[HN Gopher] N8n - Flexible AI workflow automation for technical ...
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       N8n - Flexible AI workflow automation for technical teams
        
       Author : XCSme
       Score  : 160 points
       Date   : 2025-05-03 14:31 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (n8n.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (n8n.io)
        
       | victorbjorklund wrote:
       | N8N is great. Been self-hosting for years.
        
         | k8sToGo wrote:
         | Can you provide a few examples for what you use it for
         | privately?
        
           | op00to wrote:
           | I use it to follow subreddits, scrape posts, analyze based on
           | arbitrary criteria, note the findings in a spreadsheet, then
           | send a notification.
        
           | victorbjorklund wrote:
           | An example i set up recently was getting a notification on
           | telegram whenever I deploy a vercel site (our build process
           | is slow so can take 20 min). Webhook from Vercel -> filter on
           | the author -> send notification to telegram.
           | 
           | The perfect usecase for n8n is when you got integrations and
           | you dont need to run the workflow so often
        
       | behnamoh wrote:
       | How is the name pronounced? Like nate-n, which is a play on
       | Nathan?
       | 
       | Aside from that, I've been thinking about no/low-code solutions
       | for educational purposes. I'm an incoming professor of a
       | university and most my students have little background in CS or
       | related fields. The university insists on using tools like
       | Alteryx but I want to see if free open-source solutions exist
       | (because that way, students can use the tools after graduation).
       | 
       | So far I've seen Dify, Flowise, Langflow, n8n, Make. The last two
       | seem to be more general while the other ones are tailored to LLMs
       | (which is the focus of my courses--applications of LLMs in
       | management).
        
         | c_hastings wrote:
         | From their GitHub:
         | 
         | " What does n8n mean?
         | 
         | Short answer: It means "nodemation" and is pronounced as
         | n-eight-n.
         | 
         | Long answer: "I get that question quite often (more often than
         | I expected) so I decided it is probably best to answer it here.
         | While looking for a good name for the project with a free
         | domain I realized very quickly that all the good ones I could
         | think of were already taken. So, in the end, I chose
         | nodemation. 'node-' in the sense that it uses a Node-View and
         | that it uses Node.js and '-mation' for 'automation' which is
         | what the project is supposed to help with. However, I did not
         | like how long the name was and I could not imagine writing
         | something that long every time in the CLI. That is when I then
         | ended up on 'n8n'." - Jan Oberhauser, Founder and CEO, n8n.io"
        
           | senordevnyc wrote:
           | This sounds like excellent evidence that they picked a
           | terrible name and should change it.
        
             | pinkmuffinere wrote:
             | It is definitely a bad name, even once you know the real
             | name it feels unnatural to say. It might be too late to
             | change though. Maybe better to ret-con it to just be
             | "Nathan" :/
        
       | Valodim wrote:
       | Simple to self host and use, can recommend.
       | 
       | Can't say I'm a fan of the EUR55M financing round they took
       | though. I mean, congratulations to them, but the growth they'll
       | need to satisfy those investors is so very likely to lead to
       | chasing numbers and enshittifying the product down the line.
        
         | brandonpelfrey wrote:
         | I'm curious, because neither of us knows their financial
         | situation or needs and ambitions. What would you suggest they
         | do?
        
           | 9dev wrote:
           | Not take as much Money. You can get by with way less, and
           | don't have to sell as many of your Horcruxes to the VCs.
        
       | EcommerceFlow wrote:
       | I have a friend that uses them, but I took a separate route and
       | just decided to learn programming basics, at least enough to be
       | able to vibe code.
       | 
       | I'm thinking why not just use APIs?
        
         | orliesaurus wrote:
         | I think you did the right choice, but not everyone wants to
         | take the longer route, so this is why n8n exists!
        
           | XCSme wrote:
           | I think using this without programming knowledge is hard,
           | you'll hit a lot of errors and data transformation issues
           | that are hard to solve without knowing programming 101 like
           | arrays, objects, data access, etc.
           | 
           | But, if you do know how to code, this makes it easy to
           | quickly integrate stuff without having to write all the
           | connection boilerplate code.
        
         | victorbjorklund wrote:
         | I'm a developer but use N8N. One reason is not having to build
         | and maintain integrations with lots of API:s for workflows that
         | are just run once in a while. Like building an integration with
         | Slack that will get data from 5 API:s and save it in google
         | sheets and send you an email.
         | 
         | That would require writing lots of code while here it is much
         | easier with N8N. Anything complicated or needing lots of useage
         | I would go for programming
        
       | greatpostman wrote:
       | I'm suspicious about n8n being able to abstract properly to allow
       | for dynamic agentic workflows. Anyone have actual experience?
        
         | scrollinondubs wrote:
         | Can you clarify "dynamic agentic workflows?" I use their agent
         | node and it works great but what are you trying to do with it?
         | FYI they just added native support for MCP in the latest
         | release both for exposing their workflows as a MCP server and
         | consuming MCP servcies easily via their MCP client tool:
         | https://docs.n8n.io/integrations/builtin/core-nodes/n8n-node...
         | https://docs.n8n.io/integrations/builtin/cluster-nodes/sub-n...
         | That should make things interesting because they have a fairly
         | extensive library of templates which can now easily be
         | converted to MCP servers and be more easily invoked agnatically
         | by LLMs.
        
       | preya2k wrote:
       | If you're looking for an Open Source alternative, give Windmill a
       | try.
        
         | rattray wrote:
         | For those curious, it looks like n8n is "fair-code" source
         | available.
         | 
         | I hadn't seen this term before but it looks interesting:
         | 
         | https://faircode.io/
        
         | Imustaskforhelp wrote:
         | Just to clarify. The reason why you aren't saying N8n is open
         | source because of its license right? I haven't read its license
         | but it does seem to me to have quite some restrictions.
         | 
         | And whereas Windmill seems to be agpl + apache.
         | 
         | So that is what you are mentioning, right?
        
           | tinco wrote:
           | Typically when people say open source they mean that the
           | source code can be used , modified and made public for any
           | purpose. There is an organization called OSI that maintains a
           | ratified list of licenses that are compatible with the ideals
           | of the open source movement. Although the OSI has been
           | compromised by the big cloud providers and no longer serves
           | the public interest, the list can still be relied on as a
           | good sign that the license you're looking at is open source.
        
           | preya2k wrote:
           | Yes, n8n is not open source. It's "source available".
        
         | hectormalot wrote:
         | Having some experience with both, I think they are quite
         | different. N8n looks quite polished and seems primarily
         | concerned about connecting pre-made blocks. There are custom
         | code blocks (JS and Python only, with limited ability to import
         | libraries), but it's not something you'd use by default. I
         | thinks it great for less-technical users when compared to
         | windmill.
         | 
         | Windmill OTOH supports a bunch of programming languages for
         | steps (Go, Rust, Python, TS, etc.) and seems to have a much
         | more "code first" approach. Reusable blocks are more like code
         | templates compared to n8n.
         | 
         | Hard to say which is better. I really like the ability in
         | windmill to just write code for each step and it comes across
         | more powerful, but it feels less polished and intuitive when
         | compared to n8n.
        
           | rubenfiszel wrote:
           | Founder of windmill.
           | 
           | I'm not ashamed to admit than n8n feels more polished. There
           | are a few reasons:
           | 
           | - Our team was and is still much smaller. We were 5 for the
           | first 2 years, we are now 10 (year 3), and are continuing to
           | hire to follow our growth.
           | 
           | - They have been around for longer and mature for longer,
           | more time to iterate. We have reached some level of maturity
           | recently and are now spending more iterations on polishing
           | rather than new features.
           | 
           | - Their surface area is smaller, windmill does A LOT and
           | expose more for the better or worse.
           | 
           | n8n has done a lot of things really well and although we have
           | a different audience, there is a lot to learn from what they
           | did very well and we have the upmost respect for them. We
           | have some overlap, but I think ultimately we strive in
           | different kind of orgs and will cohabit rather than compete.
        
         | filipheremans wrote:
         | Indeed! Big fan..
        
       | bwfan123 wrote:
       | Isnt this just workflow automation thats been around for decades
       | ? whats ai about it ?
        
         | ibaikov wrote:
         | There are lots of AI nodes which are both very convenient and
         | are great for learning how all of this works. Vector storage
         | integrations etc. I'm not affiliated.
        
       | nico wrote:
       | Can someone talk about their experience using n8n? I've seen it
       | in passing a lot lately, but I wonder what some good successful
       | use cases are
        
         | ibaikov wrote:
         | It is great to make chatbots in my opinion. Personal
         | automations, AI, etc. I have friends who use it to prototype
         | products and it works using n8n as backend for users. I mostly
         | don't do this, only prototypes that only I can access. It has
         | pros and cons vs coding, and you probably have to make
         | something using n8n to see if it works for you.
        
         | gokaygurcan wrote:
         | Before it was moved to GitHub Actions, we had a multiple-step
         | deployment flow created in Node-Red, I believe you can achieve
         | more or less the same thing with n8n. Never tried tho, it
         | wasn't necessary anyway. If I really really simplify it's like,
         | checkout, run some tests, deploy to a preview env, run some
         | more tests, report back to slack.
         | 
         | On a personal level, I use it to automate booking a tennis
         | court. It logs in, selects the date and time (pre-defined),
         | adds a partner/opponent, books the court, pings a service that
         | generates a calendar entry. If I decide to cancel the booking,
         | it again pings the service and removes the calendar entry. I
         | needed to bend some "nodes" to do what I need within the same
         | workflow (such as create event runs once a day but update event
         | runs in every 10 minutes).
         | 
         | In the past, I also used it to detect service interruptions
         | with my ISP. I don't use that ISP anymore, so this workflow is
         | redundant, but it was checking an API and if there's an entry,
         | sending it as a push notification (via ntfy) to my phone.
        
         | neoecos wrote:
         | I got to know n8n from HN comments a couple year ago. I tried
         | it and kinda liked it, it was really a tool for making quick
         | PoC, trying remote APIs and building operations.
         | 
         | I was able to hack a MVP of a new product in just one or two
         | days.
         | 
         | Now, the company uses n8n for a lot of stuff, out ops team and
         | finance team is expected to automatize manual work using n8n.
         | From billing to financial conciliation to customer support.
         | Also in product/dev team we implement some parts as flows, for
         | things we expect to change a lot of features that are more
         | internal.
         | 
         | But n8n requires a lot of time and care. It's not intended for
         | high loads, they make a lot of breaking changes (more like new
         | bugs, but is not fun).
         | 
         | We do all this self hosting in a k8s cluster.
         | 
         | In general I like it, but I think is still intended for a
         | personal o early adopter.
         | 
         | Funny, one of my biz co-founder, learned and created a new biz
         | just teaching it.
        
         | simple10 wrote:
         | I can highly recommend n8n. I prefer it over Make.com,
         | Pipedream, Zapier, etc. for automations and AI agent tasks.
         | Basically, anything you want to automate but don't want to spin
         | up a custom code server each time.
         | 
         | The main reasons I switched to n8n are it's open source,
         | meaning I can run it locally without limits, and it supports
         | code nodes in javascript and python. Make.com used to drive me
         | bonkers when it took 10+ minutes to create all the nodes in the
         | UI to handle loops, errors, etc. when I could normally just
         | write a few lines of code to handle it.
         | 
         | Only downside to n8n vs other platforms is it's polling based
         | vs instant trigger unlike Zapier's and Make.com's connectors.
         | So if you're processing email, Google Sheets data, etc. you'll
         | have more latency with n8n unless you add some custom
         | middleware to handle instant triggers. But polling is actually
         | a benefit in my case since I mostly run n8n locally through
         | docker. Whenever I spin it up, it auto catches up on new data
         | it hasn't yet processed.
         | 
         | n8n's AI nodes are first rate and more intuitive IMO than
         | others. You can easily extend it with custom LangChain nodes as
         | well if you're self hosting.
         | 
         | If you want to play around with n8n locally, this tool makes it
         | easy: https://github.com/LLemonStack/llemonstack/ I created it
         | to make it easier for me to spin up and down project stacks on
         | the same machine.
         | 
         | Or see n8n's official repo for instructions on running locally:
         | https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n
        
           | cluckindan wrote:
           | It's not open source though.
        
             | simple10 wrote:
             | True. It's dual licensed. Most of the features are
             | available in the self hosted / local version.
        
               | tinco wrote:
               | It's dual licensed in a way, but neither license is open
               | source. The OSI messed up in not coming up with an answer
               | to the SSPL, and now ambitious projects that would have
               | traditionally gone with an open source license like AGPL
               | are now foregoing open source entirely and just slapping
               | a sustainable use license on it.
               | 
               | So yeah, you can use n8n for free, but that doesn't make
               | it open source. It is a source available license.
        
             | mdaniel wrote:
             | Wow, that's just about the dumbest licensing clause I've
             | ever seen in my life:
             | 
             | > Content of branches other than the main branch (i.e.
             | "master") are not licensed
             | 
             | How the fuck do pull requests work in that setup? Or
             | presumably _tags_ aren 't licensed?! Holy shit
             | 
             | Anyway, seems to be some rando made up license https://gith
             | ub.com/n8n-io/n8n/blob/master/LICENSE.md#sustain...
        
         | XCSme wrote:
         | I recently started using it, and as an experienced developer, I
         | love it.
         | 
         | It's really easy to automate tasks and schedule things.
         | 
         | For example, I connected it to my UXWizz MySQL database, asked
         | the AI in UXWizz to give me a query with the funnel conversions
         | for today (visits/pricing/checkout/sales) compared to last
         | week, copied that into n8n and made it send me an emoji-
         | formatted daily Telegram message.
         | 
         | I am now using it to implement an AI chat-bot/support ticket
         | responder, and I'm planning to migrate a Node.js auto-poster to
         | it, so I can easily change the schedule/model/content of the
         | post without having to edit any code.
         | 
         | I like that it has good documentation for integrations. For
         | example, I was testing Google Ads, and I want to do conversion
         | tracking without adding the Google JS to my page. Again, I used
         | an MySQL connection to my UXWizz analytics dashboard to select
         | the gclid for all visits that lead to a conversion event, then
         | with n8n I upload those daily to a Google Sheet, which is then
         | used by Google Ads to properly track conversions. The Google
         | Sheet integration is not trivial (you need Google Cloud
         | account, create an app, create oauth login, etc.), but the n8n
         | docs were clear enough to follow and up-to-date enough to work.
        
           | rkuodys wrote:
           | Can I ask you why so many things with N8N is connected over
           | Telegram it seems versus for example slack? Not a user of
           | Telegram so I honestly am curious about this choice
        
             | nik8n wrote:
             | I think many users choose Telegram, as it's really simple.
             | Slack is usually slightly more work to setup, e.g. creating
             | the slack bot for it. I'm using Slack ware more than
             | telegram, but I guess both work.
        
             | XCSme wrote:
             | Personally I hate Slack, it never works on my PC because of
             | their organizations/workspace system, where you need a
             | separate account for each community you are in. Also, it's
             | really buggy and login often doesn't work, or switching
             | accounts breaks things.
             | 
             | Telegram has a really good mobile app, and their BotFather
             | makes it easy to create custom integrations. They display
             | nicely a lot of notification formats (text/html/markdown)
             | and it's free.
             | 
             | Slack is too bloated to simply use for notifications.
        
             | sally_glance wrote:
             | I can only talk about the Slack integration story since I
             | never worked with the Telegram API, but over the last
             | couple of years it has become an incredible mess. There are
             | various ways to do the same thing, different permission
             | models, deprecated endpoints without clear alternatives...
             | It has become a pain honestly.
        
         | sharpfuryz wrote:
         | It depends on what you need. For use cases like "export data
         | from HubSpot, transform it (join by id, normalize), and load it
         | into Google Spreadsheets," it works great. I've tested it for
         | marketing automation, but it requires skill to configure
         | properly.
        
       | ChrisGammell wrote:
       | A while back I used it to glue together a bunch of APIs to make a
       | geofence on top of a WiFi location service my company offers.
       | Super easy to prototype external computation without something
       | like severless/lambda (which would be the likely path for
       | production)
       | 
       | https://blog.golioth.io/a-2-geofence-wi-fi-location-here-com...
        
         | metadat wrote:
         | Thanks for sharing, Chris! In case it's helpful to other
         | readers, the linked article outlines combining several tools
         | together, including N8n and how it fit into the picture. Decent
         | article, although a bit shallow on details.
        
       | jasongill wrote:
       | n8n has been good but not great in our organization (and we
       | pronounce it "Nathan", to answer someone else's question). It's
       | effectively a self-hosted version of Zapier and has quite a few
       | built-in integrations. It's a bit more annoying to use than
       | Zapier (but the price is right), and the AI features are
       | currently about like the AI features of every other product:
       | basically sufficient to tell investors "we do AI!" but not
       | anything you're going to actually use.
       | 
       | The one frustration we have with n8n is trying to create custom
       | "apps" (triggers or destinations for workflows). It's clear that
       | the custom apps are an afterthought and have gone through
       | multiple iterations of "here's the best way to do it", and you
       | end up having to just keep trying until you get it to do what you
       | want. Annoyingly, there's no way to manage custom apps in the
       | interface itself - you have to create a Javascript module and
       | then inject it into a .npm directory somewhere inside of the
       | applications Docker container, which just doesn't feel very
       | "professional".
       | 
       | If n8n would add some kind of admin interface for managing custom
       | apps - especially just supporting basic use cases like specifying
       | a REST API as a reusable custom app - it would be great, but
       | still has a ways to go in terms of features (like better user
       | permissions management as part of the lackluster SSO) before it's
       | truly going to be an enterprise grade solution.
       | 
       | That said, we tried Windmill first and while it was cool for the
       | devs who were able to see the vision, the non-technical users
       | hated it and have heavily praised n8n once we created a custom
       | app to let them integrate with our system.
       | 
       | Overall I would say n8n is worth trying if you need something
       | like this, but expect to do some tinkering if you go beyond what
       | it does out of the box.
        
         | claytongulick wrote:
         | How would you compare it with Node Red?
         | 
         | I've just poked at them, but my impression was that Node Red
         | much more capable.
         | 
         | IIRC one of my issues with n8n was the lack of streaming
         | ability, which kills it for large datasets.
        
           | jasongill wrote:
           | Have not used Node Red in production and only played with it
           | briefly, but n8n is more of a Zapier replacement whereas Node
           | Red I believe is more of an IoT automation platform.
           | 
           | n8n is made so that you can set it up and give your staff
           | access and they can manage their own workflows (like "when a
           | customer opens a support ticket, update their Salesforce
           | record to increment the number of tickets they have opened").
           | 
           | It's clearly aimed at non technical users being able to
           | develop their own solutions to problems (for better or for
           | worse), more so than Windmill which is made for developers to
           | solve their own problems or develop solutions that non-
           | technical people can use. Node Red if I remember correctly is
           | more heavily weighted toward real time events for dev
           | (especially hardware/IoT dev) use than "let the support team
           | manage their own workflows for routing customer complaints"
        
           | Towaway69 wrote:
           | For doing streaming in Node-RED, I created a library[1] -
           | it's been through exacatly one example flow[2] - for that it
           | worked well. I've not had a use case for it, it was just an
           | idea of mine to implement an ETL pipeline using NodeRED.
           | 
           | The library just uses the streaming API[3] of NodeJS -
           | effectively converting lines of CSV (for example) into
           | individual messages that flow through NodeRED.
           | 
           | NodeRED isn't great for handling large messages but perfect
           | for directing many small messages.
           | 
           | [1]
           | https://flows.nodered.org/node/@gregoriusrippenstein/node-
           | re...
           | 
           | [2] https://flowhub.org/f/c520d9da20ad7f1d
           | 
           | [3] https://nodejs.org/dist/latest-v18.x/docs/api/stream.html
        
           | otabdeveloper4 wrote:
           | I evaluated both at one point, and n8n is a "we have NodeRed
           | at home" product. Didn't see the point.
        
             | Towaway69 wrote:
             | For me, NodeRED is far more low-level with switch nodes
             | being the equivalent to a case statement. A change node
             | being equivalent to doing assigments of variables.
             | 
             | n8n is far more high level with google sheet nodes
             | communicating with postgres database nodes. There is far
             | less ability to do manipulate the data being passed around
             | - as many said Zapier-like.
             | 
             | NodeRED is used for home automation and talking to devices
             | that are connected to the network and providing nice
             | dashboards of things happening. Another big use case is
             | IIoT. So it less focussed on integration of SaaS services
             | and more on devices integration and inter-communication
             | between devices.
             | 
             | Plus NodeRED has a great collection[1] of third party nodes
             | that can help in connecting to new devices. Installing
             | nodes is based on npm but is completely automated.
             | 
             | [1] https://flows.nodered.org/search?type=node
        
           | rcarmo wrote:
           | My approach to using Node-RED for AI has been to build re-
           | usable sub flows with high-level functionality (parser,
           | chunker, etc.).
           | 
           | You can go a _long_ way with the split/join nodes and a
           | little ingenuity to work around any issues with streaming.
        
           | mbesto wrote:
           | I've used Node Red and n8n both on my homelab and deleted
           | Node Red after awhile. The UI, workflow and 3rd party service
           | support is simply just better on n8n. I could see Node Red
           | having its advantages if you're used to writing code all day
           | (I'm not).
        
         | bevenky wrote:
         | How would you compare it with activepieces.com? It's also self
         | hostable but OSS license.
        
           | mdaniel wrote:
           | Open core MIT expat https://github.com/activepieces/activepie
           | ces/blob/0.51.0/LIC...
           | 
           | And their Launch HN:
           | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34723989
        
         | aerhardt wrote:
         | Zapier has fundamental issues in control flow and exception
         | handling in my experience.
         | 
         | Custom apps aside, how do Zapier and n8n compare in your
         | experience?
        
           | handfuloflight wrote:
           | Can you give a specific example re: Zapier?
        
             | zarathustreal wrote:
             | Are you asking for an example of control flow?
        
             | aerhardt wrote:
             | Once you're down a logical branch, there's no coming back
             | to the main branch. It's hacks all the way down from there
             | to do things that are extremely simple in a normal
             | programming language.
        
         | Everdred2dx wrote:
         | It's early days but check out Tracecat. I've been playing with
         | it a bit and love it!
        
           | mdaniel wrote:
           | Be aware of its AGPL license:
           | https://github.com/TracecatHQ/tracecat/blob/0.34.1/LICENSE
        
             | mogili wrote:
             | n8n has even more restrictive license.
        
         | rubenfiszel wrote:
         | > That said, we tried Windmill first and while it was cool for
         | the devs who were able to see the vision, the non-technical
         | users hated it
         | 
         | Founder of Windmill here. This is not too surprising although
         | we are working on it by leveraging AI and just better
         | DX/design. Pleasing devs in the most demanding orgs and the
         | ever-changing expectations is challenging by itself. Pleasing
         | both devs AND non-technical user is a monumental task that we
         | are now giving more attention to by focusing on 2 aspects:
         | 
         | - A better DX/UX that does not sacrifice power-user
         | capabilities but has a less step learning-curve and more
         | intuitiveness to it. That is mostly about good design and hard
         | work. We are taking inspiration from the best and on the
         | intuitiveness, we've learned a lot from n8n and other leaders
         | in the space.
         | 
         | - leveraging AI capabilities in a state-of-the-art way to have
         | the best models generate the code for non-technical users. That
         | is basically just adopting the best practices inspired by
         | cursor such as great auto-completion, great inline code-gen,
         | excellent semantic search.
        
       | revskill wrote:
       | The funny things about "modern AI workflow builders" is they
       | don't learn anything about n8n, which is universal and having a
       | solid design.
       | 
       | Examples of those failure systems, is SimStudio, just a joke
       | compared to n8n.
        
       | SKILNER wrote:
       | Is the UX of the name any indication of the UX of the product?
        
         | lukaslevert wrote:
         | n8n is a unique name that for now I think works to
         | differentiate them. Time will tell if they keep it.
        
       | Izmaki wrote:
       | Looks like a product you'd end up with if a few years back you
       | thought to yourself "how do I make a business combining AI and
       | pipelines?". I don't hate AI as such, I just don't love how it
       | has to be shoved into every product or tech imaginable these
       | days.
        
         | XCSme wrote:
         | Yeah, the title is misleading. I use it to automate non-AI
         | stuff too, and probably n8n was there before all the AI hype
         | too.
        
       | kfogel wrote:
       | Wow. This project was the cause of a very long and intense
       | discussion about mis-use of the term "open source". See
       | https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n/issues/40#issuecomment-5397146...
       | for details (lands mid-thread -- you might want to scroll back to
       | see the start, and if you read the whole thing to the end then
       | you deserve some sort of award!).
       | 
       | TL;DR: The author originally tried to call n8n "open source" but
       | while using a non-open-source license. After _much_ discussion,
       | he kept the license but stopped using the label  "open source",
       | to the relief of many people.
       | 
       | That half-decade-old thread is still what I point to when I want
       | to explain to someone why preserving the specificity of the term
       | "open source" matters.
        
       | throwaway7783 wrote:
       | Did something new happen here? Almost feels like an ad for n8n.
       | This product has been there for a while.
        
         | XCSme wrote:
         | I just found about it a few weeks ago, and it worked
         | surprisingly well for me, and I'm happy I stumbled upon it.
         | 
         | I submitted it, seeing that it was not discussed recently,
         | maybe it's useful to anyone else.
         | 
         | I using the self-hosted version.
        
       | MattDaEskimo wrote:
       | I've always found that these no-code workflow builders fail to
       | hit the right abstraction - especially when new paradigms are
       | added.
        
         | XCSme wrote:
         | This is not no-code.
         | 
         | It allows you to write custom nodes with arbitrary code, but
         | also connect them to existing integrations. Also, for each
         | connection you can transform/select the data using JavaScript.
        
       | hypefi wrote:
       | Tried it, but in an age where AI does a lot of the work in
       | coding, I think just using code to automate things is better than
       | using n8n, the visual aspect though of the AI agents nodes,
       | chains and workflows is the one thing that is interesting in n8n
        
       | m3kw9 wrote:
       | It would be nice if these sites started off with a usable demo
       | right away, even if it's on rails. Reading all the technical
       | stuff and having to figure it out that way is very inefficient.
        
       | sa-code wrote:
       | Is this an ad? Can you buy upvotes for HN?
        
         | XCSme wrote:
         | It's not an ad, the original title I submitted it with was
         | different. I added it because I discovered it a few weeks ago,
         | and I love the self-hosted version, very polished and well
         | documented.
        
       | photon_garden wrote:
       | We've been using n8n in production for the last few months at my
       | startup and are planning on migrating to regular backend code.
       | 
       | Pros:
       | 
       | - Good observability. It's handy that they track all executions
       | and let you see when workflows run.
       | 
       | - Usable for non-technical people.
       | 
       | - They've had all the integrations we needed.
       | 
       | Cons:
       | 
       | - Implementing parallel execution for async parts of the workflow
       | is complicated and flaky.
       | 
       | - Pricing is expensive for the hosted version.
       | 
       | - Version control is bad.
       | 
       | - If you have engineering capacity, it's faster and simpler to
       | write some more backend code if you already have a backend.
        
       | Jefro118 wrote:
       | How do people integrate steps on websites/web scraping into their
       | larger workflows? I'm looking to try and integrate my own browser
       | RPA tool [1] into n8n but I'm not sure how useful it is.
       | 
       | [1] - https://browsable.app
        
       | fzysingularity wrote:
       | We (at https://vlm.run) use n8n internally for a lot of
       | automations and it's been great (Reddit/HN scraping), slack
       | automations, cron jobs for sales etc.
       | 
       | We also made a custom node for popular document/image/video ETL
       | jobs like document-to-markdown, audio/video transcriptions with
       | VLMs (Vision Language Models).
       | 
       | https://github.com/vlm-run/n8n-nodes-vlmrun
       | 
       | https://www.npmjs.com/package/@vlm-run/n8n-nodes-vlmrun/v/0....
        
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