If you have read our n8n guides and want a structured way to actually learn the tool instead of piecing it together from individual how-tos, n8n now has one official, free place to start. This is not a ranked list of third-party courses — it is what n8n itself provides, and how to use it well.
The n8n Academy is the real starting point
n8n’s official learning platform lives at learn.n8n.io. Every course on it is free. It soft-launched in June 2026 and replaced the older text-based Level 1 and Level 2 courses that used to live in n8n’s documentation, which were retired on 30 June 2026 — so if an older guide anywhere points you to a “Level 1” course in the docs, that link is out of date.
There are four courses:
- QS101 Quickstart — the shortest path to a first working workflow.
- N8N101, N8N102, N8N103 — the three-course Foundations path, which goes deeper than the quickstart.
Each course mixes hands-on exercises with section quizzes and a final exam; a 70% pass mark earns a completion badge and certificate. The exercises run against practice APIs the Academy hosts itself, so you generally do not need to set up outside accounts just to do the coursework.
What you need before you start
You do need a working n8n instance to do the exercises in. Two free ways to get one:
- n8n Cloud’s free trial, which does not require a credit card.
- The free, self-hosted n8n Community Edition — see our own guide to self-hosting n8n on a VPS if you want to go this route.
A sensible order
If you have never touched n8n: start with QS101, then move into the N8N101-103 Foundations path. If you already have a workflow or two built from following individual tutorials (ours or anyone else’s) and want to check your mental model is actually correct rather than just copied-and-working, N8N101 is a reasonable place to jump in directly.
Beyond the Academy itself, n8n’s documentation also has a learning paths page that groups its reference pages into topical paths, which is worth bookmarking once the courses above are done and the docs become a reference you return to instead of a tutorial you work through start to finish.
What this does not replace
The Academy teaches n8n the tool. It does not teach the judgement calls that come up once you are running something in production — what to do when a webhook fires twice, how to monitor a workflow you cannot watch, when self-hosting actually pays off over the Cloud plan. That is the gap our own practical guides are written to fill once you have the Academy’s foundation; see our Automation category for the hands-on side once you have the basics down.
The honest limitation here
We have not completed the Academy’s courses ourselves end-to-end for this guide — this is a guide to what the resource is and how to use it, not a review of the course content’s quality. If you go through it, the structure above (QS101 first, then the three-part Foundations path) is accurate as of the date checked, not a personal account of having sat through every exercise.