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N8n – Flexible AI workflow automation for technical teams

195 points by XCSme 1y ago

victorbjorklund 1y ago
N8N is great. Been self-hosting for years.
- k8sToGo 1y ago
  Can you provide a few examples for what you use it for privately?
  - op00to 1y ago
    I use it to follow subreddits, scrape posts, analyze based on arbitrary criteria, note the findings in a spreadsheet, then send a notification.
  - victorbjorklund 1y ago
    An example i set up recently was getting a notification on telegram whenever I deploy a vercel site (our build process is slow so can take 20 min). Webhook from Vercel -> filter on the author -> send notification to telegram. The perfect usecase for n8n is when you got integrations and you dont need to run the workflow so often
behnamoh 1y ago
How is the name pronounced? Like nate-n, which is a play on Nathan? Aside from that, I've been thinking about no/low-code solutions for educational purposes. I'm an incoming professor of a university and most my students have little background in CS or related fields. The university insists on using tools like Alteryx but I want to see if free open-source solutions exist (because that way, students can use the tools after graduation). So far I've seen Dify, Flowise, Langflow, n8n, Make. The last two seem to be more general while the other ones are tailored to LLMs (which is the focus of my courses—applications of LLMs in management).
- c_hastings 1y ago
  From their GitHub: “ What does n8n mean? Short answer: It means "nodemation" and is pronounced as n-eight-n. Long answer: "I get that question quite often (more often than I expected) so I decided it is probably best to answer it here. While looking for a good name for the project with a free domain I realized very quickly that all the good ones I could think of were already taken. So, in the end, I chose nodemation. 'node-' in the sense that it uses a Node-View and that it uses Node.js and '-mation' for 'automation' which is what the project is supposed to help with. However, I did not like how long the name was and I could not imagine writing something that long every time in the CLI. That is when I then ended up on 'n8n'." - Jan Oberhauser, Founder and CEO, n8n.io”
  - senordevnyc 1y ago
    This sounds like excellent evidence that they picked a terrible name and should change it.
    - pinkmuffinere 1y ago
      It is definitely a bad name, even once you know the real name it feels unnatural to say. It might be too late to change though. Maybe better to ret-con it to just be “Nathan” :/
    - accountsarelame 1y ago
      agreed. between this, the license drama, and the "im 12 years old and i want a ricer civic" website theme, Im wondering if I'm being trolled. and their prototypical example: Do you need AI to get somebody a slack account?
Valodim 1y ago
Simple to self host and use, can recommend. Can't say I'm a fan of the €55M financing round they took though. I mean, congratulations to them, but the growth they'll need to satisfy those investors is so very likely to lead to chasing numbers and enshittifying the product down the line.
- brandonpelfrey 1y ago
  I'm curious, because neither of us knows their financial situation or needs and ambitions. What would you suggest they do?
  - 9dev 1y ago
    Not take as much Money. You can get by with way less, and don’t have to sell as many of your Horcruxes to the VCs.
EcommerceFlow 1y ago
I have a friend that uses them, but I took a separate route and just decided to learn programming basics, at least enough to be able to vibe code. I'm thinking why not just use APIs?
- orliesaurus 1y ago
  I think you did the right choice, but not everyone wants to take the longer route, so this is why n8n exists!
  - XCSme 1y ago
    I think using this without programming knowledge is hard, you'll hit a lot of errors and data transformation issues that are hard to solve without knowing programming 101 like arrays, objects, data access, etc. But, if you do know how to code, this makes it easy to quickly integrate stuff without having to write all the connection boilerplate code.
- victorbjorklund 1y ago
  I'm a developer but use N8N. One reason is not having to build and maintain integrations with lots of API:s for workflows that are just run once in a while. Like building an integration with Slack that will get data from 5 API:s and save it in google sheets and send you an email. That would require writing lots of code while here it is much easier with N8N. Anything complicated or needing lots of useage I would go for programming
greatpostman 1y ago
I’m suspicious about n8n being able to abstract properly to allow for dynamic agentic workflows. Anyone have actual experience?
- scrollinondubs 1y ago
  Can you clarify "dynamic agentic workflows?" I use their agent node and it works great but what are you trying to do with it? FYI they just added native support for MCP in the latest release both for exposing their workflows as a MCP server and consuming MCP servcies easily via their MCP client tool: https://docs.n8n.io/integrations/builtin/core-nodes/n8n-nodes-langchain.mcptrigger/ https://docs.n8n.io/integrations/builtin/core-nodes/n8n-node... https://docs.n8n.io/integrations/builtin/cluster-nodes/sub-nodes/n8n-nodes-langchain.toolmcp/ https://docs.n8n.io/integrations/builtin/cluster-nodes/sub-n... That should make things interesting because they have a fairly extensive library of templates which can now easily be converted to MCP servers and be more easily invoked agnatically by LLMs.
preya2k 1y ago
If you’re looking for an Open Source alternative, give Windmill a try.
- rattray 1y ago
  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/ https://faircode.io/
- Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
  Just to clarify. The reason why you aren't saying N8n is open source because of its license right? I haven't read its license but it does seem to me to have quite some restrictions. And whereas Windmill seems to be agpl + apache. So that is what you are mentioning, right?
  - tinco 1y ago
    Typically when people say open source they mean that the source code can be used , modified and made public for any purpose. There is an organization called OSI that maintains a ratified list of licenses that are compatible with the ideals of the open source movement. Although the OSI has been compromised by the big cloud providers and no longer serves the public interest, the list can still be relied on as a good sign that the license you're looking at is open source.
  - preya2k 1y ago
    Yes, n8n is not open source. It’s “source available”.
- hectormalot 1y ago
  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.
bwfan123 1y ago
Isnt this just workflow automation thats been around for decades ? whats ai about it ?
- ibaikov 1y ago
  There are lots of AI nodes which are both very convenient and are great for learning how all of this works. Vector storage integrations etc. I'm not affiliated.
nico 1y ago
Can someone talk about their experience using n8n? I’ve seen it in passing a lot lately, but I wonder what some good successful use cases are
- ibaikov 1y ago
  It is great to make chatbots in my opinion. Personal automations, AI, etc. I have friends who use it to prototype products and it works using n8n as backend for users. I mostly don't do this, only prototypes that only I can access. It has pros and cons vs coding, and you probably have to make something using n8n to see if it works for you.
- gokaygurcan 1y ago
  Before it was moved to GitHub Actions, we had a multiple-step deployment flow created in Node-Red, I believe you can achieve more or less the same thing with n8n. Never tried tho, it wasn't necessary anyway. If I really really simplify it's like, checkout, run some tests, deploy to a preview env, run some more tests, report back to slack. On a personal level, I use it to automate booking a tennis court. It logs in, selects the date and time (pre-defined), adds a partner/opponent, books the court, pings a service that generates a calendar entry. If I decide to cancel the booking, it again pings the service and removes the calendar entry. I needed to bend some "nodes" to do what I need within the same workflow (such as create event runs once a day but update event runs in every 10 minutes). In the past, I also used it to detect service interruptions with my ISP. I don't use that ISP anymore, so this workflow is redundant, but it was checking an API and if there's an entry, sending it as a push notification (via ntfy) to my phone.
- neoecos 1y ago
  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.
ChrisGammell 1y ago
A while back I used it to glue together a bunch of APIs to make a geofence on top of a WiFi location service my company offers. Super easy to prototype external computation without something like severless/lambda (which would be the likely path for production) https://blog.golioth.io/a-2-geofence-wi-fi-location-here-com-esp32-c3-golioth-pipelines-and-n8n/ https://blog.golioth.io/a-2-geofence-wi-fi-location-here-com...
- metadat 1y ago
  Thanks for sharing, Chris! In case it's helpful to other readers, the linked article outlines combining several tools together, including N8n and how it fit into the picture. Decent article, although a bit shallow on details.
jasongill 1y ago
n8n has been good but not great in our organization (and we pronounce it "Nathan", to answer someone else's question). It's effectively a self-hosted version of Zapier and has quite a few built-in integrations. It's a bit more annoying to use than Zapier (but the price is right), and the AI features are currently about like the AI features of every other product: basically sufficient to tell investors "we do AI!" but not anything you're going to actually use. The one frustration we have with n8n is trying to create custom "apps" (triggers or destinations for workflows). It's clear that the custom apps are an afterthought and have gone through multiple iterations of "here's the best way to do it", and you end up having to just keep trying until you get it to do what you want. Annoyingly, there's no way to manage custom apps in the interface itself - you have to create a Javascript module and then inject it into a .npm directory somewhere inside of the applications Docker container, which just doesn't feel very "professional". If n8n would add some kind of admin interface for managing custom apps - especially just supporting basic use cases like specifying a REST API as a reusable custom app - it would be great, but still has a ways to go in terms of features (like better user permissions management as part of the lackluster SSO) before it's truly going to be an enterprise grade solution. That said, we tried Windmill first and while it was cool for the devs who were able to see the vision, the non-technical users hated it and have heavily praised n8n once we created a custom app to let them integrate with our system. Overall I would say n8n is worth trying if you need something like this, but expect to do some tinkering if you go beyond what it does out of the box.
- claytongulick 1y ago
  How would you compare it with Node Red? I've just poked at them, but my impression was that Node Red much more capable. IIRC one of my issues with n8n was the lack of streaming ability, which kills it for large datasets.
  - jasongill 1y ago
    Have not used Node Red in production and only played with it briefly, but n8n is more of a Zapier replacement whereas Node Red I believe is more of an IoT automation platform. n8n is made so that you can set it up and give your staff access and they can manage their own workflows (like "when a customer opens a support ticket, update their Salesforce record to increment the number of tickets they have opened"). It's clearly aimed at non technical users being able to develop their own solutions to problems (for better or for worse), more so than Windmill which is made for developers to solve their own problems or develop solutions that non-technical people can use. Node Red if I remember correctly is more heavily weighted toward real time events for dev (especially hardware/IoT dev) use than "let the support team manage their own workflows for routing customer complaints"
revskill 1y ago
The funny things about "modern AI workflow builders" is they don't learn anything about n8n, which is universal and having a solid design. Examples of those failure systems, is SimStudio, just a joke compared to n8n.
SKILNER 1y ago
Is the UX of the name any indication of the UX of the product?
- lukaslevert 1y ago
  n8n is a unique name that for now I think works to differentiate them. Time will tell if they keep it.
Izmaki 1y ago
Looks like a product you'd end up with if a few years back you thought to yourself "how do I make a business combining AI and pipelines?". I don't hate AI as such, I just don't love how it has to be shoved into every product or tech imaginable these days.
- XCSme 1y ago
  Yeah, the title is misleading. I use it to automate non-AI stuff too, and probably n8n was there before all the AI hype too.
kfogel 1y ago
Wow. This project was the cause of a very long and intense discussion about mis-use of the term "open source". See https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n/issues/40#issuecomment-539714634 https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n/issues/40#issuecomment-5397146... for details (lands mid-thread -- you might want to scroll back to see the start, and if you read the whole thing to the end then you deserve some sort of award!). TL;DR: The author originally tried to call n8n "open source" but while using a non-open-source license. After much discussion, he kept the license but stopped using the label "open source", to the relief of many people. That half-decade-old thread is still what I point to when I want to explain to someone why preserving the specificity of the term "open source" matters.
throwaway7783 1y ago
Did something new happen here? Almost feels like an ad for n8n. This product has been there for a while.
- XCSme 1y ago
  I just found about it a few weeks ago, and it worked surprisingly well for me, and I'm happy I stumbled upon it. I submitted it, seeing that it was not discussed recently, maybe it's useful to anyone else. I using the self-hosted version.
MattDaEskimo 1y ago
I've always found that these no-code workflow builders fail to hit the right abstraction - especially when new paradigms are added.
- XCSme 1y ago
  This is not no-code. It allows you to write custom nodes with arbitrary code, but also connect them to existing integrations. Also, for each connection you can transform/select the data using JavaScript.
hypefi 1y ago
Tried it, but in an age where AI does a lot of the work in coding, I think just using code to automate things is better than using n8n, the visual aspect though of the AI agents nodes, chains and workflows is the one thing that is interesting in n8n
m3kw9 1y ago
It would be nice if these sites started off with a usable demo right away, even if it’s on rails. Reading all the technical stuff and having to figure it out that way is very inefficient.
sa-code 1y ago
Is this an ad? Can you buy upvotes for HN?
- XCSme 1y ago
  It's not an ad, the original title I submitted it with was different. I added it because I discovered it a few weeks ago, and I love the self-hosted version, very polished and well documented.
photon_garden 1y ago
We’ve been using n8n in production for the last few months at my startup and are planning on migrating to regular backend code. Pros: - Good observability. It’s handy that they track all executions and let you see when workflows run. - Usable for non-technical people. - They’ve had all the integrations we needed. Cons: - Implementing parallel execution for async parts of the workflow is complicated and flaky. - Pricing is expensive for the hosted version. - Version control is bad. - If you have engineering capacity, it’s faster and simpler to write some more backend code if you already have a backend.
Jefro118 1y ago
How do people integrate steps on websites/web scraping into their larger workflows? I’m looking to try and integrate my own browser RPA tool [1] into n8n but I’m not sure how useful it is. [1] - https://browsable.app https://browsable.app
fzysingularity 1y ago
We (at https://vlm.run https://vlm.run) use n8n internally for a lot of automations and it’s been great (Reddit/HN scraping), slack automations, cron jobs for sales etc. We also made a custom node for popular document/image/video ETL jobs like document-to-markdown, audio/video transcriptions with VLMs (Vision Language Models). https://github.com/vlm-run/n8n-nodes-vlmrun https://github.com/vlm-run/n8n-nodes-vlmrun https://www.npmjs.com/package/@vlm-run/n8n-nodes-vlmrun/v/0.1.0 https://www.npmjs.com/package/@vlm-run/n8n-nodes-vlmrun/v/0....
_pdp_ 1y ago
IMHO, N8n isn't great if you care about security. It's not that the tool itself is inherently insecure - it's more about how users are encouraged to use it. Nearly all workflows built using N8n that I've seen face some kind of prompt injection vulnerability. This is primarily because, in most cases, you configure the LLM by directly inserting external data into the system prompt. As many of you know, the system prompt has the highest execution priority, meaning instructions placed there can heavily influence how the LLM interacts with its tools. While this isn't exploitable in every situation, it can often be exploited rather generically: by embedding prompts in your social media bio, website, or other locations from where these workflows pull data. Recently, I've managed to use this technique to prompt a random LinkedIn bot to email me back a list of their functions. That's not overly exciting in itself, but it clearly demonstrates the potential for malicious use. This issue is not specific to N8n. Other tools do it too. But it seems to me there is little to no awareness that this is in fact a problem. There is a better, safer way to incorporate external data into LLM prompts without jumping through hoops, but unfortunately, that's not how things are currently done with N8n, at least as of today.
- moralestapia 1y ago
  What's the safe alternative?
  - freeqaz 1y ago
    As somebody working in AI Security: There isn't one currently. If you're feeding untrusted inputs into an LLM (today), you have to treat the entire prompt as radioactive. That means: - Limit the potential for a malicious prompt to do anything bad - Scope permissions to the lowest level you can There are some other mitigations (moderation APIs using a 2nd LLM), but in general they're not 100% solutions. You really need to design your systems around accepting this limitation today. More info on this wiki here: https://github.com/tldrsec/prompt-injection-defenses https://github.com/tldrsec/prompt-injection-defenses
  - TZubiri 1y ago
    Maybe you can: A- Limit the capabilities of users. B- Help users limit the capabilities that they to their sub-users, whether they be per-program capabilities or per dependency capabilities. I think B is the path forward, if you give a user access to emails and files and ChatGPT, then he can give ChatGPT access to emails and files and do damage that way. With B you can give the user access to ChatGPT and email and a file system, but help him configure fine grained permissions for their experiments.
Tadpole9181 1y ago
Can someone recommend a self-host alternative for n8n? I'd be fine paying for one of the lower tiers to get access to shared workspaces, so I can work with my small team, but if you want to self-host you have to jump up to the Enterprise version which can easily be 20x more expensive. This makes it unusable for my purpose. But in my (limited) research into options like Airflow or Dagster or Windmill, they weren't quite at the same level and it doesn't feel like a significant value-add over writing a simple webhook server.
- jlaneve 1y ago
  Where do you think the gap between Airflow and what you need is?
rizky05 1y ago
[dead]
SansGuidon 1y ago
As a former user of N8N the tool looked interesting to me but I ended up converting most of my use cases into shell scripts, python scripts executed by cron jobs, and into ci/cd jobs. It gave me more flexibility about the tech stack I need, and a greater ease of debugging and developing robust designed tools. I guess N8N was not intuitive for simple things and seemed too complicated for me. I'm now happier with cron jobs/GitOps to manage my automations. On the other hand I also had to replace some IFTTT workflows with my own scripts. More work for me but I gained quality and control.

195 points by XCSme 1y ago

victorbjorklund 1y ago

N8N is great. Been self-hosting for years.

k8sToGo 1y ago
Can you provide a few examples for what you use it for privately?
- op00to 1y ago
  I use it to follow subreddits, scrape posts, analyze based on arbitrary criteria, note the findings in a spreadsheet, then send a notification.
- victorbjorklund 1y ago
  An example i set up recently was getting a notification on telegram whenever I deploy a vercel site (our build process is slow so can take 20 min). Webhook from Vercel -> filter on the author -> send notification to telegram. The perfect usecase for n8n is when you got integrations and you dont need to run the workflow so often

behnamoh 1y ago

How is the name pronounced? Like nate-n, which is a play on Nathan? Aside from that, I've been thinking about no/low-code solutions for educational purposes. I'm an incoming professor of a university and most my students have little background in CS or related fields. The university insists on using tools like Alteryx but I want to see if free open-source solutions exist (because that way, students can use the tools after graduation). So far I've seen Dify, Flowise, Langflow, n8n, Make. The last two seem to be more general while the other ones are tailored to LLMs (which is the focus of my courses—applications of LLMs in management).

c_hastings 1y ago
From their GitHub: “ What does n8n mean? Short answer: It means "nodemation" and is pronounced as n-eight-n. Long answer: "I get that question quite often (more often than I expected) so I decided it is probably best to answer it here. While looking for a good name for the project with a free domain I realized very quickly that all the good ones I could think of were already taken. So, in the end, I chose nodemation. 'node-' in the sense that it uses a Node-View and that it uses Node.js and '-mation' for 'automation' which is what the project is supposed to help with. However, I did not like how long the name was and I could not imagine writing something that long every time in the CLI. That is when I then ended up on 'n8n'." - Jan Oberhauser, Founder and CEO, n8n.io”
- senordevnyc 1y ago
  This sounds like excellent evidence that they picked a terrible name and should change it.
  - pinkmuffinere 1y ago
    It is definitely a bad name, even once you know the real name it feels unnatural to say. It might be too late to change though. Maybe better to ret-con it to just be “Nathan” :/
  - accountsarelame 1y ago
    agreed. between this, the license drama, and the "im 12 years old and i want a ricer civic" website theme, Im wondering if I'm being trolled. and their prototypical example: Do you need AI to get somebody a slack account?

Valodim 1y ago

Simple to self host and use, can recommend. Can't say I'm a fan of the €55M financing round they took though. I mean, congratulations to them, but the growth they'll need to satisfy those investors is so very likely to lead to chasing numbers and enshittifying the product down the line.

brandonpelfrey 1y ago
I'm curious, because neither of us knows their financial situation or needs and ambitions. What would you suggest they do?
- 9dev 1y ago
  Not take as much Money. You can get by with way less, and don’t have to sell as many of your Horcruxes to the VCs.

EcommerceFlow 1y ago

I have a friend that uses them, but I took a separate route and just decided to learn programming basics, at least enough to be able to vibe code. I'm thinking why not just use APIs?

orliesaurus 1y ago
I think you did the right choice, but not everyone wants to take the longer route, so this is why n8n exists!
- XCSme 1y ago
  I think using this without programming knowledge is hard, you'll hit a lot of errors and data transformation issues that are hard to solve without knowing programming 101 like arrays, objects, data access, etc. But, if you do know how to code, this makes it easy to quickly integrate stuff without having to write all the connection boilerplate code.
victorbjorklund 1y ago
I'm a developer but use N8N. One reason is not having to build and maintain integrations with lots of API:s for workflows that are just run once in a while. Like building an integration with Slack that will get data from 5 API:s and save it in google sheets and send you an email. That would require writing lots of code while here it is much easier with N8N. Anything complicated or needing lots of useage I would go for programming

greatpostman 1y ago

I’m suspicious about n8n being able to abstract properly to allow for dynamic agentic workflows. Anyone have actual experience?

scrollinondubs 1y ago
Can you clarify "dynamic agentic workflows?" I use their agent node and it works great but what are you trying to do with it? FYI they just added native support for MCP in the latest release both for exposing their workflows as a MCP server and consuming MCP servcies easily via their MCP client tool: https://docs.n8n.io/integrations/builtin/core-nodes/n8n-nodes-langchain.mcptrigger/ https://docs.n8n.io/integrations/builtin/core-nodes/n8n-node... https://docs.n8n.io/integrations/builtin/cluster-nodes/sub-nodes/n8n-nodes-langchain.toolmcp/ https://docs.n8n.io/integrations/builtin/cluster-nodes/sub-n... That should make things interesting because they have a fairly extensive library of templates which can now easily be converted to MCP servers and be more easily invoked agnatically by LLMs.

preya2k 1y ago

If you’re looking for an Open Source alternative, give Windmill a try.

rattray 1y ago
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/ https://faircode.io/
Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
Just to clarify. The reason why you aren't saying N8n is open source because of its license right? I haven't read its license but it does seem to me to have quite some restrictions. And whereas Windmill seems to be agpl + apache. So that is what you are mentioning, right?
- tinco 1y ago
  Typically when people say open source they mean that the source code can be used , modified and made public for any purpose. There is an organization called OSI that maintains a ratified list of licenses that are compatible with the ideals of the open source movement. Although the OSI has been compromised by the big cloud providers and no longer serves the public interest, the list can still be relied on as a good sign that the license you're looking at is open source.
- preya2k 1y ago
  Yes, n8n is not open source. It’s “source available”.
hectormalot 1y ago
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.

bwfan123 1y ago

Isnt this just workflow automation thats been around for decades ? whats ai about it ?

ibaikov 1y ago
There are lots of AI nodes which are both very convenient and are great for learning how all of this works. Vector storage integrations etc. I'm not affiliated.

nico 1y ago

Can someone talk about their experience using n8n? I’ve seen it in passing a lot lately, but I wonder what some good successful use cases are

ibaikov 1y ago
It is great to make chatbots in my opinion. Personal automations, AI, etc. I have friends who use it to prototype products and it works using n8n as backend for users. I mostly don't do this, only prototypes that only I can access. It has pros and cons vs coding, and you probably have to make something using n8n to see if it works for you.
gokaygurcan 1y ago
Before it was moved to GitHub Actions, we had a multiple-step deployment flow created in Node-Red, I believe you can achieve more or less the same thing with n8n. Never tried tho, it wasn't necessary anyway. If I really really simplify it's like, checkout, run some tests, deploy to a preview env, run some more tests, report back to slack. On a personal level, I use it to automate booking a tennis court. It logs in, selects the date and time (pre-defined), adds a partner/opponent, books the court, pings a service that generates a calendar entry. If I decide to cancel the booking, it again pings the service and removes the calendar entry. I needed to bend some "nodes" to do what I need within the same workflow (such as create event runs once a day but update event runs in every 10 minutes). In the past, I also used it to detect service interruptions with my ISP. I don't use that ISP anymore, so this workflow is redundant, but it was checking an API and if there's an entry, sending it as a push notification (via ntfy) to my phone.
neoecos 1y ago
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.

ChrisGammell 1y ago

A while back I used it to glue together a bunch of APIs to make a geofence on top of a WiFi location service my company offers. Super easy to prototype external computation without something like severless/lambda (which would be the likely path for production) https://blog.golioth.io/a-2-geofence-wi-fi-location-here-com-esp32-c3-golioth-pipelines-and-n8n/ https://blog.golioth.io/a-2-geofence-wi-fi-location-here-com...

metadat 1y ago
Thanks for sharing, Chris! In case it's helpful to other readers, the linked article outlines combining several tools together, including N8n and how it fit into the picture. Decent article, although a bit shallow on details.

jasongill 1y ago

n8n has been good but not great in our organization (and we pronounce it "Nathan", to answer someone else's question). It's effectively a self-hosted version of Zapier and has quite a few built-in integrations. It's a bit more annoying to use than Zapier (but the price is right), and the AI features are currently about like the AI features of every other product: basically sufficient to tell investors "we do AI!" but not anything you're going to actually use. The one frustration we have with n8n is trying to create custom "apps" (triggers or destinations for workflows). It's clear that the custom apps are an afterthought and have gone through multiple iterations of "here's the best way to do it", and you end up having to just keep trying until you get it to do what you want. Annoyingly, there's no way to manage custom apps in the interface itself - you have to create a Javascript module and then inject it into a .npm directory somewhere inside of the applications Docker container, which just doesn't feel very "professional". If n8n would add some kind of admin interface for managing custom apps - especially just supporting basic use cases like specifying a REST API as a reusable custom app - it would be great, but still has a ways to go in terms of features (like better user permissions management as part of the lackluster SSO) before it's truly going to be an enterprise grade solution. That said, we tried Windmill first and while it was cool for the devs who were able to see the vision, the non-technical users hated it and have heavily praised n8n once we created a custom app to let them integrate with our system. Overall I would say n8n is worth trying if you need something like this, but expect to do some tinkering if you go beyond what it does out of the box.

claytongulick 1y ago
How would you compare it with Node Red? I've just poked at them, but my impression was that Node Red much more capable. IIRC one of my issues with n8n was the lack of streaming ability, which kills it for large datasets.
- jasongill 1y ago
  Have not used Node Red in production and only played with it briefly, but n8n is more of a Zapier replacement whereas Node Red I believe is more of an IoT automation platform. n8n is made so that you can set it up and give your staff access and they can manage their own workflows (like "when a customer opens a support ticket, update their Salesforce record to increment the number of tickets they have opened"). It's clearly aimed at non technical users being able to develop their own solutions to problems (for better or for worse), more so than Windmill which is made for developers to solve their own problems or develop solutions that non-technical people can use. Node Red if I remember correctly is more heavily weighted toward real time events for dev (especially hardware/IoT dev) use than "let the support team manage their own workflows for routing customer complaints"

revskill 1y ago

The funny things about "modern AI workflow builders" is they don't learn anything about n8n, which is universal and having a solid design. Examples of those failure systems, is SimStudio, just a joke compared to n8n.

SKILNER 1y ago

Is the UX of the name any indication of the UX of the product?

lukaslevert 1y ago
n8n is a unique name that for now I think works to differentiate them. Time will tell if they keep it.

Izmaki 1y ago

Looks like a product you'd end up with if a few years back you thought to yourself "how do I make a business combining AI and pipelines?". I don't hate AI as such, I just don't love how it has to be shoved into every product or tech imaginable these days.

XCSme 1y ago
Yeah, the title is misleading. I use it to automate non-AI stuff too, and probably n8n was there before all the AI hype too.

kfogel 1y ago

Wow. This project was the cause of a very long and intense discussion about mis-use of the term "open source". See https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n/issues/40#issuecomment-539714634 https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n/issues/40#issuecomment-5397146... for details (lands mid-thread -- you might want to scroll back to see the start, and if you read the whole thing to the end then you deserve some sort of award!). TL;DR: The author originally tried to call n8n "open source" but while using a non-open-source license. After much discussion, he kept the license but stopped using the label "open source", to the relief of many people. That half-decade-old thread is still what I point to when I want to explain to someone why preserving the specificity of the term "open source" matters.

throwaway7783 1y ago

Did something new happen here? Almost feels like an ad for n8n. This product has been there for a while.

XCSme 1y ago
I just found about it a few weeks ago, and it worked surprisingly well for me, and I'm happy I stumbled upon it. I submitted it, seeing that it was not discussed recently, maybe it's useful to anyone else. I using the self-hosted version.

MattDaEskimo 1y ago

I've always found that these no-code workflow builders fail to hit the right abstraction - especially when new paradigms are added.

XCSme 1y ago
This is not no-code. It allows you to write custom nodes with arbitrary code, but also connect them to existing integrations. Also, for each connection you can transform/select the data using JavaScript.

hypefi 1y ago

Tried it, but in an age where AI does a lot of the work in coding, I think just using code to automate things is better than using n8n, the visual aspect though of the AI agents nodes, chains and workflows is the one thing that is interesting in n8n

m3kw9 1y ago

It would be nice if these sites started off with a usable demo right away, even if it’s on rails. Reading all the technical stuff and having to figure it out that way is very inefficient.

sa-code 1y ago

Is this an ad? Can you buy upvotes for HN?

XCSme 1y ago
It's not an ad, the original title I submitted it with was different. I added it because I discovered it a few weeks ago, and I love the self-hosted version, very polished and well documented.

photon_garden 1y ago

We’ve been using n8n in production for the last few months at my startup and are planning on migrating to regular backend code. Pros: - Good observability. It’s handy that they track all executions and let you see when workflows run. - Usable for non-technical people. - They’ve had all the integrations we needed. Cons: - Implementing parallel execution for async parts of the workflow is complicated and flaky. - Pricing is expensive for the hosted version. - Version control is bad. - If you have engineering capacity, it’s faster and simpler to write some more backend code if you already have a backend.

Jefro118 1y ago

How do people integrate steps on websites/web scraping into their larger workflows? I’m looking to try and integrate my own browser RPA tool [1] into n8n but I’m not sure how useful it is. [1] - https://browsable.app https://browsable.app

fzysingularity 1y ago

We (at https://vlm.run https://vlm.run) use n8n internally for a lot of automations and it’s been great (Reddit/HN scraping), slack automations, cron jobs for sales etc. We also made a custom node for popular document/image/video ETL jobs like document-to-markdown, audio/video transcriptions with VLMs (Vision Language Models). https://github.com/vlm-run/n8n-nodes-vlmrun https://github.com/vlm-run/n8n-nodes-vlmrun https://www.npmjs.com/package/@vlm-run/n8n-nodes-vlmrun/v/0.1.0 https://www.npmjs.com/package/@vlm-run/n8n-nodes-vlmrun/v/0....

_pdp_ 1y ago

IMHO, N8n isn't great if you care about security. It's not that the tool itself is inherently insecure - it's more about how users are encouraged to use it. Nearly all workflows built using N8n that I've seen face some kind of prompt injection vulnerability. This is primarily because, in most cases, you configure the LLM by directly inserting external data into the system prompt. As many of you know, the system prompt has the highest execution priority, meaning instructions placed there can heavily influence how the LLM interacts with its tools. While this isn't exploitable in every situation, it can often be exploited rather generically: by embedding prompts in your social media bio, website, or other locations from where these workflows pull data. Recently, I've managed to use this technique to prompt a random LinkedIn bot to email me back a list of their functions. That's not overly exciting in itself, but it clearly demonstrates the potential for malicious use. This issue is not specific to N8n. Other tools do it too. But it seems to me there is little to no awareness that this is in fact a problem. There is a better, safer way to incorporate external data into LLM prompts without jumping through hoops, but unfortunately, that's not how things are currently done with N8n, at least as of today.

moralestapia 1y ago
What's the safe alternative?
- freeqaz 1y ago
  As somebody working in AI Security: There isn't one currently. If you're feeding untrusted inputs into an LLM (today), you have to treat the entire prompt as radioactive. That means: - Limit the potential for a malicious prompt to do anything bad - Scope permissions to the lowest level you can There are some other mitigations (moderation APIs using a 2nd LLM), but in general they're not 100% solutions. You really need to design your systems around accepting this limitation today. More info on this wiki here: https://github.com/tldrsec/prompt-injection-defenses https://github.com/tldrsec/prompt-injection-defenses
- TZubiri 1y ago
  Maybe you can: A- Limit the capabilities of users. B- Help users limit the capabilities that they to their sub-users, whether they be per-program capabilities or per dependency capabilities. I think B is the path forward, if you give a user access to emails and files and ChatGPT, then he can give ChatGPT access to emails and files and do damage that way. With B you can give the user access to ChatGPT and email and a file system, but help him configure fine grained permissions for their experiments.

Tadpole9181 1y ago

Can someone recommend a self-host alternative for n8n? I'd be fine paying for one of the lower tiers to get access to shared workspaces, so I can work with my small team, but if you want to self-host you have to jump up to the Enterprise version which can easily be 20x more expensive. This makes it unusable for my purpose. But in my (limited) research into options like Airflow or Dagster or Windmill, they weren't quite at the same level and it doesn't feel like a significant value-add over writing a simple webhook server.

jlaneve 1y ago
Where do you think the gap between Airflow and what you need is?

rizky05 1y ago

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SansGuidon 1y ago

As a former user of N8N the tool looked interesting to me but I ended up converting most of my use cases into shell scripts, python scripts executed by cron jobs, and into ci/cd jobs. It gave me more flexibility about the tech stack I need, and a greater ease of debugging and developing robust designed tools. I guess N8N was not intuitive for simple things and seemed too complicated for me. I'm now happier with cron jobs/GitOps to manage my automations. On the other hand I also had to replace some IFTTT workflows with my own scripts. More work for me but I gained quality and control.