying users, or white-labelling it.
Can I charge clients for n8n automations? Yes, provided the workflows run on the client's own instance. Building, maintaining and charging a retainer for that needs no licence — "providing consulting services related to n8n" and "supporting and maintaining n8n on internal servers" are both on n8n's permitted list. Running their workflows on your instance is what requires an Enterprise licence.
Can I host multiple clients on one n8n instance? Not on the free Community licence. That is the specific arrangement n8n's help centre says requires an Enterprise licence, regardless of what you charge for it. One instance per client, owned by the client, is the free-and-compliant version.
Is n8n open source? No. It's source-available under the Sustainable Use License, which n8n describes as fair-code. The code is public; commercial use is restricted. It was Apache 2.0 until March 2022.
Can I remove the n8n branding from the editor? No. "You may not alter, remove, or obscure any licensing, copyright, or other notices of the licensor in the software" is a standalone condition — it applies whether or not money is involved. Legitimate white-labelling requires an Embed licence.
Does an Enterprise licence let me white-label n8n? No. Enterprise covers hosting clients' workflows on your instance. Visible-branding embedding is an OEM agreement, and removing the branding entirely is an Embed licence. They are three different things and only the first has published pricing.
Who owns the workflows I build? You do. The Sustainable Use License governs n8n the software, not the JSON you produce with it. Workflows other people published are a separate question: most carry no stated licence at all, so treat an unlicensed template as use-at-your-own-risk rather than public domain, and rewrite anything you plan to resell.
Does using the AI nodes commercially change anything? Not from n8n's side — the AI and LangChain nodes are in the free Community edition under the same licence. Your model provider's terms are a separate agreement you also have to satisfy; see connecting OpenAI.
My client wants me to host it because they have no infrastructure. What then? Set the VPS up in their name with their billing details, and administer it for them. It takes twenty minutes more than putting it on your own account, and it is the entire difference between needing an Enterprise licence and needing nothing.
Is the licence likely to change again? It has changed once, in 2022, and n8n has kept the fair-code position since. Nothing suggests another change — but it is a licence you don't control, which is itself an argument for keeping client infrastructure in client hands.
Primary sources: n8n's Sustainable Use License, the help centre's which licence do I need, and the OEM deployment docs.
Costs rather than licensing? Is n8n free? covers what the free edition includes, what n8n Cloud charges, and what self-hosting actually costs once you count the server and your own time. Comparing against a SaaS tool instead: n8n vs Zapier pricing works through the math, and the two bill on different units, which matters more than the headline prices.