Versionc selft hosted in render vs version cloud native on n8n.io

[Tanegaa]

Hello team,
I’ve installed two versions of n8n:
one self-hosted on Render (free plan),
and another one on n8n Cloud (14-day trial).
Unfortunately, I’ve noticed that the Render version is very limited.
I built identical workflows on both platforms:
On n8n Cloud, everything works perfectly.
But on Render, the workflows are extremely slow or never complete.
For example, I tried to extract text from a PDF using the “Extract from PDF” node.
On Render, the workflow keeps running indefinitely.
On the cloud version, the same workflow completes in less than 5 seconds.
Could you please explain why this difference occurs and how I can fix it?
I’m planning to get a paid subscription on Render, but I’d like to understand these limitations first.
Thank you for your help

Describe the problem/error/question

What is the error message (if any)?

Please share your workflow

(Select the nodes on your canvas and use the keyboard shortcuts CMD+C/CTRL+C and CMD+V/CTRL+V to copy and paste the workflow.)

Share the output returned by the last node

Information on your n8n setup

• n8n version:
• Database (default: SQLite):
• n8n EXECUTIONS_PROCESS setting (default: own, main):
• Running n8n via (Docker, npm, n8n cloud, desktop app):
• Operating system:

[Sven_Lueck]

This sounds more like an Render related problem to me. The downsides of renders free plan is the limited hardware (512mb Ram) and also service spin-down after 15 minutes of inactivity, There are also other solutions (low cost) available. I chcecked Hostinger and if 10€ /month is in your budget i would go with the KVM4 or KVM2 which is a bit cheaper. If you already know how to set up Dynamic DNS (DynDNS) and handle the security side properly, you could absolutely run an Nginx server yourself — and inside Docker containers, host PostgreSQL (with pgvector), N8N and many other services.

Just keep in mind that doing this securely is really important. You’ll need some basic understanding of Docker, networking, API configuration, and how to harden your setup (SSL, firewall rules, reverse proxy settings, etc.). Once that’s in place, it’s a great way to have a flexible and powerful self-hosted environment.