How you build it
n8n: A canvas of nodes you wire together — Us: A sentence in plain English, corrected in plain English
Looking for a n8n alternative
n8n draws the workflow. Here you say the job.
A canvas of nodes is the right tool when the steps are known, fixed and worth wiring by hand. It is the wrong tool when the job is “check what our competitors changed and tell me what matters”, because that is not a graph — it is a judgement, and it changes every week.
I have a CSV of orders with duplicated rows and dates in three different formats. Clean it up and add a total row.
clean.csv · deduped + totalleddone in 48s · under $0.01
The short version
n8n, in three questions.
What a month costs
n8n: Starter 20€ a month billed annually, Pro 50€, Business 667€ — priced by monthly workflow executions — Us: Free to start with no card; building plans from $10 a month billed annually, usage included
Run it on your own hardware
n8n: Community Edition, self-hosted and free under their Sustainable Use Licence — Us: Yes — your own machine, your own model keys
n8n and Amelia’s Agent, on the questions that decide it
Questionn8nAmelia’s Agent
How you build it
A canvas of nodes you wire together
A sentence in plain English, corrected in plain English
What a month costs
Starter 20€ a month billed annually, Pro 50€, Business 667€ — priced by monthly workflow executions
Free to start with no card; building plans from $10 a month billed annually, usage included
Run it on your own hardware
Community Edition, self-hosted and free under their Sustainable Use Licence
Yes — your own machine, your own model keys
What it produces
Workflow runs: data moved and transformed between apps
The same work, plus the site or app it feeds, published on your own domain
When it does the wrong thing
You open the graph and debug the node
You say what was wrong in the chat, and its instructions change
The n8n column is quoted from their own published pages as read on 17 September 2026, not characterised. Where their page does not answer a question the cell says so — on a table whose headline is that nobody publishes the price, that is the answer. Check every cell against their site; that is the point of writing it this way.
Where they are better
For a pipeline that must do exactly the same thing every time, n8n is the better tool.
A deterministic graph you can read, version and self-host has no equivalent here, and it never has an opinion at three in the morning. If the job is “every new row in this table becomes a record in that system”, draw it in n8n and sleep well. Their Community Edition running entirely on your own infrastructure is a real answer to a real requirement. Agents are for the jobs where the steps are not the same twice — reading, weighing, writing, and knowing when to stop and ask.
The question that decides it
A dollar is a unit you already understand.
Credits are a currency with no published exchange rate. Here the unit is a dollar: what the model provider charged us plus 20–30% — 30% on the trial, Amelia’s Chat AI and Pro, 28% on Pro Plus, 22% on Pro Max — with that rate under the composer before you send and what the answer cost printed on the answer. Free to start with no card, building plans from $10 a month billed annually, and a spending limit on from day one.
And if you want to know who is making these claims: a software company that has shipped for other businesses since 2005.
If you are still weighing it up
See the price before you spend it.
Type what you want on the home page — it estimates the cost before you sign in, and there is no card to start.
Questions
Asked, answered
How much does n8n cost?
As published on n8n.io/pricing on 17 September 2026: Starter is 20€ a month billed annually, Pro is 50€, and Business is 667€, with pricing based on monthly workflow executions and no cap on users or workflows on any plan. A self-hosted Community Edition is free under n8n's Sustainable Use Licence.
Is there an n8n alternative that does not need a workflow canvas?
Yes. Here the job is a sentence: what to do, how often, and the monthly budget it may spend. There is no graph to wire, and correcting it is another sentence rather than an edit to a node.
Can an agent do the same automations n8n does?
For scheduled work that involves reading, judging and writing — a weekly competitor summary, a briefing, a reconciliation against files you upload — yes. For a fixed, high-volume data pipeline that must behave identically every run, a deterministic tool like n8n is the better fit, and we would rather say so.