The n8n Licence Clause Most Agencies Are Quietly Breaking

n8n is a workflow automation platform from Berlin with 199,380 GitHub stars, more than any other tool in the self-hosted AI category. It is free to self-host, priced in Euro on the cloud, and backed by a company that does the European compliance paperwork better than almost anyone else in this market.

It also has the most restrictive licence of the seven major open-source AI tools we audited. Not slightly more restrictive. The Sustainable Use License states in plain words:

You may use or modify the software only for your own internal business purposes or for non-commercial or personal use. You may distribute the software or provide it to others only if you do so free of charge for non-commercial purposes.

Read that twice if you run an agency. Building n8n workflows for paying clients is not obviously covered by that sentence. There is a whole German cottage industry doing exactly this, and most of it has never opened the file.

Everything below was verified against primary sources on 4 August 2026.

n8n GmbH is headquartered in Berlin and was founded in 2019 by Jan Oberhauser. It raised a 180 million US-Dollar Series C led by Accel at a 2.5 billion valuation, with participation from NVIDIA's venture arm NVentures, Sequoia, HV Capital and Highland Europe. Total funding is reported at around 254 million across five rounds, and later 2026 reporting puts the valuation higher still, though we could not verify that second figure against a primary source.

The product connects applications together into automated workflows, and since 2024 it has become one of the most common ways companies actually run AI agents in production. It reports more than 3,000 enterprise customers including Vodafone, Softbank and Seat, and a community of over 700,000.

For a German or Austrian buyer, the headline is simple: this is a German company subject to German law, which removes an entire category of argument before you start. That matters more than it sounds, and we will come back to why n8n is genuinely the strongest option in this cluster on data sovereignty.

n8n is published under the Sustainable Use License, which is not an OSI-approved open-source licence. GitHub flags it as `NOASSERTION`. The limitations section is short enough to quote in full, and it is worth reading slowly:

Use or modification is permitted only for your own internal business purposes, or for non-commercial or personal use. Distribution or providing the software to others is permitted only free of charge and for non-commercial purposes. You may not remove licensing or copyright notices.

The first sentence is the one with commercial consequences. A company automating its own invoices is squarely inside it. An agency that self-hosts n8n and charges a client to build and run workflows for them is doing something the licence does not obviously permit, because the purpose is not that agency's own internal business, and the provision to a third party is neither free nor non-commercial.

We are not lawyers and this is not legal advice. But this is exactly the kind of sentence you want your own counsel to look at before you build a business line on it, not after n8n's legal team sends a letter.

The Sustainable Use License does not even cover the whole codebase. Two further carve-outs sit on top of it:

Files with `.ee.` in the filename, or `.ee` in the directory name, are not covered at all. They fall under the separate n8n Enterprise License, which permits production use only if you hold a valid Enterprise licence for your usage. Development and testing are explicitly exempt.

Content of branches other than master is not licensed. That is an unusual clause we have not seen elsewhere, and it means forks and feature branches sit in undefined territory.

If that Enterprise licence wording feels familiar, it is: it is near-identical to the one Onyx uses, down to the sentence order. Three separate companies in this category ship the same boilerplate, which tells you open core is a settled industry pattern rather than any one vendor being clever.

n8n publishes its cloud pricing, which already puts it ahead of Glean and Open WebUI, neither of which publishes anything. Prices are in Euro on annual billing, and the billing unit is unusual in a good way: one execution is one full run of a workflow, no matter how many steps it contains or how much data it moves. Competitors that bill per step make long workflows expensive by design.

The genuinely buyer-friendly part is that every plan has unlimited seats. In a category where per-user pricing is the norm and Glean has an effective floor of hundreds of users, that is a real structural difference for a mid-sized company.

The row that matters for a compliance-minded buyer is the third one. SSO, SAML and LDAP are Enterprise-only, which means the 667 Euro Business plan still cannot authenticate your staff against your identity provider. Also Enterprise-only: external secret store integration, log streaming, unlimited shared projects, 365 days of insights and a support SLA.

This is the same pattern we found across the category. Onyx and Flowise both put SSO behind a commercial licence too. The one exception is Open WebUI, which includes SSO, OIDC and LDAP for free and charges for branding instead.

Having been hard on the licence, credit where it is due. On European compliance paperwork n8n is the strongest vendor we have reviewed in this category, and it is not close.

- A pre-signed DPA you can simply download. n8n publishes a data processing agreement as processor, ready to countersign and return. Glean does not. Onyx does not. This alone removes weeks from a procurement cycle.
- A subprocessor document exists in its trust centre, which Glean's privacy policy does not provide.
- SOC 2 Type 2 and SOC 3, with GDPR listed. Reports are behind an access request rather than fully public, and ISO 27001 is not listed.
- A German legal entity. n8n GmbH is subject to German law, so there is no international transfer question to assess at the vendor level at all.

One honest gap: n8n does not disclose its cloud hosting region on its own trust centre. Third-party write-ups state Frankfurt on Azure, and that is plausible for a Berlin company, but we could not confirm it from n8n's own documentation. Ask them in writing and get it into the contract, exactly as you would with any other vendor.

n8n is the best-documented European vendor in this whole cluster. A German GmbH with a downloadable DPA, published Euro pricing, unlimited seats and SOC 2 is a genuinely easier procurement conversation than any US alternative we have reviewed, Glean included.

The licence is the catch, and it is a real one rather than a technicality. Only for your own internal business purposes is a narrow permission, and an entire services industry has grown up around a product whose default terms do not obviously cover services. n8n is not hiding this. It sells commercial licences for exactly these cases, and the file has been public the whole time. But almost nobody writing about n8n mentions it.

Use it for your own automation and it is one of the best deals in software. Build a business on top of it and buy the right licence first.