17 ms·

n8n.io - A powerful workflow automation tool

237 points by sacrosanct 3y ago

reion 3y ago
I have been using n8n for over a year. I prefer it over popular Zapier as it gives me more flexibility and I am able to self host. It have its quirks that you learn about only when you work enough with it to look up solutions on community forums. The only thing I wouldn't recommend is their Cloud, it seams more buggy/unstable than my self hosted instance (more timeouts, probably to conserve shared resources). Still I would recommended to anyone looking for a cheap and open source alternative for Zapier.
- aliasxneo 3y ago
  I read the home page twice and struggled to figure out the use case. Is Zapier what it's typically compared to?
  - reion 3y ago
    In footer they have n8n vs Zapier and n8n vs Make pages, I guess other similar software would be IFTTT
    - grotorea 3y ago
      IFTTT is target more at personal usage while the others are more professional or more complex uses. n8n is, as the starting page, open source and self-hosted unlike those two.
      - commoner 3y ago
        n8n is source-available, not open source, because they restrict commercial use. They acknowledge this themselves: https://docs.n8n.io/choose-n8n/faircode-license/#is-n8n-open-source https://docs.n8n.io/choose-n8n/faircode-license/#is-n8n-open...
        grotorea 3y ago
        Thanks for the correction. The non-commercial aspect seems to be mostly directed at people trying to compete with them, not comercial users. > You may distribute the software or provide it to others only if you do so free of charge for non-commercial purposes. > You may use or modify the software only for your own internal business purposes or for non-commercial or personal use.
- JimDabell 3y ago
  > Still I would recommended to anyone looking for a cheap and open source alternative for Zapier. It’s not open source, it’s source available with commercial restrictions.
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    Right, you can run it yourself or pay n8n to run it. For purists the language matters, realistically for users it does not. You’re not locked into the SaaS platform is the point.
    - JimDabell 3y ago
      It’s not about being a purist, the difference was a $50k/yr hole in our budget for a license.
      - toomuchtodo 3y ago
        I assume because you were not running it for internal business only but were attempting to distribute or white label/SaaS it? Isn’t $50k about 3-4 months of one dev’s time (assuming fully loaded costs)? https://docs.n8n.io/choose-n8n/faircode-license/ https://docs.n8n.io/choose-n8n/faircode-license/
        JimDabell 3y ago
        > I assume because you were not running it for internal business only but were attempting to distribute or white label/SaaS it? Yes, we wanted our customers to be able to set up integrations themselves. We didn’t care about white labelling it, we just needed to a) modify it, b) self-host it, and c) use it commercially. Something that open source is ideal for. > Isn’t $50k about 3-4 months of one dev’s time (assuming fully loaded costs)? Yes but that means absolutely nothing if you don’t have the budget for it, or even if you do have the budget for it but there are more valuable things for your developers to work on, or if you do have the budget for it but it isn’t worth that much. In our case the value provided by n8n wasn’t anywhere near $50k/yr. And, more to the point, $50k/yr is $50k/yr more expensive than open source. It would have been worth using if it had been open source, but it wasn’t worth using at that price.
BaseballPhysics 3y ago
Anyone know how this compares to Huginn? I've built out some self hosted automation on Huginn and it works great once it's set up, but it's just a bit janky and difficult to use. And getting initial flows set up can be frustrating as the diagnostics aren't always great.
- tonyhb 3y ago
  RE. initial flows and diagnostics, I totally feel your pain. Part of the trouble with these systems is that they're too different from our average SDLC we have every day: - Write regular code - Test locally - Then deploy This is one of the key aspects we're fixing at https://www.inngest.com https://www.inngest.com — you can write regular TS (or Go, or Elixir) code as a function, create simple workflows, test locally, and have your functions automatically triggered by events. I still think there's room to go with improving automations here, and it's going to be an interesting few years as things develop.
  - cpursley 3y ago
    Elixir, really? That sounds amazing. So many of these tools are TS or Python only.
    - tonyhb 3y ago
      https://github.com/darwin67/ex_inngest https://github.com/darwin67/ex_inngest. We'll officially support this soon — it's written by one of our engineering team. The SDKs are lightweight, work in any language (we only support a few right now), and you can live-migrate long running functions across languages at any time. Long running state is automatically transferred across those SDKs. One of our foundational aspects is to make long running state, queues, events really easy, and that means we need to make multi-cloud and multi-lang migrations easy, too.
      - thelastbender12 3y ago
        Transferring state across sdks sound very cool, how do you achieve that? With all the workflows as code frameworks (like say, Temporal), this is what I imagine to be a shortcoming. With regular services + state in database implementations, you can query the database separately. While with a temporal workflow, you can't cleanly figure out where a particular workflow run is atm since the state is an append only stream of events?
bevenky 3y ago
As per its description on github: N8n is a Free and source-available fair-code licensed workflow automation tool. Not really OSS. Check out: https://www.activepieces.com/ https://www.activepieces.com/ MIT open source.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- JimDabell 3y ago
  Thanks for this. We had previously evaluated n8n a year ago and couldn’t use it because it wasn’t open source and they wanted to charge us $50k/yr. I wasn’t aware of ActivePieces, will check it out.
- jholman 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - bevenky 3y ago
    Its the latter. The project does good work so don't want to dump on the project. When one sees source code on Github, one assumes that its OSS, but its not and thats why I share that. The license is a fair code license and it says "is commercially restricted by its authors" and its not clear what commercially restricted really means here.
    - meiraleal 3y ago
      Thanks for doing this. I found n8n 2 days ago and was working on integrating it but just found that their "license" is too much. I was going to integrate it on my platform and sell their product as an affiliate but that license is a no-go.
  - jzb 3y ago
    Why the interrogation about pointing out that it’s not FOSS?
- commoner 3y ago
ugur2nd 3y ago
Locale is easy to install and difficult to add to the server.
Hnrobert42 3y ago
I really want to like these tools. Yet every time I consider Zapier or IFTTT, their integrations are a mile wide and an inch deep. I’ll see that they integrate with XYZ corp, but then it’s only with a handful of endpoints. Like say I wanted to gather attendees from my Google Meet, Zoom, Webex, etc and send them to salesforce. I’d look at Zapier and see they work with Google. Then I’d look for Google Meet and see there’s nothing there. I get that these connectors can only integrate with existing endpoints. I’m not criticizing. I’m just confused. How do people actually use these services?
- klysm 3y ago
  I find that these services are typically used to implement shitty half broken database replication. It’s obvious to anybody that’s worked on that sort of problem that it’s a fools errand and is going to result in terrible, brittle, untrustable data. However, their marketing and product success depends on you not knowing that.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  Simple integrations that would otherwise require dev time to build and maintain. As long as the workflows last just long enough for the value they’re providing, it’s a superior solution to a bespoke build.
- quasiuna 3y ago
  We’ve used N8N for about 2 years, at scale, in production, self-hosted on a VM with docker compose. It’s phenomenal. We run every piece of client-specific custom integration work through it. Plumbing a few systems together is a piece of cake - either triggered by webhook or scheduled cron-like. There are tonnes of out the box nodes for common services, but for everything else the JavaScript code block and HTTP request nodes fill in any missing gaps. We’ve tried Zapier, Integromat and loads of others - N8N has nailed the UX for us.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
smusamashah 3y ago
Looking at self hosting, one of the requirements is docker. Is there another tool with similar UI to automate workflows on your computer locally (windows, Linux etc)? I just realized there are a few very good android automation tools which monitor various states and can act on apps and settings but I haven't seen anything that intuitive for windows.
- tough 3y ago
  docker is a -requirement- only if you plan to use their pre-fab stuff you can just take their dockerfile and run the infra however you wish too, probably. Haven't checked n8n on a while Actually. says npm OR docker right there in their docs https://docs.n8n.io/hosting/installation/ https://docs.n8n.io/hosting/installation/
- skripp 3y ago
  Maybe Node-RED?
- gettodachoppa 3y ago
  Docker is the ultimate application format for Linux. It IS Linux. If you read a Dockerfile, you can replicate it on a fresh install command by command, it serves as doc too. For example if it says "FROM debian:bookworm RUN apt install nginx blah blah" you can just repeat those steps on Bookworm. It's just the developer already that work for you so all you need to do is run "docker run -dt sometool:sometag" and presto it's all running on your PC. Dockerized apps run with almost no overhead, it's not like using a VM. Take 2 hours to learn it, trust me it's worth it. This isn't some "Cloud Scale!" hype. It's useful even for someone with just a Pi at home. Just stick to the basic Docker commands (exec, run, compose if you want to be fancy). Don't bother with that Google-scale stuff like Kubernetes unless this becomes your career.
- ristomatti 3y ago
  I believe Node-RED (https://nodered.org/ https://nodered.org/) is the way to go. It's just an NPM package to install and you can run it how ever you wish (even on Windows). It has a friendly and helpful community with even the main developers tirelessly answering even beginner level questions. In fact the community forum its THE friendliest forum I've ever been a member of by a large margin. Node-RED's development is supported by the JS Foundation and it's completely free and open source. It's widely used in the industrial automation industry and even integrated by some PLC manufacturers such as Siemens.
alberth 3y ago
What do people use these tools for? I’ve yet to find a need for Zapier, etc but know it’s hugely popular & generates a ton of revenue.
- JimDabell 3y ago
  Let’s say you’re building a software product. When something happens in your product (maybe somebody buys something, or shares a link, or creates an image, etc.), some of your customers want something to happen in response. Maybe they want the user to receive an email, maybe they want something to be posted to social media, etc. Normally you would have to integrate with each of those third-party services directly. With n8n, Zapier, etc., you can write one integration and let your customers decide what to plug it into. So you get thousands of integrations “for free” by integrating one service. The same goes in reverse – maybe something happens in a third-party service and your customers want something to happen in your product as a result. Instead of requiring all those third-party services to integrate with you, they can just integrate with n8n, Zapier, etc. Because services like n8n and Zapier provide a common interface between very different services, it sidesteps a combinatorial explosion of integrations needed to wire everything up to everything else explicitly. For instance “when somebody buys something from our Shopify store, I want to add them to a private Slack channel”. Shopify aren’t going to spend time building an integration like that, Slack aren’t going to spend time building an integration like that, and a customer isn’t going to want to commission bespoke software to wire it all up. But if they both integrate with n8n or Zapier, then customers can do it themselves.
  - afro88 3y ago
    I'm pretty sure OP was asking about the end user use cases. But I appreciate your reply because I'm developing a product and this made something click for me about letting users integrate with other things with minimal effort.
- extragood 3y ago
  My company has "apps" on n8n, Zapier, and Make. I've used them all and they're fairly similar: they make integration of supported platforms easy and support simple automation workflows. E.g. if x happens on y platform, get relevant data, process it, send me a text message if it's during the day or email me if it's at night/weekend. It's frequently faster than building out the integrations yourself, and is more accessible to inexperienced programmers/ less technical folks. In terms of ease of use, I'd rank it: Zapier (top), Make, n8n. Same ranking for available apps. Complexity of workflows I'd rank those in reverse though. You can do more with n8n.
vbezhenar 3y ago
We're using this tool for some of our project. Basically our manager with zero programming skills was able to build a quite complex backend, which uses postgres, some REST APIs. It runs scheduled tasks and webhook-initiated tasks. It was impressive for me. One of the downsides is that we have sporadic errors which we just live with, with retries. Probably will be fixed in the foreseeable future. I, personally, don't have interest with this tool, I prefer proper programming stack. However I can suggest this kind of tool for someone with lacking programming skills (however it's expected that you understand some SQL, some databases fundamentals, some HTTP fundamentals). We self host it within our kubernetes cluster, it's not a worst thing I had to deal with. Of course free version is quite restricted when it comes to user management, etc, can't even think about oidc integration. But we're cheapos, don't have money for software, so better than nothing.
- rglullis 3y ago
  The lack of user management was what killed it for me. I was ready to sell it for management when our Zapier bill was growing to equivalent salary of a FTE support person, but it wouldn't work if there was at least no basic separation for accounts.
  - sisve 3y ago
    Check out windmill.dev they have auth including sso in their open source version. Used it to replace zapier for a lot of stuff and quite happy
  - janober 3y ago
    Totally understandable. We have however basic user management in n8n for quite a while already and it is available for free. Since the beginning of the year we also have built collaboration, that is however a paid feature.
- debarshri 3y ago
  Would you pay of an enterprise version of this platform?
iAkashPaul 3y ago
Always adored tools like this, Isoflow for isometric flowcharts is another one that was closed sources but is being opened up one feature at a time.
iFire 3y ago
Sustainable Use License https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n/blob/master/LICENSE.md https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n/blob/master/LICENSE.md
- solarkraft 3y ago
  > You may use or modify the software only for your own internal business purposes or for non-commercial or personal use. You may distribute the software or provide it to others only if you do so free of charge for non-commercial purposes. So basically "source available", but still proprietary.
  - Jka9rhnDJos 3y ago
    Which is okay if they’re doing that from the start. They’re not waiting 9 years switching it after hundreds of thousands of free contributions.
    - pas 3y ago
      or, even worse, claiming that other vendors are not upstreaming "material changes" (or whatever the fuck their sleazy phrasing was), while having 200+ PRs in limbo and a "note" in their contributing FAQ about basically pausing PR reviews.
ulrischa 3y ago
I found n8n some years ago and dexcided to use NodeRed instead. It has a large Community and more built in features
Towaway69 3y ago
How does this compare to Node-RED? My impression is that Node-RED is more flexible and extendable than n8n but I've hardly used n8n. By the sound of it Node-RED has simpler licensing, its completely open source.
- ChymeraXYZ 3y ago
  I am maintaining a fairly complex set of nodered flows, dealing with some long running tasks performed by other tools. When checking n8n the impression was that it's like a v2 of NodeRed that learned from what NR did wrong. Lots of tools an capabilities you end up wishing for in NR are built into n8n. For example: * data flow is simplified, no one global "msg" var that gets clobbered by every 2nd custom script * you can fairly easily test flows * you can see execution history, including in/out data * you can see exacting flows
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- cowthulhu 3y ago
  Are you associated with Node-Red?
  - Towaway69 3y ago
    Me? No, I just do a lot work with node-red because I enjoy the visual programming experience. I wonder why programs have to be textual when we have tools that can make them visual and thereby more inclusive.
    - claytongulick 3y ago
      > visual and thereby more inclusive. How does making code visual make it more inclusive?
      - solarkraft 3y ago
        Preventing syntax errors/abstracting syntax is probably the most important piece.
ericcholis 3y ago
Anybody have experience with this in comparison to parabola?
01acheru 3y ago
The problem I see in n8n is that a lot of the integrations seem a little half baked. We tried to use it instead of Zapier something less than an year ago: - you have an FTP node, but it doesn't work with FTP over TLS - you have an AWS SES node, but cannot attach files to the email - you have a Salesforce node, but it only has very few options available Just to name a few that I remember now, we were quite disappointed. It is a great software crafted with care, but the integration nodes seem to be built on a hurry to say "over N integrations available". Maybe it changed now that it reached 1.0, I don't know but they need to invest a bit into it.
dang 3y ago
Related: N8n.io – Workflow automation alternative to Zapier - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21191676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21191676 - Oct 2019 (196 comments)
rabbitofdeath 3y ago
Ok slightly off topic, but how do you pronounce/say n8n? Like nation?
- b0afc375b5 3y ago
  From the readme[0], it's pronounced nodemation. [0] https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n/blob/master/packages/cli/README.md https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n/blob/master/packages/cli/READM...
  - rabbitofdeath 3y ago
    ah Thanks!
  - RankingMember 3y ago
    wow, bit of a clunker, that. I read "n8n" as "nation" too.
gcanyon 3y ago
"Interesting" I think -- "I wonder if it can parse a PDF?" I check, and there is an action to parse a PDF. I just want to see how well it does that... <three hours later> Okay, not really, but it has been something like 20-30 minutes, and I'm still nowhere near being able to test this one action. Can I upload a file manually from my computer? Seems not. Can I read it from Google Drive? There's an action for that, but authentication hell took five minutes of my life and did not succeed. Just getting set up took several minutes. So, yeah, it's not looking good for me at this point.
mercurialsolo 3y ago
Someone should look at a very different take on this space based on cause and effect based modeling. DX based on cause and effect is a.lot more intuitive for users and reasoning agents
claytongulick 3y ago
I evaluated this as a sort of batch job UI for internal staff, but it doesn't handle even moderately large files and has no concept of streaming. If you want to do a basic task like download and load a file into a database, n8n doesn't work well unless the file will fit entirely into memory. I'm sure it's great for other use cases, but that limitation ruled it out for me (for this use case).
- Multrex 3y ago
  This is the default behavior. There is an env variable to store the data to disk. https://docs.n8n.io/hosting/scaling/binary-data/ https://docs.n8n.io/hosting/scaling/binary-data/ https://docs.n8n.io/hosting/environment-variables/environment-variables/#binary-data https://docs.n8n.io/hosting/environment-variables/environmen... N8N_DEFAULT_BINARY_DATA_MODE: filesystem
jwillmer 3y ago
After the license change we switched to Elsa and contribute code together with other companies that made the switch. https://elsaworkflows.io https://elsaworkflows.io

237 points by sacrosanct 3y ago

I have been using n8n for over a year. I prefer it over popular Zapier as it gives me more flexibility and I am able to self host. It have its quirks that you learn about only when you work enough with it to look up solutions on community forums. The only thing I wouldn't recommend is their Cloud, it seams more buggy/unstable than my self hosted instance (more timeouts, probably to conserve shared resources). Still I would recommended to anyone looking for a cheap and open source alternative for Zapier.

aliasxneo 3y ago
I read the home page twice and struggled to figure out the use case. Is Zapier what it's typically compared to?
- reion 3y ago
  In footer they have n8n vs Zapier and n8n vs Make pages, I guess other similar software would be IFTTT
  - grotorea 3y ago
    IFTTT is target more at personal usage while the others are more professional or more complex uses. n8n is, as the starting page, open source and self-hosted unlike those two.
    - commoner 3y ago
      n8n is source-available, not open source, because they restrict commercial use. They acknowledge this themselves: https://docs.n8n.io/choose-n8n/faircode-license/#is-n8n-open-source https://docs.n8n.io/choose-n8n/faircode-license/#is-n8n-open...
      - grotorea 3y ago
        Thanks for the correction. The non-commercial aspect seems to be mostly directed at people trying to compete with them, not comercial users. > You may distribute the software or provide it to others only if you do so free of charge for non-commercial purposes. > You may use or modify the software only for your own internal business purposes or for non-commercial or personal use.
JimDabell 3y ago
> Still I would recommended to anyone looking for a cheap and open source alternative for Zapier. It’s not open source, it’s source available with commercial restrictions.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  Right, you can run it yourself or pay n8n to run it. For purists the language matters, realistically for users it does not. You’re not locked into the SaaS platform is the point.
  - JimDabell 3y ago
    It’s not about being a purist, the difference was a $50k/yr hole in our budget for a license.
    - toomuchtodo 3y ago
      I assume because you were not running it for internal business only but were attempting to distribute or white label/SaaS it? Isn’t $50k about 3-4 months of one dev’s time (assuming fully loaded costs)? https://docs.n8n.io/choose-n8n/faircode-license/ https://docs.n8n.io/choose-n8n/faircode-license/
      - JimDabell 3y ago
        > I assume because you were not running it for internal business only but were attempting to distribute or white label/SaaS it? Yes, we wanted our customers to be able to set up integrations themselves. We didn’t care about white labelling it, we just needed to a) modify it, b) self-host it, and c) use it commercially. Something that open source is ideal for. > Isn’t $50k about 3-4 months of one dev’s time (assuming fully loaded costs)? Yes but that means absolutely nothing if you don’t have the budget for it, or even if you do have the budget for it but there are more valuable things for your developers to work on, or if you do have the budget for it but it isn’t worth that much. In our case the value provided by n8n wasn’t anywhere near $50k/yr. And, more to the point, $50k/yr is $50k/yr more expensive than open source. It would have been worth using if it had been open source, but it wasn’t worth using at that price.

BaseballPhysics 3y ago

Anyone know how this compares to Huginn? I've built out some self hosted automation on Huginn and it works great once it's set up, but it's just a bit janky and difficult to use. And getting initial flows set up can be frustrating as the diagnostics aren't always great.

tonyhb 3y ago
RE. initial flows and diagnostics, I totally feel your pain. Part of the trouble with these systems is that they're too different from our average SDLC we have every day: - Write regular code - Test locally - Then deploy This is one of the key aspects we're fixing at https://www.inngest.com https://www.inngest.com — you can write regular TS (or Go, or Elixir) code as a function, create simple workflows, test locally, and have your functions automatically triggered by events. I still think there's room to go with improving automations here, and it's going to be an interesting few years as things develop.
- cpursley 3y ago
  Elixir, really? That sounds amazing. So many of these tools are TS or Python only.
  - tonyhb 3y ago
    https://github.com/darwin67/ex_inngest https://github.com/darwin67/ex_inngest. We'll officially support this soon — it's written by one of our engineering team. The SDKs are lightweight, work in any language (we only support a few right now), and you can live-migrate long running functions across languages at any time. Long running state is automatically transferred across those SDKs. One of our foundational aspects is to make long running state, queues, events really easy, and that means we need to make multi-cloud and multi-lang migrations easy, too.
    - thelastbender12 3y ago
      Transferring state across sdks sound very cool, how do you achieve that? With all the workflows as code frameworks (like say, Temporal), this is what I imagine to be a shortcoming. With regular services + state in database implementations, you can query the database separately. While with a temporal workflow, you can't cleanly figure out where a particular workflow run is atm since the state is an append only stream of events?

bevenky 3y ago

As per its description on github: N8n is a Free and source-available fair-code licensed workflow automation tool. Not really OSS. Check out: https://www.activepieces.com/ https://www.activepieces.com/ MIT open source.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
JimDabell 3y ago
Thanks for this. We had previously evaluated n8n a year ago and couldn’t use it because it wasn’t open source and they wanted to charge us $50k/yr. I wasn’t aware of ActivePieces, will check it out.
jholman 3y ago
[flagged]
- bevenky 3y ago
  Its the latter. The project does good work so don't want to dump on the project. When one sees source code on Github, one assumes that its OSS, but its not and thats why I share that. The license is a fair code license and it says "is commercially restricted by its authors" and its not clear what commercially restricted really means here.
  - meiraleal 3y ago
    Thanks for doing this. I found n8n 2 days ago and was working on integrating it but just found that their "license" is too much. I was going to integrate it on my platform and sell their product as an affiliate but that license is a no-go.
- jzb 3y ago
  Why the interrogation about pointing out that it’s not FOSS?
commoner 3y ago

ugur2nd 3y ago

Locale is easy to install and difficult to add to the server.

Hnrobert42 3y ago

I really want to like these tools. Yet every time I consider Zapier or IFTTT, their integrations are a mile wide and an inch deep. I’ll see that they integrate with XYZ corp, but then it’s only with a handful of endpoints. Like say I wanted to gather attendees from my Google Meet, Zoom, Webex, etc and send them to salesforce. I’d look at Zapier and see they work with Google. Then I’d look for Google Meet and see there’s nothing there. I get that these connectors can only integrate with existing endpoints. I’m not criticizing. I’m just confused. How do people actually use these services?

klysm 3y ago
I find that these services are typically used to implement shitty half broken database replication. It’s obvious to anybody that’s worked on that sort of problem that it’s a fools errand and is going to result in terrible, brittle, untrustable data. However, their marketing and product success depends on you not knowing that.
toomuchtodo 3y ago
Simple integrations that would otherwise require dev time to build and maintain. As long as the workflows last just long enough for the value they’re providing, it’s a superior solution to a bespoke build.
quasiuna 3y ago
We’ve used N8N for about 2 years, at scale, in production, self-hosted on a VM with docker compose. It’s phenomenal. We run every piece of client-specific custom integration work through it. Plumbing a few systems together is a piece of cake - either triggered by webhook or scheduled cron-like. There are tonnes of out the box nodes for common services, but for everything else the JavaScript code block and HTTP request nodes fill in any missing gaps. We’ve tried Zapier, Integromat and loads of others - N8N has nailed the UX for us.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

smusamashah 3y ago

Looking at self hosting, one of the requirements is docker. Is there another tool with similar UI to automate workflows on your computer locally (windows, Linux etc)? I just realized there are a few very good android automation tools which monitor various states and can act on apps and settings but I haven't seen anything that intuitive for windows.

tough 3y ago
docker is a -requirement- only if you plan to use their pre-fab stuff you can just take their dockerfile and run the infra however you wish too, probably. Haven't checked n8n on a while Actually. says npm OR docker right there in their docs https://docs.n8n.io/hosting/installation/ https://docs.n8n.io/hosting/installation/
skripp 3y ago
Maybe Node-RED?
gettodachoppa 3y ago
Docker is the ultimate application format for Linux. It IS Linux. If you read a Dockerfile, you can replicate it on a fresh install command by command, it serves as doc too. For example if it says "FROM debian:bookworm RUN apt install nginx blah blah" you can just repeat those steps on Bookworm. It's just the developer already that work for you so all you need to do is run "docker run -dt sometool:sometag" and presto it's all running on your PC. Dockerized apps run with almost no overhead, it's not like using a VM. Take 2 hours to learn it, trust me it's worth it. This isn't some "Cloud Scale!" hype. It's useful even for someone with just a Pi at home. Just stick to the basic Docker commands (exec, run, compose if you want to be fancy). Don't bother with that Google-scale stuff like Kubernetes unless this becomes your career.
ristomatti 3y ago
I believe Node-RED (https://nodered.org/ https://nodered.org/) is the way to go. It's just an NPM package to install and you can run it how ever you wish (even on Windows). It has a friendly and helpful community with even the main developers tirelessly answering even beginner level questions. In fact the community forum its THE friendliest forum I've ever been a member of by a large margin. Node-RED's development is supported by the JS Foundation and it's completely free and open source. It's widely used in the industrial automation industry and even integrated by some PLC manufacturers such as Siemens.

alberth 3y ago

What do people use these tools for? I’ve yet to find a need for Zapier, etc but know it’s hugely popular & generates a ton of revenue.

JimDabell 3y ago
Let’s say you’re building a software product. When something happens in your product (maybe somebody buys something, or shares a link, or creates an image, etc.), some of your customers want something to happen in response. Maybe they want the user to receive an email, maybe they want something to be posted to social media, etc. Normally you would have to integrate with each of those third-party services directly. With n8n, Zapier, etc., you can write one integration and let your customers decide what to plug it into. So you get thousands of integrations “for free” by integrating one service. The same goes in reverse – maybe something happens in a third-party service and your customers want something to happen in your product as a result. Instead of requiring all those third-party services to integrate with you, they can just integrate with n8n, Zapier, etc. Because services like n8n and Zapier provide a common interface between very different services, it sidesteps a combinatorial explosion of integrations needed to wire everything up to everything else explicitly. For instance “when somebody buys something from our Shopify store, I want to add them to a private Slack channel”. Shopify aren’t going to spend time building an integration like that, Slack aren’t going to spend time building an integration like that, and a customer isn’t going to want to commission bespoke software to wire it all up. But if they both integrate with n8n or Zapier, then customers can do it themselves.
- afro88 3y ago
  I'm pretty sure OP was asking about the end user use cases. But I appreciate your reply because I'm developing a product and this made something click for me about letting users integrate with other things with minimal effort.
extragood 3y ago
My company has "apps" on n8n, Zapier, and Make. I've used them all and they're fairly similar: they make integration of supported platforms easy and support simple automation workflows. E.g. if x happens on y platform, get relevant data, process it, send me a text message if it's during the day or email me if it's at night/weekend. It's frequently faster than building out the integrations yourself, and is more accessible to inexperienced programmers/ less technical folks. In terms of ease of use, I'd rank it: Zapier (top), Make, n8n. Same ranking for available apps. Complexity of workflows I'd rank those in reverse though. You can do more with n8n.

vbezhenar 3y ago

We're using this tool for some of our project. Basically our manager with zero programming skills was able to build a quite complex backend, which uses postgres, some REST APIs. It runs scheduled tasks and webhook-initiated tasks. It was impressive for me. One of the downsides is that we have sporadic errors which we just live with, with retries. Probably will be fixed in the foreseeable future. I, personally, don't have interest with this tool, I prefer proper programming stack. However I can suggest this kind of tool for someone with lacking programming skills (however it's expected that you understand some SQL, some databases fundamentals, some HTTP fundamentals). We self host it within our kubernetes cluster, it's not a worst thing I had to deal with. Of course free version is quite restricted when it comes to user management, etc, can't even think about oidc integration. But we're cheapos, don't have money for software, so better than nothing.

rglullis 3y ago
The lack of user management was what killed it for me. I was ready to sell it for management when our Zapier bill was growing to equivalent salary of a FTE support person, but it wouldn't work if there was at least no basic separation for accounts.
- sisve 3y ago
  Check out windmill.dev they have auth including sso in their open source version. Used it to replace zapier for a lot of stuff and quite happy
- janober 3y ago
  Totally understandable. We have however basic user management in n8n for quite a while already and it is available for free. Since the beginning of the year we also have built collaboration, that is however a paid feature.
debarshri 3y ago
Would you pay of an enterprise version of this platform?

iAkashPaul 3y ago

Always adored tools like this, Isoflow for isometric flowcharts is another one that was closed sources but is being opened up one feature at a time.

iFire 3y ago

Sustainable Use License https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n/blob/master/LICENSE.md https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n/blob/master/LICENSE.md

solarkraft 3y ago
> You may use or modify the software only for your own internal business purposes or for non-commercial or personal use. You may distribute the software or provide it to others only if you do so free of charge for non-commercial purposes. So basically "source available", but still proprietary.
- Jka9rhnDJos 3y ago
  Which is okay if they’re doing that from the start. They’re not waiting 9 years switching it after hundreds of thousands of free contributions.
  - pas 3y ago
    or, even worse, claiming that other vendors are not upstreaming "material changes" (or whatever the fuck their sleazy phrasing was), while having 200+ PRs in limbo and a "note" in their contributing FAQ about basically pausing PR reviews.

ulrischa 3y ago

I found n8n some years ago and dexcided to use NodeRed instead. It has a large Community and more built in features

Towaway69 3y ago

How does this compare to Node-RED? My impression is that Node-RED is more flexible and extendable than n8n but I've hardly used n8n. By the sound of it Node-RED has simpler licensing, its completely open source.

ChymeraXYZ 3y ago
I am maintaining a fairly complex set of nodered flows, dealing with some long running tasks performed by other tools. When checking n8n the impression was that it's like a v2 of NodeRed that learned from what NR did wrong. Lots of tools an capabilities you end up wishing for in NR are built into n8n. For example: * data flow is simplified, no one global "msg" var that gets clobbered by every 2nd custom script * you can fairly easily test flows * you can see execution history, including in/out data * you can see exacting flows
deleted 3y ago
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cowthulhu 3y ago
Are you associated with Node-Red?
- Towaway69 3y ago
  Me? No, I just do a lot work with node-red because I enjoy the visual programming experience. I wonder why programs have to be textual when we have tools that can make them visual and thereby more inclusive.
  - claytongulick 3y ago
    > visual and thereby more inclusive. How does making code visual make it more inclusive?
    - solarkraft 3y ago
      Preventing syntax errors/abstracting syntax is probably the most important piece.

ericcholis 3y ago

Anybody have experience with this in comparison to parabola?

01acheru 3y ago

The problem I see in n8n is that a lot of the integrations seem a little half baked. We tried to use it instead of Zapier something less than an year ago: - you have an FTP node, but it doesn't work with FTP over TLS - you have an AWS SES node, but cannot attach files to the email - you have a Salesforce node, but it only has very few options available Just to name a few that I remember now, we were quite disappointed. It is a great software crafted with care, but the integration nodes seem to be built on a hurry to say "over N integrations available". Maybe it changed now that it reached 1.0, I don't know but they need to invest a bit into it.

dang 3y ago

Related: N8n.io – Workflow automation alternative to Zapier - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21191676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21191676 - Oct 2019 (196 comments)

rabbitofdeath 3y ago

Ok slightly off topic, but how do you pronounce/say n8n? Like nation?

b0afc375b5 3y ago
From the readme[0], it's pronounced nodemation. [0] https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n/blob/master/packages/cli/README.md https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n/blob/master/packages/cli/READM...
- rabbitofdeath 3y ago
  ah Thanks!
- RankingMember 3y ago
  wow, bit of a clunker, that. I read "n8n" as "nation" too.

gcanyon 3y ago

"Interesting" I think -- "I wonder if it can parse a PDF?" I check, and there is an action to parse a PDF. I just want to see how well it does that... <three hours later> Okay, not really, but it has been something like 20-30 minutes, and I'm still nowhere near being able to test this one action. Can I upload a file manually from my computer? Seems not. Can I read it from Google Drive? There's an action for that, but authentication hell took five minutes of my life and did not succeed. Just getting set up took several minutes. So, yeah, it's not looking good for me at this point.

mercurialsolo 3y ago

Someone should look at a very different take on this space based on cause and effect based modeling. DX based on cause and effect is a.lot more intuitive for users and reasoning agents

claytongulick 3y ago

I evaluated this as a sort of batch job UI for internal staff, but it doesn't handle even moderately large files and has no concept of streaming. If you want to do a basic task like download and load a file into a database, n8n doesn't work well unless the file will fit entirely into memory. I'm sure it's great for other use cases, but that limitation ruled it out for me (for this use case).

Multrex 3y ago
This is the default behavior. There is an env variable to store the data to disk. https://docs.n8n.io/hosting/scaling/binary-data/ https://docs.n8n.io/hosting/scaling/binary-data/ https://docs.n8n.io/hosting/environment-variables/environment-variables/#binary-data https://docs.n8n.io/hosting/environment-variables/environmen... N8N_DEFAULT_BINARY_DATA_MODE: filesystem

jwillmer 3y ago

After the license change we switched to Elsa and contribute code together with other companies that made the switch. https://elsaworkflows.io https://elsaworkflows.io