N8n – Flexible AI workflow automation for technical teams

What's the safe alternative?

> 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.

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?

How would you compare it with activepieces.com? It’s also self hostable but OSS license.

It’s early days but check out Tracecat. I’ve been playing with it a bit and love it!

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.

n8n and Windmill are two very different tools.

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.

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.

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/

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?

Windmill is also not fully open source; there are major sections of it powering central features that are not released as free software.

Also, they require a CLA with copyright assignment so they can reuse your contributions in nonfree software. It’s always shady when companies do this.

The open source parts of Windmill are partially Apache and partially AGPL; there are some of us who additionally regard the AGPL as nonfree (because it’s really a EULA).

Indeed! Big fan..

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

n8n is a unique name that for now I think works to differentiate them. Time will tell if they keep it.

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”