n8n Workflow Automation

Because they are good at different things. Power Automate is the right tool inside Microsoft 365 — it understands SharePoint, Teams and Dataverse natively and needs no infrastructure. n8n earns its place when the workflow lives mostly outside Microsoft, when per-run licensing gets expensive at volume, or when you need to self-host so that data never leaves your own network. Most of our clients end up using both.

No, but you can, and that is often the reason to choose it. n8n runs as a container on your own server or in your own cloud subscription, which keeps every credential and every payload inside your perimeter. There is also a managed cloud option if you would rather not operate it.

It is a commercially maintained product with a source-available licence, used in production well beyond hobby projects. The licence permits internal business use; the restriction applies to reselling it as a hosted service, which is not what you would be doing.

It gets recorded, retried according to the policy you set, and it alerts someone. Every execution is stored with its input and output, so a failed run can be inspected and replayed rather than guessed at. Automation without observable failures is the expensive kind.

Yes — that is the usual reason for choosing it. Self-hosted n8n sits inside your network, so it can reach databases and internal APIs that a cloud service cannot, without opening those systems to the internet.