The choice between Beam AI vs N8N is a choice between a developer-first, node-based automation and an agentic platform with governance. N8N offers a visual builder and broad integrations, while Beam AI lets you design, run, and govern AI agents with enterprise-grade guardrails.
If you aren’t sure what fits your team better, here’s a quick comparison between the two:
N8N is a fair-code automation platform that runs self-hosted or in a managed cloud, combining a visual editor with hundreds of integrations and LLM nodes.
Meanwhile, Beam AI is an agentic platform to create, deploy, and manage AI agents that reason, act, and integrate with your systems. Explore Beam’s AI agents for an overview of agent capabilities and orchestration.
Here’s a quick assessment of both platforms on build and operations, improvement, ecosystem, time to first deployment, and security.
Building and Operating AI
N8N: You design flows with triggers and nodes, including LLM nodes like the Basic LLM Chain, and can mix visual steps with custom code. This suits teams who aim to extend automations with AI while staying inside a familiar workflow builder.
Beam AI: You and your team model common processes as agentic workflows where AI agents coordinate tasks, tools, and data. The platform focuses on running agents reliably in production, with centralized oversight across processes.
Improvement over Time
N8N: Provides execution logging, error workflows, audit logging, version control, and debugging in the editor. Iteration requires your manual input but is well-supported by logs and diffs.
Beam AI: The platform centers on operational governance for AI agents so teams can observe, tune, and scale agent behavior. This happens within one space rather than per-flow scripting.
Integrations and Ecosystem
N8N: Offers 400+ integrations and a growing template gallery, plus community workflows to accelerate builds.
Beam AI: Connect agents to your existing stack through Beam Integrations including systems like Slack, Zendesk, Salesforce, and Shopify, which makes your workflow as efficient as ever.
Time to First Deployment
N8N: N8N starts a fast path with hosted cloud plans, ready-made templates, and visual editing. Teams can start from community templates and customize them.
Beam AI: Beam provides guided onboarding and a concise demo library of task-focused videos. This helps your team stand up their first agentic workflows fast, with pre-built agent templates and a broad integrations catalog.
Security and Compliance
N8N: For hosted plans, data is stored in the EU (Frankfurt). Self-hosted deployments place controls with your team. N8N documents privacy, incident response, and access controls in its security and docs pages.
Beam AI: Beam AI centralizes oversight for AI agents, with documented encryption standards and incident handling, which supports your auditability and enterprise data-handling expectations. For more information, please review Beam’s security page.
N8N uses public, fixed-tier pricing with defined quotas and features, emphasizing “pay for full executions” rather than per-step billing; it’s available in both cloud and self-hosted deployments, with Business and Enterprise plans for higher usage.
By contrast, Beam AI offers flexible, use-case–scoped pricing so customers pay only for what they actually use. An approach that perfectly fits agentic automation, where workloads, integrations, and model choices vary by process and your expectations.
Choose N8N if you want a visual workflow builder with broad app coverage and you plan to embed LLM calls inside conventional automations.
Choose Beam AI if you need an agentic platform to operate multiple AI agents across business processes with centralized governance, integrations, and security that meet enterprise expectations.