Free n8n Hosting: Every "Free" Option Checked (2026)

Free n8n hosting exists in three honest forms in 2026: the 14-day n8n Cloud trial, the free Community Edition running on your own computer, and an always-free cloud VM such as Oracle Cloud's Always Free Arm instance or Google Cloud's e2-micro. The free tiers of app platforms such as Render and Railway either sleep, expire or run out of credit, and Hugging Face Spaces now requires a paid plan to create a Docker Space.

A documentation-based comparison, not a hands-on test: we did not deploy n8n on each service. Free-tier terms were checked on 11 October 2026 on each provider's own pages: n8n's trial, one-line setup and Cloud Run docs, Oracle's Always Free resources and Free Tier pages, Google Cloud's free tier, the AWS Free Tier, Render's free instance docs, Railway's pricing and plan limits, Fly.io pricing and the Hugging Face Spaces overview. Free tiers change without notice, so re-check before you build on one.

The software is not the problem. n8n's Community Edition has no license fee and no execution cap, so "free n8n" really means "free somewhere to run it". That is where free-hosting lists tend to go wrong: they count a service as free if the sign-up costs nothing, and skip what happens on day 15, or after 15 idle minutes. This page sorts each option by the two things that decide whether it is usable: does it stay on, and does your data survive. For the paid side of the same question, see our n8n Cloud vs self-hosted guide; for what to build once n8n is running, the n8n hub.

Free n8n hosting options compared

Pick your own computer to learn, Oracle or Google if you can manage a Linux server and want something that stays up, and the Cloud trial if you only need two weeks to decide. Skip the rest for anything you would miss if it vanished.

Is there n8n free hosting in the cloud from n8n itself?

No. n8n Cloud has a trial, not a free plan. n8n's docs describe it as 14 days with Pro plan features, "a limit of 1000 executions and the same computing power as the Starter plan". What happens next is the part to plan for: "If you don't upgrade by the end of your trial, the trial automatically expires and n8n deletes your workspace." You get 90 days to download your workflows afterwards, and nothing is charged.

That makes the trial the right tool for one job: finding out whether n8n fits before you spend an evening on servers. Build your real workflows in it and export the JSON before day 14. The cheapest paid plan is Starter at €20 a month billed annually with 2,500 executions (checked October 2026); our n8n pricing guide shows how to estimate which tier you would need.

Your own computer: the best free option for learning

The Community Edition runs on any machine with Docker, at no cost and with no execution limit. n8n's one-line setup checks Docker, writes the config files and starts n8n on SQLite. The command below is from n8n's docs; we checked it against the page and did not run it for this article.

# One-line setup from n8n's docs. Needs Docker with the compose v2 plugin.
curl -fsSL https://get.n8n.io | sh

# n8n is then at http://localhost:5678, with data in the Docker volume n8n-data
# Stop it:      docker compose -f ./n8n/compose.yml down
# Never add -v unless you mean it: "down -v" deletes all n8n data

Two limits keep this in the learning category. Schedules only fire while the computer is awake, and services on the internet cannot reach localhost, so webhooks from Stripe, Telegram or a form tool need a tunnel. Cloudflare's Quick Tunnels give a temporary address without an account, and Cloudflare says they "are for testing and development". An old laptop or mini PC left running at home moves this closer to a server, but your home connection and power are now the uptime.

Always-free cloud VMs: Oracle and Google

These are the only free options that behave like real hosting: a Linux server with a disk and a public address that stays on. You install Docker and run n8n as you would on any paid VPS, which our n8n Docker Compose setup guide covers.

• Oracle Cloud Always Free. Oracle's docs list up to two AMD micro instances with 1 GB of memory each, plus Arm Ampere A1 capacity of 1,500 OCPU hours and 9,000 GB hours a month, which the page says "is equivalent to 2 OCPUs and 12 GB of memory", with 200 GB of block storage. If a guide promises 4 cores and 24 GB, check its date. Three conditions apply. Oracle "may reclaim" idle instances, defined as seven days with CPU, network and (on Arm) memory use all under 20%. An "out of host capacity" error means your region has no free shapes left right now. And accounts left idle for 30 days can be treated as abandoned. Sign-up needs a credit or debit card for identity checks.
• Google Cloud free tier. One e2-micro VM a month in Oregon, Iowa or South Carolina, with 30 GB of standard disk and 1 GB of outbound transfer. An e2-micro has 1 GB of memory and a quarter of a vCPU. For scale, n8n's own Cloud Run guide gives the n8n container 2 GiB, so treat the e2-micro as room for a single light instance on SQLite and nothing more.
• Google Cloud Run. Tempting because it scales to zero, and that is the problem. n8n's guide warns of its quick deployment: "Anytime this Cloud Run service scales to zero or is redeployed, the n8n data will be lost." The free allowance of 180,000 vCPU-seconds is 50 hours of one vCPU, and a month has about 730. The durable setup in the same guide adds a Cloud SQL database, for which Google lists only a 30-day free trial instance.
• AWS. New accounts get $100 in credits and can earn up to $100 more. AWS says the free account "closes on its own 6 months after you open it or when your credits run out, whichever comes first". Useful for a long test, not a home.

Render, Railway, Fly.io and Hugging Face: why the free tiers fail

App platforms are the easiest way to deploy a container, which makes them the obvious first try. Their free tiers are built for previews, and n8n is the opposite of a preview: it has to be awake to run a schedule and it writes to disk constantly.

• Render. A free web service has 512 MB of memory. Render "spins down a Free web service that goes 15 minutes without receiving any inbound traffic" and takes about a minute to start it again. The filesystem is ephemeral and free services cannot attach a persistent disk. The free Postgres database holds 1 GB and expires 30 days after creation, with a 14-day grace period. Render's own advice on free instances: "Do not use them for production applications."
• Railway. The trial is a one-time $5 credit that expires after 30 days. Then the Free plan gives $1 of credit a month, with 0.5 GB of memory and 0.5 GB of volume storage per service. Railway bills memory at about $10 per GB a month, so half a gigabyte running all month is about $5 of usage, five times the credit. Volumes created on a trial are deleted 30 days after the credit expires.
• Fly.io. Its pricing page answers the question directly: "New organizations don't have a free tier or a monthly free usage allowance." The trial is two hours of machine runtime or seven days, whichever comes first.
• Hugging Face Spaces. The docs now say Docker Spaces "run on compute and require a paid plan to create: PRO for personal accounts". The basic CPU hardware still has no hourly cost, but its disk is not persistent and free hardware goes to sleep when unused.

Both Railway and Render run n8n properly once you pay for an always-on service, a database and a fixed encryption key. Our n8n on Railway and Render guide has that configuration and what it costs a month.

Free host plus a free database: does the combination work?

The usual workaround is to keep the free host and move the data out to a free Postgres database, so a restart no longer wipes it. It solves half the problem. The database tiers have rules of their own (checked October 2026): Supabase pauses free projects "after 1 week of inactivity" and includes 500 MB per project, and Neon's free plan suspends compute after five minutes of inactivity, which cannot be switched off on that plan.

Two things still break. The host sleeps, so schedules are still missed. And n8n creates its credential encryption key on first launch and saves it in the .n8n folder; on a disk that resets, the next start generates a new key, and n8n's backup docs say credentials cannot be decrypted without the original. If you try this setup, set N8N_ENCRYPTION_KEY yourself as an environment variable so it survives restarts. You now depend on two free tiers staying generous at the same time.

What free costs you in reliability

Every free option trades money for one of three things: uptime, data safety or your time. A free tier that sleeps costs you missed schedules. One with an ephemeral disk costs you the instance itself. An always-free VM costs neither, but you are the administrator: updates, HTTPS, backups and security patches are yours, exactly as on a paid server. Our list of n8n self-hosted limitations covers what that job includes.

The step up is small. Railway's Hobby plan is $5 a month including $5 of usage, and our self-hosted n8n pricing breakdown lists small VPS plans at list prices from the published pages. Against a workflow that quietly stopped running for a week, that is cheap insurance.

Is there a free n8n alternative that is hosted for you?

If the goal is "automation without a bill or a server" and not n8n specifically, hosted free plans are the simpler answer. Checked October 2026 on each pricing page: Activepieces gives 1,000 credits a month on its free plan, with one credit per run however many steps it has; Make gives 1,000 credits and two active scenarios; Zapier gives 100 tasks a month on two-step Zaps. All three stay awake and keep your data, which no free n8n host on an app platform does. Our n8n alternatives comparison covers twelve options and when each one fits.

And if free hosting is a stopgap while you build something you intend to sell, plan for the product, not the workaround. The AI SaaS Builder program has no n8n lessons; it covers building an app on Supabase and the Claude API, including a lesson on Supabase's free tier limits and when to upgrade, then deploying it and charging for it.

Free n8n hosting: FAQ