Head to head
Dify vs n8n
A side-by-side, sourced comparison. Facts come from each vendor’s own materials; scores are our editorial opinion applied by the same rubric to both.
| Dimension | ||
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Dify Cloud: Sandbox is free (200 message credits, 1 workspace, 5 apps); Professional is $59/workspace/mo (5,000 credits/mo); Team is $159/workspace/mo (10,000 credits/mo). A self-hosted community edition is available separately.source ↗ | Self-hosted Community Edition is free. Cloud (billed annually): Starter EUR20/mo (2.5K executions), Pro EUR50/mo (10K executions), Business EUR667/mo (40K, self-hosted), Enterprise custom — all with unlimited users, workflows, and integrations.source ↗ |
| Hosting model | Managed cloud (dify.ai) or a self-hosted open-source community edition on your own infrastructure.source ↗ | Two options — n8n Cloud (hosted) or self-hosted on your own infrastructure, including a free Community Edition on GitHub.source ↗ |
| Memory & state | RAG knowledge pipelines to make your data LLM-ready, plus conversation and app state within workflows.source ↗ | AI Agent nodes take memory sub-nodes: "Simple Memory" (in-instance, not persisted across sessions), "Postgres Chat Memory" for persistence, and a "Chat Memory Manager" for advanced management.source ↗ |
| MCP support | Nativesource ↗ | Nativesource ↗ |
| Integrations | Agentic workflows, RAG pipelines, bidirectional native MCP (consume tools and publish as an MCP server), a tool/plugin ecosystem, and observability.source ↗ | 400+ integrations per the GitHub repository (the homepage markets 500+); provider-agnostic LLM nodes via LangChain.source ↗ |
| Model providers | Model-agnostic — any major LLM, plus local models via Ollama and any OpenAI-compatible API.source ↗ | LangChain-based; documented chat models include OpenAI, DeepSeek, Google Gemini, Groq, and Azure, and you can connect any model.source ↗ |
| Open source | Yessource ↗ | Nosource ↗ |
| Developer experience(opinion) | 4/5 | 4/5 |
| Pricing transparency & value(opinion) | 3/5 | 4/5 |
| Scalability(opinion) | 3/5 | 4/5 |
| Memory & state(opinion) | 3/5 | 3/5 |
| Integrations(opinion) | 4/5 | 5/5 |
| MCP nativeness(opinion) | 5/5 | 5/5 |
The balanced view
Editorial opinion, derived from the scorecard above
Where Dify scores higher
In our rubric, Dify does not rate ahead of n8n on any single dimension.
Where n8n scores higher
In our rubric, n8n rates ahead on pricing transparency & value, scalability, integrations.
These two serve different needs — read the full dossiers for Dify and n8n before deciding. Neither has been hands-on tested by us yet.
Product and company names are trademarks of their respective owners and are used here only to identify the products under discussion.