Understand instance roles

Every user has one instance role. The instance role determines the user's permissions and access across the n8n instance.

There are three built-in instance roles: Owner, Admin, and Member. If these don't meet your needs, you can create custom instance roles with granular permissions.

Feature availability

The Admin role is available on:

• n8n Cloud: Pro, Enterprise

• Self-hosted: Enterprise

Instance roles and project roles

n8n has two levels of roles. Instance roles control what a user can do across the entire instance. Project roles (part of RBAC) control what a user can do within a specific project, and a user can have different project roles in different projects.

Create a Member role account for the owner

n8n recommends that owners create a second account with the Member role for themselves. Owners can see and edit all workflows, credentials, and projects. However, there is no way to see who created a particular workflow, so there is a risk of overriding other people's work if you build and edit workflows as an owner.

Permission	Owner	Admin	Member
Manage own email and password	✅	✅	✅
Manage own workflows	✅	✅	✅
View, create, and use tags	✅	✅	✅
Delete tags	✅	✅	❌
View and share all workflows	✅	✅	❌
View, edit, and share all credentials	✅	✅	❌
Set up and use Source control	✅	✅	❌
Create projects	✅	✅	❌
View all projects	✅	✅	❌
Add and remove users	✅	✅	❌
Access the Cloud dashboard	✅	❌	❌

Custom instance roles

If the built-in roles don't match your access needs, you can create custom instance roles with granular permissions. Custom instance roles let you grant specific instance-level capabilities (such as managing users, tags, or API keys) without giving full Admin access.

Refer to Create custom instance roles for instructions on creating and managing them.