How to Self-Host n8n for Free (Local & Cloud)

n8n is like Zapier, Make, and IFTTT… if they were free, open-source, and didn’t hold your data hostage.

So in this post, you’ll learn to deploy this popular visual workflow tool locally and to the cloud — for free, in under a minute.

After this post, you can automate anything… with n8n!

The easiest way to run n8n locally for free is by using Docker.

And the easiest way to run Docker is by using Docker Desktop.

In a nutshell, Docker Desktop provides a ready-to-use setup for downloading and running apps like n8n locally.

With Docker Desktop installed and running, open your terminal, type these two commands, and press Enter after each one.

docker volume create n8n_data

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

Because these commands create a volume to store persistent data, download n8n, and start your container, exposed on port 5678. To save your work between restarts, it also mounts a Docker volume called n8n_data. To finish a session, just quit Docker Desktop.

And that’s it. Go to localhost:5678, and boom — you’ve got n8n running locally for free!

But now it’s time to run n8n in the cloud, also for free!

We’ll go with Render. I’m not affiliated with them in any way; I just think they offer a very generous free tier.

We need to create an account and complete their onboarding flow!

Next, we create a new web service, where we need to copy the Docker image URL for n8n.

docker.n8n.io/n8nio/n8n

This is just a nerdy version of a download link.

We leave the configuration as is, select the free tier, and deploy our web service!

Now, wait for it to go live.

And that’s it. Go to your deployment URL, and boom — you’ve got n8n running in the cloud for free!