[HN Gopher] N8n raises $180M
___________________________________________________________________
N8n raises $180M
Author : doppp
Score : 202 points
Date : 2025-10-09 09:19 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.n8n.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.n8n.io)
| BoredPositron wrote:
| 5000 n8n workflows that made me millions. 1 n8n workflow that
| made me 5k per hour...
|
| It's an okay product I appreciate that it's selfhosted with good
| documentation but they absolutely destroyed their brand with
| excessive affiliate marketing and now nothing of substance is
| left if you search for it anywhere.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| When I think of n8n I think of the n8n subreddit of people
| posting about how their workflow is broken and they lost all
| their customers and don't know how to make it work and the
| obvious solution is that if they had written actual software
| with tests, fallbacks, etc. this wouldn't have happened.
| narrator wrote:
| I have written some stuff with n8n and I think it's is better
| than most no code platforms because it's debuggable. For
| example, it keeps all the historical executions so you can
| see what happened when the workflows failed and what all the
| data going in and out of each component in the system was
| during the failed run. It also has real detailed error
| messages instead of just vague "An Error Occurred" popup
| boxes that don't provide any information. Also, it's
| different from most nocode platforms in that it is self-
| hostable and you can easily export and import programs from
| it and share them with other people.
| ekianjo wrote:
| If you want to something similar to n8n but with a
| professional tool, better use NiFi
| cap11235 wrote:
| Worth noting for NiFi you end up with a bunch of
| integrations built-in via https://camel.apache.org/ which
| makes it easy to plug into some small portion of a task
| and then expand.
| havefunbesafe wrote:
| That subreddit is the new r/dropshipping. I joined to see
| what fun tooling people were building, and I found it mostly
| populated with people attempting to setup a "business" with a
| single feature solution.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| It was a giant disappointment to me as well. I guess it's
| reasonable that people want something for nothing otherwise
| the lottery wouldn't make any money. But it is rather
| unfortunate that something that could be otherwise a cool
| community of people making automations is instead just get
| rich quick schemes. I suppose we could all try building a
| n8n community that is not focused on get rich quick
| schemes. But tbh anything I need automated is far easier in
| python especially when all the connectors in n8n that you
| may not know the particular python library for (e.g., some
| Reddit comment aggregator) you can easily convince Claude
| code to generate for you.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| They've been growing exponentially the last couple years
| because of affiliate marketing in large part
| monkeydust wrote:
| Any more details on how they made this work for them? Hard to
| pull off.
| cinericius wrote:
| Is it hard to pull off? Give people a cut of the revenue
| from new paying customers who first visit by clicking their
| referral link. Everyone else does the work for you, but you
| lose control of the brand as people who only care about
| making a quick buck use your name to spam low-quality
| videos and medium articles.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| Have a good product and then pay people a percentage when
| they sell it on your behalf. Works amazingly in some
| niches. I personally paid out affiliates around $1m for my
| SaaS
| anticorporate wrote:
| This.
|
| I like n8n. It feels a little less rough around the edges for
| visual coding than something like huggin or nodered. The
| documentation is good, but finding examples and things like
| that offsite is impossible.
| shiandow wrote:
| I'm currently dealing with some of the fallout of their
| marketing, could you explain a bit better what you mean? It was
| good but isn't any more?
| iyn wrote:
| Can you share some examples of the workflows that you had
| success with?
| kamranjon wrote:
| I'm just wondering if anyone that is closer to this space could
| shed some light on if this $2.5B valuation seems more or less
| accurate? I have played around with n8n - I just didn't know if
| it was ubiquitous/profitable. $180m round seemed pretty huge but
| maybe it's really a unicorn?
| binarymax wrote:
| There is no accurate valuation in this space.
| helsinki wrote:
| I built a GitHub-native coding / review agent that outperforms
| CodeRabbit (by a lot), and it only took me like two hundred
| hours. There are a few of us using it at work, meanwhile
| CodeRabbit is valued at $550M.
| dpflan wrote:
| Do you have paying customers? Putting money into customer
| acquisition and retention is where a lot of money can go
| versus R&D.
| erredois wrote:
| They seem to be pushing their message now as an easy way to
| integrate AI to workflows.
| nikanj wrote:
| $180m seeds make sense if you remember to say AI lots. See
| Thinking Machines for example.
| cap11235 wrote:
| Add a sprinkle of "quantum" in to get an extra 100M, too. I
| am profoundly disgusted by the phrase "quantum ML". That's
| not a thing one can vaguely point to (or its just not a thing
| period), and of course they never define it.
| bix6 wrote:
| > Founded in 2019, n8n helps companies automate repetitive
| computing tasks. As of March, it had more than 230,000 active
| users and reported annual recurring revenue of over $40
| million. The focus for the fresh funding will be on expanding
| its engineering capabilities and hiring.
|
| $40M rev makes this a 62.5x rev multiple. AI has been around
| 40x lately so it's a bit high but it sounds like there was
| competition to lead and those are March numbers so it's
| probably about on par.
|
| Personally I find these multiples absurd but big VC needs to
| put money somewhere and AI is the new SaaS so here we are.
|
| > The Series C comes less than a year after a $60 million
| Series B, which valued the German group at a reported $350
| million.
|
| That's a huge step up so maybe their growth numbers are that
| good.
|
| https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/ai-agent-startup-n8n-lan...
| phrotoma wrote:
| What is this thing? IFTTT?
| tom1337 wrote:
| As far as I used it (which was for like 15minutes) it's like
| Zapier but with deeper customizability and you can self host
| it.
| Deukhoofd wrote:
| It's basically a piece of software for doing visual programming
| where workflows can be triggered by events (webhooks, web
| calls, and a bunch of other things). Has a self-hosting option
| which is quite nice.
| sharpfuryz wrote:
| More like an actor engine than IFTTT, a simple and good tool
| that can simplify workflows like "daily export data from
| HubSpot to Google spreadsheet, then send emails."
| yuvadam wrote:
| an MLM scheme
| nomilk wrote:
| 147k stars and currently the 38th most starred repo on all of
| GitHub [0, 1]. Seems odd that a project has so many stars yet is
| largely unfamiliar to much of HN (corrections appreciated).
|
| I asked an LLM if there's ways to detect suspicious starring
| activity (e.g. if stars were purchased). It suggested checking
| the project's star history [2] (doesn't appear suspicious).
|
| It also suggested the stars to issues ratio. n8n has 147k:6k
| (about 25:1) compared to, say, rails with 57k stars and 18k
| issues (about 3:1).
|
| I haven't looked deeply into n8n (is it 'no-code' for building
| agents?). I just see hype and am default skeptical.
|
| [0] https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n
|
| [1] https://github.com/EvanLi/Github-
| Ranking/blob/master/Top100/...
|
| [2] https://www.star-history.com/#n8n-io/n8n&Date
| jychang wrote:
| It got viral on Tiktok of all places a while back, so I'm not
| surprised at the number of stars.
| nomilk wrote:
| Surprised there's much overlap between users of Tiktok and
| GitHub, but perhaps I'm just old :)
| krapp wrote:
| Why wouldn't there be an overlap? Over a billion people use
| TikTok, it would be weird if that set didn't include most
| of the people who use Github.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| They been around for a long time (I was using it back in 2020 i
| think) but now they are just getting hype by AI. Its not relly
| AI. Its a no-code platform that has a lot of connections to
| tools and a few AI nodes. So you can build automations that
| have a step that uses an AI. But really its more a no code
| platform for automation (maybe no code is wrong wors and more
| like visual programming)
| abrookewood wrote:
| Yep, this is my recollection. I'm I remember correctly, they
| used to be "Like Yahoo Pipes" or something similar. They seem
| to have (quite successfully) latched onto the AI hype and are
| now regarded as a visual AI building tool
| vbezhenar wrote:
| n8n is low code platform to build various applications. We're
| using it for some kind of prototyping, when manager builds a
| prototype backend and then we use it as a starting point to
| implement a proper backend.
|
| I wouldn't call it "nocode". You need to get pretty techincal
| to implement useful functionality. You need to write SQL, you
| need to extract data from XML or JSON, you need to describe
| HTTP queries and parse responses. You're doing it in a GUI
| editor, connecting nodes, so it looks like a block diagram with
| ordinary nodes, conditional splits, loops and so on.
|
| For me, personally, it looks very weird and I wouldn't use this
| product. It's much easier to just write code. But some people
| are afraid of code and will jump over all kind of hoops to
| pretend they're not programming.
| janober wrote:
| Definitely, no stars have been bought, and none will ever be.
| It would go literally against everything we stand for and one
| of our core values, "Act with Integrity".
| nomilk wrote:
| Well done, you earned them :)
|
| (sorry for doubting)
| janober wrote:
| Thanks a lot!
|
| And all fine. I know there is a lot of that going on out
| there. So, I can not blame you at all.
| murukesh_s wrote:
| Its all over youtube. Its the de-facto way to build agents if
| you are searching youtube. Just try "Create agent" and see.
|
| https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/agent-builder
|
| The openai agent builder launched 2 days ago is basically
| inspired by n8n. n8n when launched wasn't an AI tool, it was
| inspired from numerous enterprise integration tools like
| Mulesoft, which were inspired by dozens of other enterprise
| tools, some launched even decades ago.
|
| If you haven't tried you should check it out. Its an amazing
| way for no-coders to build something substantial in a
| relatively quick manner.
| marktolson wrote:
| I represent one of those stars. N8N is an amazing system. I use
| it daily and have seen incredible progress made consistently
| over the past few years. Currently my team use it for
| processing millions of workflows each year on a very small
| server and it hasn't cost us a cent so I would give them more
| than 1 star if I could. I wouldn't build a new system without
| it to be honest.
| mekster wrote:
| You could let your team mates to star as well.
| detaro wrote:
| n8n has come up here quite a bit and is one of the biggest
| projects in is niche, not sure why you think people would be
| particularly unfamiliar with it.
| primitivesuave wrote:
| N8n is _extremely_ popular among CS educators. I imagine at
| least a few thousand of those stars are from students who
| learned to code with n8n.
| detaro wrote:
| interesting! In what kind of contexts/classes is it used?
| user3113 wrote:
| I made something similar to n8n. its not visual but it helps you
| automate things. https://rapidforge.io/. Despite they are visual
| they also have learning curve. I think most of these tools are
| great but I feel they are overvalued. Its my take I might be
| wrong.
| viraptor wrote:
| Shame it's not FOSS. There's still https://www.windmill.dev/
| though.
| bsnnkv wrote:
| This comment got me digging, n8n actually has a pretty good
| post-open source license[1] - I'm glad to see more successful
| examples of this sort of licensing in the wild
|
| [1]: https://docs.n8n.io/sustainable-use-license/
| poly2it wrote:
| It's great and all that their business strategy is working
| out, but anyone looking to use a FOSS solution isn't going to
| care at all.
|
| This is basically just allowing self-hosting of a third-
| party's cloud, which is an improvement over traditional SaaS,
| but shouldn't dilute the FOSS label.
| bsnnkv wrote:
| > but shouldn't dilute the FOSS label
|
| This is such a strange thing to post in response to a link
| which states:
|
| > Although n8n's source code is available under the
| Sustainable Use License, according to the Open Source
| Initiative (OSI), open source licenses can't include
| limitations on use, so we do not call ourselves open
| source.
| poly2it wrote:
| I don't think it's strange at all. These licenses
| obviously have rhetoric reminiscent of FOSS licenses.
| These companies just don't want to call their technology
| proprietary.
| bsnnkv wrote:
| I'm not sure what else you and others who make these
| kinds of comments are looking for from projects like
| these who are already explicitly and clearly stating that
| they are _not_ FOSS projects
|
| It's as if you don't want source code to be available _at
| all_ unless it's under a FOSS license
| cmsj wrote:
| Surely the goal is to ensure that there is no erosion of
| FOSS as a concept?
|
| The existence and growth of FOSS is something that has
| happened as a result of considerable advocacy, and while
| its broad success has become somewhat self-sustaining,
| there will never not be the risk of a slide into more
| single-corporation-friendly "source available" realms.
|
| It's not a bad thing to push for "source available" to be
| considered as not going far enough, and to not let it
| supplant FOSS through purely pragmatic concerns.
| bsnnkv wrote:
| > there will never not be the risk of a slide into more
| single-corporation-friendly "source available" realms
|
| There is something off about this to me in a world where
| FOSS exists in it's present form primarily to the
| outsized benefit of hyperscalers and entrenched
| incumbents
|
| There was a post on another forum earlier this week on
| this same broad topic which resonated deeply with me, as
| someone (who like most of the US population) is a layoff
| and a medical emergency away from ruin:
|
| > When I started getting interested in open source, I had
| problems like unreliable software, the inability to
| inspect or improve it, limited experience with
| collaborating. Open source solved those, but now my most
| pressing problem is that the excellent software I use is
| undermaintained and outright abandoned because the
| creators can't afford to keep donating time to it. Open
| source has been a process for solving problems, not the
| end goal. If it's not capable of solving problems, it's
| time for new approaches.[1]
|
| [1]: https://lobste.rs/c/d4kmra
| Lutger wrote:
| Look at the other comments, one states "Oh, it's open
| (core) source."
|
| Not exactly the fault of n8n, but the confusion is there
| to clear up. That is all I'm reading into it.
| JimDabell wrote:
| > Not exactly the fault of n8n
|
| They did start out by incorrectly calling themselves
| open-source, but to their credit they stopped doing that
| and have been very clear ever since.
| adastra22 wrote:
| They only added that qualification after huge community
| backlash. Last time I looked they still called themselves
| open source despite that claim.
| greenavocado wrote:
| Sir, this is a VC forum for people that are trying to make
| _money_
| turnsout wrote:
| Too real
| sixtyj wrote:
| And I thought that we do everything for prestige /s
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| So, a forum full of people who will be very much affected
| by restrictions on commercial use?
| blitzar wrote:
| How much equity did they kick back to the devs from the open
| source era?
| bsnnkv wrote:
| As much as I appreciate a good snarky comment, this is a
| good reminder for contributors to be thoughtful about the
| licenses under which they contribute code to projects
|
| > Nowhere in any common open license does anyone promise to
| keep working on their project, much less on particular
| terms. Any contributor to a permissively-licensed project
| can license their next contribution however they want. Any
| steward of a copyleft project with rights to all
| contributions can, too. Much as you could pick an Apache-
| licensed project, fork it, and sell your enhanced version
| under proprietary terms, a project steward can share new
| work under new terms, as well.
|
| >
|
| > None of this changes the license terms for old releases.
| Prior versions with MIT or Apache 2 or MPLv2 or what have
| you in the LICENSE file remain available to use, share, and
| change under those terms. That includes forking. We see
| that every time a going-forward relicensing spawns a new
| one. The reason the new license terms matter for new
| releases is that those new license terms apply to the diff
| between the old release and the new one.[1]
|
| [1]: https://writing.kemitchell.com/2023/09/23/Two-Kinds-
| Relicens...
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| "post-open source license"
|
| That's a terrible reimagining, subtlying implying that open-
| source is old and past it.
|
| It's a pre-open source license. They've not quite made the
| bar.
| cap11235 wrote:
| It's a license that tastes like the usual embrace, extend,
| extinguish.
| bsnnkv wrote:
| > subtlying implying that open-source is old and past it
|
| It's really not that deep; U2 and Mogwai exist in the same
| timeline, in the same shared canon of contemporary music.
|
| > It's a pre-open source license
|
| This statement is strictly ahistorical; the earliest
| software licenses which made source code available to
| everyone and included restrictions on redistribution and/or
| use date back to the late 1990s[1][2].
|
| You can certainly _try_ to make the case that these are the
| same as the Xerox license, but I don't think it would be a
| very strong one.
|
| [1]: https://spdx.org/licenses/Aladdin.html
|
| [2]: https://spdx.org/licenses/QPL-1.0.html
| sneak wrote:
| The term you are looking for is "source available" license.
| bsnnkv wrote:
| Maybe we can solve the "free" vs "libre" vs "open" debate
| first
| raffael_de wrote:
| Are you referring to the license? Cause the source seems to be
| open as in "available on GitHub".
| viraptor wrote:
| That's not what open source means. Open source licences are
| well defined and listed here https://opensource.org/licenses
|
| With extra restrictions, n8n is at most "source available".
| raffael_de wrote:
| Okay, you're referring to the license. Got it.
| dahart wrote:
| Open source does mean source available to many people,
| especially the non-programmer lay-public, no matter how
| much OSI and people who adopt OSI's definition dislike it,
| c.f. the dictionary https://www.merriam-
| webster.com/dictionary/open-source
|
| (And BTW I _like_ OSI's definition!)
|
| Instead of claiming the words "open source" always mean
| OSI's definition, it'd be better to clarify up front that
| you're talking about OSI's "Open Source Definition", which
| is (effectively) a trademark or term of art and does not
| preempt all possible definitions of the phrase. (Special
| note that the words "open source" do not always refer to
| code.)
|
| The turf battle over the words free and open seems silly to
| me, with both sides arguing that the other side's word
| literally means something other than they intend. Stallman
| has argued that open means source available, and OSI has
| argued that free means price. Both sides are right, and
| both sides are stubborn too.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| Source available but you can't use it professionally or
| commercially doesn't feel open source at all to me, and I
| disapprove of trying to weasel word around that.
|
| Rather than clarify confusion & raise a real and
| important distinction, this post carries water for
| obfuscation and confusion: if people aren't clear the
| answer isn't to loosen the definition, it's to make the
| distinction clearer.
| cmsj wrote:
| I would argue completely the opposite, and that we
| actually have a very clear set of descriptors available
| to us, each of which is a subset of the following ones:
|
| * Free Software - meets FSF's four freedoms
|
| * Open Source - meets OSI's definition
|
| * Source Available - you can read the source code
| Lutger wrote:
| Honestly, I never heard of people being confused about
| open source like this. Either you know about open source
| and then you know exactly what it means, or you know
| nothing about it at all. At least, that has been my
| experience. Open source, FOSS and source available are
| quite well defined and their definitions commonly known
| amongst anyone with even the slightest clue about
| software licenses.
| kristopherleads wrote:
| Some might argue this confusion is intentional and
| injected by people trying to obfuscate that their fav is
| in fact not open source.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| In my view this is little more than FUD.
| nextworddev wrote:
| What's with the windmill plug? It's not even the same cateogry
| testycool wrote:
| I also prefer Windmill. A category they both fall into is
| workflow automation. n8n is useful when collaborating with
| non-coding colleagues.
| nextworddev wrote:
| Not really, they serve completely different personas. Enjoy
| your downvote
| brunoqc wrote:
| windmill is open-core.
| kristopherleads wrote:
| Is open-core a sub-genre of post-hardcore? I generally prefer
| midwest emo, to be honest.
| moralestapia wrote:
| If we're being strict, Windmill is also not FOSS.
|
| This is not an argument in favor of n8n.
| JimDabell wrote:
| If you clone the Windmill source from GitHub and build it,
| that's AGPL.
|
| If you enable the enterprise feature flag or use the Docker
| image, the result is source available.
|
| I think it's fair to call Windmill open source. It's using
| the open core model for commercialisation. Just because you
| publish open source it doesn't obligate you to make _all_ the
| code you write open source.
| k__ wrote:
| A few days ago I looked into n8n and saw that people are
| switching to node-red.
|
| Are these projects comparable?
| kristopherleads wrote:
| Full disclosure, I'm incredibly biased here as I'm a DevRel
| at FlowFuse, but there's a reason I joined them instead of
| n8n. On the surface they're comparable, but I think Node-RED
| (and FlowFuse) is a better solution for a lot of reasons:
|
| First off, Node-RED handles real-time event data much, much
| better in my experience. Because of where Node-RED came from,
| there's much better support for IoT, MQTT, Modbus, OPC UA,
| edge protocols, etc. n8n is much more limited in this regard,
| and the fact that the Node-RED and FlowFuse community has
| literally thousands of custom nodes makes the calculus pretty
| clear.
|
| I also think that FlowFuse/Node-RED has better integration of
| AI workloads. In theory n8n is designed around AI, but it
| treats it the same way OpenAI's AgentKit does - as sort of
| opaque connections. FlowFuse/Node-RED instead treats it as an
| actual message payload (both in terms of how you connect to
| the APIs and how you interact with what's generated), so
| instead of throwing your request into the void and hoping for
| the best, you can control every minute part of the flow.
|
| That also makes for much more transparent debugging and
| visual data flow - the whole idea of these low-code
| environments is to give you the same control as high-code
| without the headache. Abstracting that away too much gives
| you less control, which is sort of the antithesis of this
| approach.
|
| Like I said though, SUPER biased here.
| cap11235 wrote:
| I'm not legally biased similarly (work in finance), and I
| prefer NodeRED. To me, the black box thing is very
| significant in the feel of using the tool. When I work on a
| N8N workflow, it feels like I'm chaining gmail filters.
| Where as NodeRED, I can mentally map that better to what is
| actually being run, and so feels more like using ComfyUI's
| custom node capability. I feel like N8N wants to be no-
| code, where as NodeRED is very much low-code and embraces
| that, which I find to be the right balance for me for
| control vs convenience.
| kristopherleads wrote:
| Yeah, exactly! What's so funny to me is that people who
| think they want no-code really don't want no-code.
| Because no-code is built for that - but even novices in
| coding will really quickly outstrip a no-code native
| environment, whereas low-code will scale with your
| learning,
|
| No-code: "I don't need code, this is so easy!" 2 weeks
| later "I wish I had access to literally any code system
| to make this work."
|
| Low-code: "I don't need code, this is so easy!" 2 weeks
| later "Oh awesome I can actually use code here!"
| spogbiper wrote:
| Compare the workflows/templates shared by each community:
|
| https://flows.nodered.org/
|
| https://n8n.io/workflows/
| CodeCompost wrote:
| Can you give me more information about your experience with it?
| cube2222 wrote:
| Kudos to the n8n team! Seems like the focus is increasingly
| shifting to AI.
|
| Question to folks who've used n8n extensively, I'm curious, what
| are your experiences with n8n, and how much does it end up being
| a web of verbose "visual python" in practice?
|
| I'm very much biased here and have a vested interest, because
| I've been working on a new product not far from this space, but
| much more oriented at technical users (platform engineers,
| primarily, see [0] and [1] for a shameless plug, not released
| yet), but really, I'm curious about what experiences folks have
| had here, and what your main issues with it were, esp. if you
| used it in a platform/devops engineering role, or maybe why you
| decided _not_ to use it.
|
| [0]: https://spacelift.io/flows
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZHGg1QIAQk
| lawnchair wrote:
| Using another company's funding announcement to shill your own
| is lame.
| blitzar wrote:
| Sure, but it is (nearly) the entire purpose of this forum.
| adastra22 wrote:
| What gives you that impression?
| bix6 wrote:
| Ever notice all the YC hiring / launch announcements?
| This is literally an advertising / jobs board for them.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Not on someone else's post/announcement. That is bad
| form.
| bix6 wrote:
| All is fair in Love and PR
| adastra22 wrote:
| Absolutely not. That's a good way to get yourself banned,
| and also a good way to make sure I never use your
| product.
| knowitnone3 wrote:
| what's lame about it? I read the comments specifically for
| alternative tools. Often times, commenters provide links to
| other tools and nobody has ever complained...until you came
| along
| hirako2000 wrote:
| n8n in my experience using it for 2 years now, and compared to
| similar solutions as there are many doing quite the same thing:
| it is just a very good product. It's stable. It has a gazillion
| integrations out of the box and is architectured as a module
| system so it's easy to create your own. It is very community
| centric, with community workflows and also integration modules
| people kindly publish on GitHub.
|
| Oh, it's open (core) source. And while certain (just a couple
| of) enterprise features should have been made open to qualify
| as being called open source, it's very close to that. Most
| powerful features are open, ready to self host, modify and make
| your own.
|
| Does it end up driving webs of python partials forming apps.
| Absolutely. Does it scale ? It does. Do complex flow remain
| maintainable? As a coder I prefer to maintain a repo of code
| than visual elements made of snippets. But, the critical
| advantage is productivity, for simple flows the community
| intelligence solves everything so you can get an operational
| set of valuable solutions within hours, even minutes once
| proficient with the interface. Another factor is, you can
| deploy pilot flow acting as applications, test them with
| production data, and make that live with the press of a button
| once pilot testing is done. With a code project you would need
| a robust and well polished cicd pipeline to get that.
|
| The limit or cons to me is a logic and compute heavy solution
| just isn't a fit to run on an n8n platform, scaling n8n just
| isn't as intuitive as scaling pure application component that
| do one thing.
|
| An example you may have a cpu heavy node, and a memory heavy
| node. It makes scaling the whole instance very inefficient.
| Scaling memory of a dedicated memory intensive application and
| scaling compute for the compute intensive component simply is
| far more optimal.
|
| If resource cost is not significant relative to the value of
| your flows then just scale a self hosted n8n and you only need
| to digest having to maintain, following your analogy, a "nest
| of pythons".
|
| Note: n8n sadly only supports python or JavaScript for custom
| code nodes, would have been nicer had they built a polyglot
| runtime instead. That's however more than what every other flow
| platforms let users do.
| cube2222 wrote:
| Wow, thanks a lot for this extensive response, appreciate it
| a lot!
| turnsout wrote:
| This is so helpful, thank you.
|
| I've been evaluating n8n as a way to build things quickly for
| clients, but I do wonder about what happens when they want to
| turn the automation into a full app. I wish there was a
| first-party way to export an n8n workflow as a plain Python
| script or set of scripts.
|
| Have you ever had to migrate a project from n8n to code?
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| > _Oh, it 's open (core) source. And while certain (just a
| couple of) enterprise features should have been made open to
| qualify as being called open source, it's very close to
| that._
|
| It is absolutely _not_ open source.
|
| The "Fair Source" license that n8n invented has two related
| qualifications that make it not open source:
|
| > _You may use or modify the software only for your own
| internal business purposes or for non-commercial or personal
| use._
|
| It's not open source if you can't use it professionally or
| sell work derived from it [ed: comments have correctly called
| out that this is _not_ the deal, thank you]. There 's no
| chance this license or anything like it is ever going to be
| an OSI approved open source license.
| https://opensource.org/licenses
| Lutger wrote:
| "Internal business purposes" can be professional right? Not
| saying its an open source license as defined by OSI, just
| that this license permits the most likely professional use
| (internal automation).
| btown wrote:
| Source Available would be a better descriptor, and with its
| prevalence in game dev I'm surprised it's not more commonly
| used in the broader tech community.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Yeah, it's the proper standard term:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software
|
| I also find it weird how little use it gets. Possibly a
| side-effect of true open source having been more popular
| to the point of source available being historically
| unknown.
| xienze wrote:
| > It's not open source if you can't use it professionally
| or sell work derived from it.
|
| Does anyone _really_ use these low/no-code platforms to
| create products? I was always under the impression that
| you'd primarily use something like this for "internal
| business purposes" i.e. little internal utilities that you
| can't justify spending serious development time on. Which
| the license lets you do.
| adastra22 wrote:
| I would've. We are rolling out one solution instead due
| to this.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| This reminds me of a wonderful definition of ownership:
| You only own something if you can buy and sell it. See:
| Kindle books/movies "bought" on Apple TV/etc.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| Does n8n have an app store for such products?
|
| Apparently there is a total market of Ableton addons[1]
| (for example) sold on separate markets. I would call such
| addons (or packs) "low code".
|
| So there is definitely a _potential_ market for "add
| ons". But does n8n a) support that and b) encourage such
| markets for _money_?
|
| [1] https://www.ableton.com/en/packs/
| tomwhipple wrote:
| As a software engineer I find it cumbersome and frustrating
| to use. When something doesn't work it can be difficult to
| see the true cause of the error. That said, those who are
| slightly less technical like analysts or PMs are able to put
| together reasonable POC solutions relatively quickly. (Though
| it remains to be seen how well this holds up when those POCs
| become business critical)
|
| Further nitpick: Their Python implementation is based on WSAM
| so libraries that require C compilation won't work.
|
| However if this funding let's them integrate a Claude-Code
| like tool, they'll have an amazing product.
| sneak wrote:
| n8n is not open core/open source. it is not free software at
| all.
| portaouflop wrote:
| It's close enough for me
| SafeDusk wrote:
| Building close to this space[0] too but starting with low code
| instead of no code. Still wondering in node-based GUI is the
| way to go, another alternative is something like Lovable where
| it is entirely chat based.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/aperoc/toolkami
| mattfrommars wrote:
| I have come to realize these drag and drop no code solution are
| good for low complexity solution. If project scales, it is better
| to write code.
|
| I kid you not, we use another no code solution at work and it was
| originally meant for PM to create workflows. It came to us the
| devs to make it and we resent daily working on it.
|
| Our life would have been much similar if our workflows had been
| written in code.
| hannofcart wrote:
| PM (at the next sprint meeting): "So, Matt, for your next story
| here's this 48000 line code base that I vibe coded for the new
| vendor interop feature you said would be difficult to implement
| correctly.
|
| Of course this is a standalone page written in some language
| that I forget. I think Cursor mentioned some animal name...
| anyway. Can you please put this into our product please?"
| blitzar wrote:
| "I haven't run or tested it yet, but I am sure it will work.
| At worst it will just need a few tweaks, an hour or two max."
| an0malous wrote:
| I wish I had gone into medicine like my parents wanted
| PyWoody wrote:
| I think about going to law school more with every passing
| day.
| inhumantsar wrote:
| Just imagine all the vibe coded nonsense your clients
| would bring to the table. Billable hours sure, but still.
| edoceo wrote:
| Similar experience. Now for these little automation needs I'm
| have some LLM write most of the code. Then fix it a bit, then
| pack into a container - one container image per automation
| task. Some are in JS, some python, some PHP, one is a nasty
| shell script with an obscure dependency.
|
| They get a readme, compose.yaml and git repo.
|
| This has worked for set-it-and-forget-it experience.
|
| I tried n8n but for some automation needs, it just wasn't
| flexible and/or I'd have to build a custom module. My choice
| was custom code in n8n or custom code in whatever.
| kristopherleads wrote:
| Well that really comes down to how much control the solution
| actually gives you, right? I'm a DevRel at FlowFuse, so yes -
| biased - but something like Node-RED can give you wild
| complexity or pretty simple flows. I think where other
| solutions miss the mark is in trying to abstract control away
| too readily for the sake of simplicity and polish.
| simlevesque wrote:
| It's pronounced Nathan ?
| Deukhoofd wrote:
| It was originally called Nodemation, but the creator thought it
| was too long, so he shortened it to that, pronounced n-eight-n.
|
| https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n?tab=readme-ov-file#what-does-n...
| shrx wrote:
| What a stupid naming convention, I'm not surprised it's
| something coming from the javascript ecosystem. Nodemation
| would have been perfectly fine.
| JimDabell wrote:
| This doesn't come from the JavaScript ecosystem. Numeronyms
| have been in use in the computer industry since before
| JavaScript existed. "i18n" ("internationalisation") has
| been in use since the mid-80s, for instance.
| elAhmo wrote:
| That is a lot of money! Seems like a great product, but for
| something that there is plenty of alternatives or players in a
| similar space, it is hard to see how this money wont be spent to
| just increase sales / AI push, which is not necessarily a good
| thing.
| kristopherleads wrote:
| It's also just not where the product needs to go. When a lot of
| users get frustrated and jump back to high-code environments (h
| ttps://www.reddit.com/r/n8n/comments/1mcm9d2/why_i_left_n8n...)
| , that points to high-friction and not enough control.
| Iterating in just AI for AI's sake isn't going to fix that.
| cap11235 wrote:
| Behold the cargo cult. DAGs are not new at all, and N8N
| doesn't haven't any "special sauce". Its AI integration is
| kind of a joke, since its similar to what my phone tacked on
| as "features": summarization and translation and visual style
| editing. For serious usage in an ML system, you want
| gradients and experiments to be run, and N8N is not that. It
| feels like systemd got reimplemented with a GUI and a lot of
| gaffer tape.
| kristopherleads wrote:
| That's how I explained it to someone else recently - a lot
| of solutions on the hype train right now feel like they're
| made with duct tape and popsicle sticks.
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| For me the Math isn't Mathing.
|
| Hiring 50 fairly well paid developers is roughly $15M/year, maybe
| more if one insists on SV compensation which always seem a bit
| absurd.
|
| $240M total funding is a lot of money. They've only been around
| for about 5 years and probably didn't start out fully staffed.
|
| So they're basically covered for the next 10-15 years even if
| they had zero sales ?
|
| Having 500 employees won't speed things up and would actually
| slow down development - so why so much funding?
|
| Or who actually waits that long? The first version of Windows 10
| was released about 10 years ago and soon will be EOL.
|
| I feel software investment is like some oil ETFs -- there is more
| investment money than the thing to invest in...
| hu3 wrote:
| Since their betting on AI integration, I'm guessing a good part
| of their spending will be on GPUs/Cloud.
|
| Specially if they go the PaaS/SaaS AI route.
| hobofan wrote:
| The AI integrations are bring-your-own-key, so they have 0
| GPU/AI-Cloud spend (outside of their dev/test work).
|
| For their Business (self-hosted) plan, they have essentially
| 0 cost per customer.
| riku_iki wrote:
| what about marketing and sales?
| JimDabell wrote:
| Once you hit product-market fit for a SaaS, engineering becomes
| a smaller proportion of your spending and you start hiring and
| spending a lot more on sales and marketing. If you know you can
| earn more than a dollar for every dollar you spend on customer
| acquisition, you throw as much money as you can at acquiring
| customers.
| hobofan wrote:
| n8n is already very obviously marketing + sales driven, which
| is where there valuation originates and where the money will
| go to.
|
| Of course that valuation makes sense if you've seen the
| insane prices they charge.
| bix6 wrote:
| This money will be gone in 2-3 years! They say engineering but
| I bet half goes to marketing.
|
| > The focus for the fresh funding will be on expanding its
| engineering capabilities and hiring.
|
| https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/ai-agent-startup-n8n-lan...
| rustoo wrote:
| This is such great news.
|
| My question to non-tech folks who used n8n, especially marketers:
| what has been your experience with n8n? Did it help you automate
| creative things like blogs, newsletters, white papers, etc? What
| tips would you give about n8n?
| foundart wrote:
| Just participated in a hackathon where my team used n8n. We found
| it didn't have good connectors for getting data from Kinesis
| streams or Slack. Given the abbreviated timeline of the hackathon
| we ended up simulating the Kinesis input and dropping the
| interactive Slack part of our project, which was unfortunate.
|
| I hope they spend a good bit of the $180M on building out their
| input connectors.
| skrtskrt wrote:
| Here come the HN comments from people that work at closed source
| companies or companies that profit off the free labor of open
| source devs, wailing and gnashing their teeth that it's not the
| purest form of open source blessed by Stallman himself and
| therefore is radioactive and doomed to fail.
| random3 wrote:
| Only here to reply. For context, I worked on open source while
| at a "closed source" company and founded a "closed source"
| company. I want to address at least a part of the open/closed
| pet peeve.
|
| The problem, in general is not about "unpure" OSS.
|
| The problem is "free riding" by slapping "open source"
| marketing without any real or meaningful open source
| contribution, nor any intent.
| echelon wrote:
| Fair source, open core, non-commercial, "do not compete with
| us" / "no reselling", and MAU/MRR caps are all better than
| closed source.
|
| We should be happy when companies do this.
| scosman wrote:
| Don't forget praising a completely closed competitors with zero
| sense of irony.
| seer wrote:
| While n8n is amazing for the odd office automation and giving
| semi-technical people an enormously powerful tool to get things
| done, it seems it can't really replace a real backend, and mostly
| because of the n8n team choices than any technology.
|
| We were trailing it and wanted to essentially switch our entire
| backend to it - and technically it seemed to be able to do the
| job, but their licensing turned out to not be a fit.
|
| For a moderately used app we very quickly burned through their
| "executions" that were allotted by our license - and that's where
| we host it ourselves, configuring and paying for the servers,
| load balancers, key value store and database, with its failovers
| and backups.
|
| So the license was to use it on top of all that, and even their
| highest enterprise license was cutting it close, and if you "run
| out" of these executions, the service just stops working ...
|
| And all of that would have been fair if it was hosted, but sounds
| ludicrous to me for something we self host.
|
| I think it is an incredible piece of tech, but just not suited
| for a dynamic startup, and once we spent the time to code up the
| alternative paths for our use cases, it no longer made sense to
| use n8n at all, as we mostly solved all the problems it was
| helping us with.
| jitl wrote:
| Surely you can negotiate an unlimited amount of executions?
| spwa4 wrote:
| Only by installing nodeRED.
| vini wrote:
| It seems crazy to me that they impose imaginary limits on the
| self-hosted version, you can have a server that can handle more
| executions, but the license won't allow it.
| Hobadee wrote:
| I can see an argument of "well it typically bogs down and
| stops being performant at X, and we don't want to get a bad
| rep because people abuse it, so we don't allow anything over
| X", but that should still be negotiable if you can show you
| have plenty of horsepower.
| scns wrote:
| I understood it as a total amount, not how many executions
| at the same time.
| Jalad wrote:
| Look I love giving people the benefit of the doubt, but
| that's not why this pricing model exits. It's because they
| want to capture a percentage of the value delivered, and
| the easiest way to do that it to charge by executions
| dylan604 wrote:
| People continue to use these limitations. A long time ago
| when multicore CPUs were new or even systems with multiple
| CPUs saw vendors charge higher fees to allow their software
| to run on more than one core/cpu. My first run in with this
| was transcoding software with the license running ~$5k per
| core. To them, it was a whole second computer since
| everything was single threaded, so they felt it was worth
| twice as much. All it took was for someone else to _not_
| charge per core and took away business for that sales model
| to go the way of the dodo.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| Huh? Isn't that oracle's business strategy in 2025, still?
|
| I mean my current role doesn't put me into these kinds of
| considerations anymore, but I didn't hear they've changed
| their ways - so I just thought that's still the way you pay
| for Oracle DB
| comprev wrote:
| Oracle was the first company I thought of who licensed
| per-CPU.
|
| Many moons ago I was a sysadmin at a company and first
| heard about their licensing strategy when sizing up some
| new multi-socket Opteron servers. First time I learned
| about per-CPU licensing.
| rkuodys wrote:
| Facing similar issue with monitoring part of executions. What
| is your solution if I may as - have you taken smth of the shelf
| and extended to your needs or did you built from the ground up
| everything?
| j45 wrote:
| It's an orchestration tool. Backends are a lot more than just
| orchestration.
|
| There are alternatives to n8n depending on your stack of what
| is being orchestrated. Node-red, and others have quietly
| existed for a very long time, similar to how n8n existed for a
| good while before being discovered by the AI world.
| Onavo wrote:
| Well there's always YC's n8n competitor
|
| https://www.activepieces.com/
|
| They are open core I think (MIT+enterprise features model)
| dvcoolarun wrote:
| Two days ago, with the launch of OpenAI's AgentKit, people were
| claiming that similar tools and startups would become obsolete.
|
| I think the pie is big enough for everyone to benefit.
|
| I haven't tried these agent-and-connector-based approaches yet --
| where should someone start to get a good grasp of this kind of
| automation?
| Towaway69 wrote:
| I doubt it, looking at the VCs involved, this is probably a
| pump & dump to have an exit to OpenAI. Hence also the strong
| repositioning towards AI - which n8n seemed to have done in
| this year.
| ishikawa wrote:
| What surprised me the most was to know the company is from
| Germany. That shows that with a good product you don't need
| necessarily to be in the US.
| nirav72 wrote:
| I've used n8n for local adhoc automation. They had a nice desktop
| version and had this neat option to export the flow and run it
| standalone. They got rid of the desktop version. Not sure if
| there is option to run standalone flows now without hosting the
| entire n8n app in a container.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| So what is the exit strategy? Sell to OpenAI or NVIDIA?
|
| Or will this become a white elephant too large too sell like
| Zalando?
|
| Whatever happened to IFTTT?
|
| Edit: It's a valuation of 2.5 Billion - hence my question. There
| is snowballs chance that they will ever be worth that much. They
| are SaaS and not consumer products. They have no side gig like
| amazon or google - they have a single product in a tight market.
| qrios wrote:
| > They are SaaS and not consumer products. They have no side
| gig like amazon or google - they have a single product in a
| tight market.
|
| Like Databricks with no consumer products, no side gig, single
| product, but 100 billion valuation[1]?
|
| [1]
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/sasirekhasubramanian/2025/10/07...
| Towaway69 wrote:
| Databricks collects data, does n8n collect data? I thought
| they sell compute for various visual desgned workflows? So
| data does not stay on premises or?
|
| Geniunely asking since I do wonder what their USP is and why
| it's worth 2.5B.
| qrios wrote:
| Databricks offers an engineering, management, ETL (focussed
| on data) platform as SaaS/PaaS. As far as I can see, this
| is what the revenue comes from.
|
| n8n offers an orchestration, integration, ETL platform as
| SaaS/PaaS (plus self-hosted).
|
| For many medium sized and enterprise companies such a
| service is as important as the data platform from
| Databricks. From my personal experience in a small EU-wide
| enterprise in finance sector, the budget for the data
| platform is in the lower 7digits/year. For automation and
| workflows multiple solutions in place. Some are outdated
| for years (on mainframes) or with an EoL in the next years
| (due to retirements in-house or at the datacenter
| provider).
|
| Since decades such companies externalize their own business
| logic - formally running on homegrown software - to SaaS
| vendors. Established workflows are quite often not able to
| integrate these kind of "modern" integration. REST?
| GraphQL? WebSocket? We speak SOAP and FTP!
|
| So, from my point of view n8n is a valid solution in a
| growing market.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| Is n8n pivot to AI perhaps them stepping away from that
| market? Or spreading themselves too thin?
|
| I don't know but their sudden heavy adaption of AI will
| have detrimental affects on their other business such as
| integration of less "sexy" basic services such as FTP and
| SOAP.
|
| I guess it all comes down to how well Claude and Co. work
| with integrating legacy systems based on priority
| protocols (in part). Because I assume that's the kind of
| systems that are coming up for retirement.
| tomasphan wrote:
| Question for n8n and other orchestration tool users: Why not use
| an LLM to vibe code the orchestration? Is it still hard to host
| or not mature enough? I tried n8n but found it easier and cheaper
| to have Claude code something and then throw it in docker as API
| that I could interact with. Tool integrations were also easy to
| vibe code. I am maybe more technical than the average n8n user?
| Not sure
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