If you’re a developer, AI engineer, or technical founder, you’ve probably tried n8n. It’s great for basic automations, but when you start building complex AI agents or scaling to production, hidden costs and limitations quickly appear.
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Latenode was built to solve those problems.
N8n’s Community Edition is “free” only if you ignore the costs of servers, maintenance, scaling, and security.
Even for a simple self-hosted setup, the price will start from around $86/month once you factor in a basic server and sysadmin time.
As your workload grows, you must handle queue mode, webhook processors, multi-main setups - plus security patches and 24/7 monitoring. Those overheads quickly wipe out any “free” advantage.
Scaling makes it even worse:
Running 40,000 executions on self-hosted n8n cost  $800/month (around $0.02 per execution).
In comparison, Latenode’s Team plan charges only $0.004 per execution - 5× cheaper, without the headaches of maintaining infrastructure yourself.
Latenode isn’t just cheaper - it’s more powerful. We’ve already shipped built-in RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), while n8n still has no native RAG support. With Latenode’s AI Data Storage, you can upload PDFs, text, or images and have them automatically chunked, embedded, and indexed for fast retrieval.
And when you combine RAG with Latenode’s multi-agent workflows, your automations become even more powerful and precise. A main “CEO” agent can route tasks to specialist agents, each with its own logic and data access. This means your workflows don’t just run - they think, adapt, and deliver more accurate results at scale.
N8n requires you to bring your own API keys and pay separately for each AI provider. Latenode bundles it all: with one subscription, you access OpenAI, Claude, LLaMA, DeepSeek, etc., and you can combine models for cost efficiency and performance. No more juggling API keys or negotiating multiple invoices.
Stop wrestling with infrastructure and hidden costs. Start automating with Latenode - where multi-agent workflows, RAG search, and transparent pricing let you ship AI-powered automations faster and more cost-effectively 🚀
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