The open-source n8n alternative you can self-host

What open source buys you here

Open source usually buys you the engine to run. With Kortix it buys the whole company setup as source. Agents and skills are markdown files. Memory is a directory of files that grows as the company learns. Connectors, triggers, permission rules and the machine image each session boots are declared in one kortix.yaml. Clone the repo and the company is on your disk.

Because the setup is text in git, every change has a diff. A new skill, a memory edit, a connector swap: read the diff before it merges, then roll back any of it. Nothing about how your company works lives only in a vendor's database.

The runtime is open too. One isolated sandbox per session. Every session runs the OpenCode harness on its own branch, with permissions per tool down to a single shell command. Any model provider with your own keys. Connector credentials are brokered server-side and never enter the machine. Kortix is the leading open-source alternative to Claude Cowork and ChatGPT Work, and the full source is Kortix on GitHub with 20,000+ stars (checked October 2026).

The repo is the company

A Kortix project is one manifest plus directories of plain text. agents/ holds who does the work, skills/ how the company does a job, and memory/ what it has learned. kortix.yaml declares the rest: what each agent may touch, when work starts on its own, which tools it is wired to, and the machine image every session boots.

# kortix.yaml
kortix_version: 2
default_agent: kortix
agents:
  kortix:
    file: agents/kortix.md
    connectors: all
triggers:
  - slug: daily-digest
    type: cron
    agent: kortix
    cron: '0 0 9 * * 1-5'
    prompt: |
      Summarize yesterday's commits. Open a CR against main.

The scheduled and webhook jobs n8n is known for run as triggers: a cron or a signed webhook starts a session with nobody present. When a session runs, the agent boots in an isolated sandbox on its own branch and commits there. Session work reaches main through a change request. Merge is default-deny for agents, so you read the diff, then merge it to the default branch.

The self-host path

Self-hosting Kortix is free. What you run is one Docker Compose stack: the frontend, the API, the LLM gateway and the Supabase distribution. The manual path from the docs is a few commands:

1. Install the CLI: curl -fsSL https://kortix.com/install | bash. macOS and Linux (WSL on Windows).
2. Point DNS at the box: A/AAAA records for your domain and api.<domain>, then open ports 80 and 443 for the bundled Caddy proxy.
3. Initialize the instance: kortix self-host init --domain kortix.example.com.
4. Start the stack: kortix self-host start.
5. Configure the runtime: kortix self-host configure prompts for the sandbox provider key, and optionally a managed-git token.

Check progress with kortix self-host status. After that, instances update themselves. Pin an exact version with kortix self-host update --tag <version>. Backups stay yours, under ~/.config/kortix/self-host/<instance>/.

No domain yet? Evaluation mode swaps DNS for a Cloudflare tunnel: kortix self-host init --tunnel cloudflare, then kortix self-host start. The tunnel URL changes on every restart, so use it for evaluation only.

Agent sessions run on a separate sandbox provider, not on this stack. Self-hosted instances use your own model key by default.

Or managed cloud, same setup

Prefer no infrastructure? Sign up in the web app and start a session, nothing to install. From the terminal, kortix init scaffolds a project and kortix ship pushes it; the first run creates the cloud project and repo. Finished work arrives as change requests: kortix cr ls lists them, kortix cr merge lands one after you read the diff.

The price is simple. Free is $0 with 200 credits per month and 1 project. The team plan is $40 per seat per month with 2,500 credits per month per seat, pooled. Either way, the company is the same thing: one repo of files you own.

Where n8n fits vs where Kortix fits

Both tools self-host, and the overlap is smaller than the shared vocabulary suggests.

n8n is a workflow builder. Fixed flowcharts, the same steps in the same order every time, are where it does well. n8n's own docs describe it as a fair-code workflow automation tool, which is not open source, and its homepage offers deployment on your infrastructure or theirs.

Kortix runs open-ended work: research, a report, a fix, a reply that needs judgment. Each job is a session on its own machine, the configuration is the repo, and a person approves what changes.

Choose n8n when the job never varies. Choose Kortix when the job needs judgment, when the setup belongs in git, or when the source has to be open.

The feature-by-feature rundown is in n8n vs Kortix, the migration checklist in migrate from n8n, and the wider field in n8n alternatives. The Kortix blog takes the comparison further; the home page starts the tour.