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n8n is great for automating simple tasks and quickly connecting services. But if you’re building a full-fledged application with UI, roles, logic, and APIs—you’ll need something more powerful. In this article, you’ll find a clear comparison, real-world cases, and a breakdown of why Directual is about building products, not just workflows.
To put it simply:
n8n is about automation—“connecting the dots,” making different services work together without manual hassle.
Directual is about building full-stack applications—with a database, APIs, business logic, UI, security, and scalability.
People often confuse the two and see them as analogues. But that’s like comparing a fork to a Swiss Army knife: both are food-related, but one is limited to a single function, while the other can help you survive in the mountains, open a can, fix a bike, and solve a hundred other problems.
So the main takeaway is clear right away:
Let’s dive deeper.
With n8n you automate a beer kiosk, with Directual—you build a brewery.
That’s the best explanation. A kiosk is a simple chain: order → payment → notification. Perfect for n8n. A brewery is supply chains, warehouse management, quality control, role-based access, interfaces for clients and admins, accounting integration, and even AI assistants. That’s Directual.
In 2025, n8n changed its model:
This sparked outrage. Self-hosters already pay for infra (servers, storage, bandwidth), but now also per execution. At ~1M ops/month, that’s $124,800/year—for software running on your own servers.
Directual isn’t free either—but at scale it’s cheaper: $175–249/mo for 500k ops, $840–1199 for 2M. Plus, enterprise clients get full on-prem versions with SLA, or private cloud starting at $1,750/mo—with no operation limits at all.
Community Edition is technically free. But that “free” comes with strings attached—major limitations and hidden costs.
So yes—you can run workflows. But for serious projects, CE is a toy for solo developers.
Bottom line: “free” is misleading. CE is underpowered and expensive to operate at scale.
We started with n8n—it looked free. But soon hit walls: auth, roles, CE limits. Counted time & money—moved to Directual. Everything just works.
Deploying n8n is easy. Running it in production isn’t.
This means fragmented setups, harder updates, higher risk. Corporate DevOps integration demands serious effort.
Directual solves this out-of-the-box: a stable Terraform provider, Helm charts, private cloud & on-prem support, and built-in app snapshots for safe migration. That saves weeks of DevOps time.
When it comes to self-hosting, security isn’t a “nice to have” — it’s a critical requirement. And here, n8n shows some real weak points.
Over the past few years, several serious vulnerabilities have been found in n8n:
Things get particularly dangerous with Docker Compose: if unnecessary ports are open, authentication isn’t enforced, or SSL is missing — your entire n8n instance can be compromised. Attackers could gain full access to your workflows, credentials, and even the host server.
There are ways to mitigate the risks:
But all of this is on you. Without an experienced DevSecOps team, running n8n securely at scale is no small feat.
With Directual, it’s a different story. Security is built-in:
So when it comes to real-world, enterprise-grade usage, choosing a platform with security as a first-class citizen makes all the difference.
Directual and n8n are not competitors. They serve different purposes.
n8n is a tool for small-scale automation and personal workflows.
Directual is a platform for building real applications and products.
Don’t get misled by n8n’s “free.” Self-hosting requires DevOps and infra, and at scale becomes way more expensive.
So: if you just need autopilot for a few services—pick n8n.
But if you’re building a “factory” with scale and ambition—you need Directual.
Technically, the Community Edition of n8n is free. But in practice, it’s far from it: self-hosting requires infrastructure, DevOps skills, proper security setup, and constant maintenance. In 2025, n8n introduced a Business plan for self-hosting — with per-execution billing. 1 million executions per month will cost you $10,400. “Free” only works for small side projects with expert support.
Security in n8n heavily depends on how you configure the server. There have been several major vulnerabilities (auth bypass, XSS, open redirects). If Docker Compose is misconfigured — open ports, no SSL, outdated images — attackers can gain full server control. Without a DevOps/security specialist, n8n can become a serious attack surface.
Community Edition lacks:
You get full node access, but most advanced, enterprise-grade features are paywalled or require hacks. It’s great for solo workflows — not for production systems.
Cloud pricing: $50–60/month for 10,000 executions.
Self-hosted: after 50,000 free executions, you pay $0.104 per run.
That’s $10,400/month for 1 million executions — even if you run it on your own infrastructure. Add server costs, ops, monitoring — and n8n becomes more expensive than integrated full-stack platforms.
Only for very simple use cases. If your product needs user interfaces, roles, scalable APIs, and secure access control — n8n hits limits fast. Team collaboration is missing, versioning is primitive, and scaling requires DevOps-level effort. It’s a tool for workflows, not serious apps.
Directual isn’t just an alternative — it’s a different beast. It’s a full-stack platform: databases, logic, API builder, UI, RBAC, AI agents — all in one place.
It ships with:
Perfect if you need to build real apps — not just connect dots.
Join 22,000+ no-coders using Directual and create something you can be proud of—both faster and cheaper than ever before. It’s easy to start thanks to the visual development UI, and just as easy to scale with powerful, enterprise-grade databases and backend.
