An n8n alternative.
Describe the job, get an agent.

For jobs that change from run to run, yes. SpringBrand is not a like-for-like replacement: there is no canvas to draw and nothing to self-host. You describe the job in chat, review the result and save it as an agent that runs on schedule in SpringBrand's cloud, metered in credits. That trades n8n's step-by-step control for less setup. Workflows that need self-hosting, custom code or a fixed sequence of nodes are a better fit for n8n.

The self-hosted Community edition is perpetually free in licence terms — you pay for the servers, upgrades and on-call instead — and runs on your own servers without registering with n8n. n8n's docs also list a Registered Community tier that unlocks additional features after you register an email address. n8n Cloud needs an account and has no permanently free plan: the Starter and Pro trials need no credit card and include 800 AI Assistant credits, while a Business trial requires a credit card for 14 days. Paid Cloud starts at 20€ a month billed annually for 2,500 executions.

The source is public, but the licence is not OSI-approved, and n8n's own word for the model is fair-code. The Sustainable Use License, Version 1.0 permits you to "use, copy, distribute, make available, and prepare derivative works of the software" but restricts that use to "your own internal business purposes or for non-commercial or personal use", and permits redistribution "only if you do so free of charge for non-commercial purposes". Files whose names contain ".ee." are enterprise code and require an n8n Enterprise License.

It is the version of n8n that n8n runs for you. The docs call it "fully-managed", with "no installation needed" and required technical expertise listed as "none required", because "n8n handles hosting, updates, and scaling". It is sold as a subscription — Starter, Pro, Business and Enterprise — and billed by workflow execution rather than by seat: "An execution is a single run of your entire workflow. It doesn't matter how many steps are in the workflow or how much data it processes. It's still a single execution." Published allowances are 2,500 executions on Starter, 10,000 on Pro and 40,000 on Business, all with unlimited users, and Business lists overage at 4,000 EUR for extra buckets of 300,000 executions. Cloud also carries plan-level concurrency caps, and gateway credits on Starter and Pro that let nodes call OpenAI, Anthropic or Google Gemini without you managing provider API keys.

In n8n, the agent is the AI Agent node inside an ordinary workflow. n8n's documentation describes it as follows: "Connect a chat model and one or more tools, and the agent decides which tools to call to complete a task." The node is built on LangChain and requires at least one tool sub-node to run — a chat model on its own is not enough. The agent type setting was deprecated in n8n 1.82.0 and the older v1 node is scheduled for removal in n8n 3.0, so older tutorials showing a type dropdown are out of date. In SpringBrand the agent is the product: you describe the job, it uses marketplace APIs, skills and your connected apps, runs on schedule and learns from each run.

No code and no nodes. Describe the job in chat and SpringBrand proposes the agent's setup — instructions, data sources, connected apps and skills — for you to confirm. If you prefer, fill in the same four parts in a form. If you want to write JavaScript or Python for each step, n8n's code steps give you that control.

Agents work from live data, the tools you allow and your company documents rather than from model memory alone, and many tasks return sources with the result. Review the first runs; the agent learns from your feedback, so later runs need fewer corrections. For steps that must run exactly the same way every time, keep a fixed n8n workflow.

Yes. Agents run in the cloud, with nothing to host. Schedule a task by day, by week or at a set time and the result is delivered to you, for example in Slack, Microsoft Teams or Lark. Plus includes 3 daily scheduled tasks, Pro 20 that can run every 15 minutes and Max unlimited every 5 minutes; the Free plan has no scheduled tasks.

Yes — and for many teams that is the right start. Keep the deterministic flows that already work in n8n, such as webhooks, data syncs and self-hosted pipelines, and move the research, writing, screening and reporting jobs that change from run to run to SpringBrand.

Not automatically. No n8n import is offered, and n8n workflows do not share a format with other tools — nor do the tools people often compare it with: Make and Zapier, hosted-only and counting credits and successful actions respectively; Microsoft Power Automate, which charges per user or per bot; and Activepieces and Windmill, which are OSI-licensed and self-hostable. Write down the trigger, inputs, connected accounts and expected output of one workflow, rebuild it as a SpringBrand agent, and run both in parallel for a week before you switch the n8n workflow off.

n8n Cloud starts at 20€ a month billed annually for Starter, with 2,500 executions and 5 concurrent executions. Pro is 50€ a month for 10,000 executions, and Business is 667€ a month for 40,000 executions with a self-hosted deployment option. Enterprise is priced by sales, and the self-hosted Community edition has no licence fee. SpringBrand Plus is $29 a month, or $23 billed annually, for 3,000 credits; Pro is $59 for 12,000 and Max $199 for 30,000. One subscription covers the models, APIs and data an agent uses, a typical task uses about 15–40 credits, and top-ups are $5 per 1,000 credits. Executions and credits are different units, so price one real job on both. The full n8n plan-by-plan breakdown is in n8n pricing.

Stay with n8n when your data has to stay on your own servers, when developers want JavaScript and Python steps they control, or when you run fixed, high-volume workflows that must behave the same way every time. SpringBrand has no self-hosted edition. You can also use both: n8n for deterministic plumbing, SpringBrand agents for the research and reporting jobs that need judgment.