n8n

You need to consider two things: whether you have a server or someone who can set one up, and whether you are ready to work in an English interface.

Why people come to n8n and what they get: six common Yandex queries over a month where the answer is not obvious.

Search volume - Wordstat, Russia region, 06.09.2026

Who it is for. For those who already have a repetitive task: put website leads into a CRM, send a summary to Telegram every morning, reply to customer emails with a neural network. And for those who want to build an AI agent without glue code: an AI Agent node, plus a model, memory, and tools, all connected on the canvas in an evening.

Who else. For those who keep their data in-house. Your own installation is free, does not count executions, and does not contact a license server, while Russian hosts sell a server with n8n already installed from 490 ₽ per month.

Who it is not for. For those expecting «one button and done». The interface is in English, the first hour will go on Docker and a domain for webhooks, and n8n gets 4.0 out of 5 for ease of use on Capterra with an overall score of 4.6. And for those who want to pay for the cloud by card: since 07.03.2022, the vendor has not accepted cloud customers from Russia.

A fit: section 3 takes you from a server to your first workflow. Choosing between n8n and Make? See the comparison in section 7.

What vibecoding isStarting from scratch: how to set tasks for agents with no coding experience

Three layers: ready-made nodes, your own code inside a node, and an AI agent that decides for itself which nodes to call.

Nodes. The catalog on 06.09.2026 lists 2,147 nodes: Telegram, Google Sheets, Gmail, Slack, Airtable, and an HTTP request to any API. The number of integrations differs across vendor pages, from «400+» in the repository description to «1500+» in the README, so the catalog is the more reliable count. Russian services such as GigaChat, Avito, and amoCRM are available through community nodes with hundreds of downloads per month.

Code. You can write JavaScript or Python in the Code node. npm packages can be added to a self-hosted installation; external libraries are unavailable in the cloud, and Python in the cloud cannot import anything at all. The catalog has 12,125 ready-made workflow templates written by the community.

AI agent. The AI Agent node has four connectors: model, memory, tools, and response parsing. You can connect any model, from OpenAI and Anthropic to DeepSeek and local models through Ollama, while the Model Selector node can distribute requests across four models from different vendors. The agent can access external MCP servers, and the workflow itself can be exposed as an MCP server; since 10.08.2026, you can connect to 70 MCP servers from the node panel via OAuth.

Build with words. AI Workflow Builder creates a workflow from a description such as «every morning at eight, collect AI news, summarize the five biggest stories, and send them to Telegram», and a chain of a dozen nodes appears on the canvas. Every edit through the builder costs one credit from the cloud plan's monthly allowance; a self-hosted installation needs your own model key.

Russian. The interface is English only. The n8n code contains one translation file, English, and the Russian locale displays English labels. The documentation is also in English, but is available in markdown and through its own MCP server, so you can ask any AI assistant about it. The community explains it in Russian: 430 Habr posts mentioning n8n in 2025–2026, with the most-read one reaching 344 thousand views.

What the vendor itself shows. The video in the header comes from the n8n.io homepage: on a dark canvas, Schedule Trigger, Find Comments, HTML Extract, Edit Fields, and Code nodes appear one after another and connect with green links. We did not run n8n for a specific task ourselves; the figures come from documentation, pricing pages, the GitHub API, and third-party tests.

You need to install it on your own server through Docker: the vendor closed its cloud to Russia on 07.03.2022, and installation via npm will no longer be supported in version 3.0 in October 2026.

Step 1. Get a server with Docker and at least 1 GB of memory: n8n itself uses 190 MB, while the vendor's entry-level cloud plan runs on 335 MB. Russian hosts sell a server with n8n already installed: Amvera from 490 ₽ per month for 1 GB, Beget 660 ₽ for 2 GB with a public address, and Timeweb Cloud 900 ₽ for 2 GB when paid annually (06.09.2026).

Step 2. One command from the vendor website will start the container itself:

curl -fsSL https://get.n8n.io | sh

Or use the image directly; the editor will open on port 5678:

docker run -it --rm --name n8n -p 5678:5678 -v n8n_data:/home/node/.n8n docker.n8n.io/n8nio/n8n

Open localhost:5678 or the server address, then create the owner account by email. A free license key sent to the same email adds folders and debugging to the editor.

Step 3. For a Telegram bot and any webhooks, n8n must be accessible from the internet: you need a domain and an HTTPS certificate. For local testing, a cloudflared tunnel is enough; the vendor provides it for testing only and explicitly does not recommend it for production.

Model from Russia. OpenAI and Anthropic keys are not sold directly in Russia, and n8n has no official nodes for GigaChat or YandexGPT. Practitioners use DeepSeek or OpenRouter, both of which have built-in nodes, GigaChat through the n8n-nodes-gigachat community node, or a local model through Ollama, which needs no keys or payment at all.

Cloud. The website, documentation, forum, and cloud sign-in are accessible from Russia: a test on 06.09.2026 from a Moscow node returned code 200 on all four domains, and n8n domains are not in the blocking registry. But the vendor has not accepted new cloud customers from Russia since 07.03.2022, and Paddle does not process payments from Russia, based on the buyer's country. Cloud data is hosted in the EU on Microsoft Azure.

Steps verified on 06.09.2026 using the repository README, n8n documentation, Timeweb Cloud, Beget, and Amvera pricing pages, and a check-host test with control nodes

Automation builders have no arenas or benchmarks, so the measurements here are about scale and demand, not quality.

Code and community. 203,515 stars and 60,579 forks on GitHub (API, 06.09.2026); the vendor places the repository among GitHub's top fifty. The forum has 175,080 registered users and 6,704 active users per month according to the forum API, while the homepage rounds the community to «200 thousand». The most-read Habr article about n8n, with 344 thousand views, is titled «everything you need to know about the service»: Russian demand is still at the discovery stage.

Company funding. On 12.05.2026, SAP took an equity stake at a $5.2 billion valuation, twice the October valuation; the company has raised $240 million in total. In the same press release, n8n reports 1,400 enterprise customers and 1.7 million active builders per month; a year earlier it counted «3,000 enterprises», so the metric changed, and the company does not disclose revenue.

Demand. «n8n» is searched 26.8 thousand times a month, plus 682 searches in Cyrillic as «n8n»; the «what is it» tail gets 2,452, «download» 549, and «docker» 372 (Wordstat, 06.09.2026). The only neighboring tool in Yandex paired suggestions is Make; Zapier is not in the pairs. Its place among automation tools is shown below the card title; the full tool ranking is on the general page.

A self-hosted installation costs 0 € and does not count executions, while the cloud sells executions in bundles: Starter is 24 € per month for 2,500, although the pricing page shows the annual price of 20 € by default.

Plan currency. A run in n8n counts for the entire workflow, “no matter how many steps and data it contains,” as the vendor explains on the pricing page. In Make and Zapier, the counter ticks for every operation, so one request to a Telegram bot with an AI model inside costs one run in n8n, but five or six operations with its competitors. The vendor itself calculates on the pricing page: a workflow on a five-minute schedule consumes 8 600–8 900 runs per month, chat-bot runs should be counted by number of messages, conversations multiplied by the average number of messages per conversation, and according to the documentation, manual editor runs and nested sub-workflows do not count toward the quota.

Self-hosting. The Community edition is free, needs no key, and does not count users or runs. It has no single sign-on (SSO), projects, environments, Git, external secrets, or workflow sharing: only a workflow's author and owner can see it. A free email key adds folders, debugging, and run tags. The Business plan for 800 € per month is also sold for self-hosting; its key contacts the vendor's license server once a day, payment goes through the same Paddle checkout, which does not process payments from Russia.

Cloud. Free provides 50 runs per month, Starter 24 € for 2 500, Pro 60 € for 10 000, Business 800 € for 40 000, and Enterprise on request. Annual billing is 17 % cheaper, and those are the prices shown first on the pricing page. The card-free trial is limited to 1 000 runs; the vendor does not state the number of days. The vendor offers no refunds for annual subscriptions, while Business overages are sold in bundles of 300 000 runs for 4 000 €.

Quiet price increase. The figure of 20 on the pricing page has not changed since January 2023; what it includes has. In 2023, 20 $ bought 5 000 runs; from March 2024, it bought half as many; in September 2025, dollars changed to euros and the Business plan appeared. The free plan was introduced in the first half of 2026.

What it costs in Russia. The license forbids selling access to n8n for money, so Russian hosting providers sell a server with a ready-made image. Amvera charges 490 ₽ per month for 1 GB of memory with a domain and certificate, Beget 660 ₽ for 2 GB with a public address, and Timeweb Cloud 900 ₽ for 2 GB with annual billing (06.09.2026). n8n itself costs 0 € on such a server.

Three questions: what the license allows, how leaky 2026 was, and where n8n sends your data.

License. The vendor calls the model fair-code and explains it with examples. You can synchronize your company's data, write your own nodes, charge clients for workflow setup, and run n8n on an internal server. You cannot sell access to your n8n for money or release it under your own brand. Files marked .ee in the repository are not covered by this license at all; they can only be used with an Enterprise key.

Vulnerabilities. Five critical vulnerabilities were disclosed from 19.12.2025 to 04.02.2026, and two received names. Ni8mare, scored 10,0 out of 10, provided access to server files without login and had already been fixed in version 1.121.0 on 18.11.2025, 50 days before disclosure. N8scape allowed an escape from the Python sandbox and was fixed by version 2.0 itself, which the vendor released on 08.12.2025 as “secure by default”. Cloud was affected too; this was not only a self-hosting problem.

Public instances. On 05.08.2026, GitGuardian found 4 576 leaked n8n keys in public commits; 321 live instances accepted someone else's key, while internet search revealed 31 793 installations. Since January 2026, n8n has had 48 vulnerability records by the same company's count. An instance stores keys for dozens of services, so updates and restricted access matter more than any other setting.

Data. Cloud runs on Microsoft Azure in the EU, and the vendor undergoes an external SOC 2 security audit once a year. Self-hosting sends data nowhere except for one thing: by default, it sends usage telemetry to the vendor, which can be disabled according to the instructions. A paid key pings the license server every day, the keyless Community edition does not contact the vendor's server, and free registration also issues a key. The workflow builder sends the model a description of nodes and connections, but not your keys or previous runs.

Reviews. Product Hunt: 4,81 out of 5 from 73 reviews and a “best for developers” award for winter 2026 (06.09.2026); Capterra: 4,6 from 48 reviews, with 4,0 for ease of use (page data as of 20.08.2026). The most common downside in Product Hunt reviews, four mentions out of 73, is a steep learning curve. Practitioners on Habr add their own pitfalls: an 18 GB run database in four months and an out-of-memory crash for one client (11.05.2026).

The split is not in the number of integrations, but in two questions: where they meter the money, per step or per run, and where the workflow lives, on their side or yours.

Make. A builder from the Celonis group, grown from the Czech Integromat: 3 000 ready-made apps, workflows are drawn with modules on the same kind of canvas, and since 2025 can also be assembled through a conversation with Maia. Cloud-only, it offers 1 000 free credits per month with runs no more frequent than once every 15 minutes; Core costs 12 $, Pro 21 $ for 10 000 credits (make.com, 06.09.2026). A credit is charged for every module action; custom JavaScript or Python code costs two credits per second. The site is accessible from Russia just like n8n, payment requires a foreign card.

Zapier. The largest catalog, 9 000 apps, and the simplest model: an event in one, an action in another. Free includes 100 tasks per month; Professional starts at 19,99 $ for 750 tasks with annual billing and 29,99 $ month to month, with every workflow step and every AI call consuming a task (zapier.com, 06.09.2026). No self-hosted server, less code inside workflows than n8n, but its own MCP server, through which AI agents access the same app catalog.

Russian neighbors. Nodul says on its first screen, «a Russian alternative to n8n, Zapier and Make.com»: servers in Russia, Federal Law No. 152-FZ, 300 free executions, plans from 590 ₽ per month (06.09.2026). Albato keeps its servers in Russia, accepts Russian card payments, and sells 1 000 transactions for 2 200 ₽ per month, where a transaction equals one step after the trigger. Meanwhile, ApiX-Drive, often called «domestic» in Russia, has blocked its site and dashboards for Russian addresses since June 2022, while Germany's n8n has kept its site and code accessible.

In seven years, a Berlin special-effects specialist's night project grew to a 5,2 billion $ valuation and gained SAP as an investor, while along the way receiving its own license, two major versions, and a wave of critical vulnerabilities.