9 ms·

N8n raises $180M

235 points by doppp 1y ago

phrotoma 1y ago
What is this thing? IFTTT?
- tom1337 1y ago
  As far as I used it (which was for like 15minutes) it's like Zapier but with deeper customizability and you can self host it.
- Deukhoofd 1y ago
  It's basically a piece of software for doing visual programming where workflows can be triggered by events (webhooks, web calls, and a bunch of other things). Has a self-hosting option which is quite nice.
- sharpfuryz 1y ago
  More like an actor engine than IFTTT, a simple and good tool that can simplify workflows like "daily export data from HubSpot to Google spreadsheet, then send emails."
- yuvadam 1y ago
  an MLM scheme
BoredPositron 1y ago
5000 n8n workflows that made me millions. 1 n8n workflow that made me 5k per hour... It's an okay product I appreciate that it's selfhosted with good documentation but they absolutely destroyed their brand with excessive affiliate marketing and now nothing of substance is left if you search for it anywhere.
- mnky9800n 1y ago
  When I think of n8n I think of the n8n subreddit of people posting about how their workflow is broken and they lost all their customers and don't know how to make it work and the obvious solution is that if they had written actual software with tests, fallbacks, etc. this wouldn't have happened.
  - narrator 1y ago
    I have written some stuff with n8n and I think it's is better than most no code platforms because it's debuggable. For example, it keeps all the historical executions so you can see what happened when the workflows failed and what all the data going in and out of each component in the system was during the failed run. It also has real detailed error messages instead of just vague "An Error Occurred" popup boxes that don't provide any information. Also, it's different from most nocode platforms in that it is self-hostable and you can easily export and import programs from it and share them with other people.
    - ekianjo 1y ago
      If you want to something similar to n8n but with a professional tool, better use NiFi
      - cap11235 1y ago
        Worth noting for NiFi you end up with a bunch of integrations built-in via https://camel.apache.org/ https://camel.apache.org/ which makes it easy to plug into some small portion of a task and then expand.
  - havefunbesafe 1y ago
    That subreddit is the new r/dropshipping. I joined to see what fun tooling people were building, and I found it mostly populated with people attempting to setup a "business" with a single feature solution.
    - mnky9800n 1y ago
      It was a giant disappointment to me as well. I guess it’s reasonable that people want something for nothing otherwise the lottery wouldn’t make any money. But it is rather unfortunate that something that could be otherwise a cool community of people making automations is instead just get rich quick schemes. I suppose we could all try building a n8n community that is not focused on get rich quick schemes. But tbh anything I need automated is far easier in python especially when all the connectors in n8n that you may not know the particular python library for (e.g., some Reddit comment aggregator) you can easily convince Claude code to generate for you.
- weird-eye-issue 1y ago
  They've been growing exponentially the last couple years because of affiliate marketing in large part
  - monkeydust 1y ago
    Any more details on how they made this work for them? Hard to pull off.
    - cinericius 1y ago
      Is it hard to pull off? Give people a cut of the revenue from new paying customers who first visit by clicking their referral link. Everyone else does the work for you, but you lose control of the brand as people who only care about making a quick buck use your name to spam low-quality videos and medium articles.
    - weird-eye-issue 1y ago
      Have a good product and then pay people a percentage when they sell it on your behalf. Works amazingly in some niches. I personally paid out affiliates around $1m for my SaaS
- anticorporate 1y ago
  This. I like n8n. It feels a little less rough around the edges for visual coding than something like huggin or nodered. The documentation is good, but finding examples and things like that offsite is impossible.
  - rehevkor5 1y ago
    The documentation leaves a lot to be desired. Especially regarding custom node development. But also on the user side, for example the kaka trigger node has zero info on its doc page.
- shiandow 1y ago
  I'm currently dealing with some of the fallout of their marketing, could you explain a bit better what you mean? It was good but isn't any more?
- iyn 1y ago
  Can you share some examples of the workflows that you had success with?
- Bhushan2005 1y ago
  [flagged]
kamranjon 1y ago
I’m just wondering if anyone that is closer to this space could shed some light on if this $2.5B valuation seems more or less accurate? I have played around with n8n - I just didn’t know if it was ubiquitous/profitable. $180m round seemed pretty huge but maybe it’s really a unicorn?
- binarymax 1y ago
  There is no accurate valuation in this space.
- helsinki 1y ago
  I built a GitHub-native coding / review agent that outperforms CodeRabbit (by a lot), and it only took me like two hundred hours. There are a few of us using it at work, meanwhile CodeRabbit is valued at $550M.
  - dpflan 1y ago
    Do you have paying customers? Putting money into customer acquisition and retention is where a lot of money can go versus R&D.
    - helsinki 1y ago
      No, I don’t. I built it inside of my employer’s walls (hedge fund), so I’d have to rebuild it from scratch in order to acquire paying customers (not a bad idea).
      - dpflan 1y ago
        True, from scratch, may need to be cautious regarding re-creating it having built it on your employer's time and machinery/property, check your employment contract. Still very cool that you built this!
- erredois 1y ago
  They seem to be pushing their message now as an easy way to integrate AI to workflows.
nomilk 1y ago
147k stars and currently the 38th most starred repo on all of GitHub [0, 1]. Seems odd that a project has so many stars yet is largely unfamiliar to much of HN (corrections appreciated). I asked an LLM if there's ways to detect suspicious starring activity (e.g. if stars were purchased). It suggested checking the project's star history [2] (doesn't appear suspicious). It also suggested the stars to issues ratio. n8n has 147k:6k (about 25:1) compared to, say, rails with 57k stars and 18k issues (about 3:1). I haven't looked deeply into n8n (is it 'no-code' for building agents?). I just see hype and am default skeptical. [0] https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n [1] https://github.com/EvanLi/Github-Ranking/blob/master/Top100/Top-100-stars.md https://github.com/EvanLi/Github-Ranking/blob/master/Top100/... [2] https://www.star-history.com/#n8n-io/n8n&Date https://www.star-history.com/#n8n-io/n8n&Date
- jychang 1y ago
  It got viral on Tiktok of all places a while back, so I'm not surprised at the number of stars.
  - nomilk 1y ago
    Surprised there's much overlap between users of Tiktok and GitHub, but perhaps I'm just old :)
    - krapp 1y ago
      Why wouldn't there be an overlap? Over a billion people use TikTok, it would be weird if that set didn't include most of the people who use Github.
- victorbjorklund 1y ago
  They been around for a long time (I was using it back in 2020 i think) but now they are just getting hype by AI. Its not relly AI. Its a no-code platform that has a lot of connections to tools and a few AI nodes. So you can build automations that have a step that uses an AI. But really its more a no code platform for automation (maybe no code is wrong wors and more like visual programming)
user3113 1y ago
I made something similar to n8n. its not visual but it helps you automate things. https://rapidforge.io/ https://rapidforge.io/. Despite they are visual they also have learning curve. I think most of these tools are great but I feel they are overvalued. Its my take I might be wrong.
viraptor 1y ago
Shame it's not FOSS. There's still https://www.windmill.dev/ https://www.windmill.dev/ though.
- bsnnkv 1y ago
  This comment got me digging, n8n actually has a pretty good post-open source license[1] - I'm glad to see more successful examples of this sort of licensing in the wild [1]: https://docs.n8n.io/sustainable-use-license/ https://docs.n8n.io/sustainable-use-license/
  - poly2it 1y ago
    It's great and all that their business strategy is working out, but anyone looking to use a FOSS solution isn't going to care at all. This is basically just allowing self-hosting of a third-party's cloud, which is an improvement over traditional SaaS, but shouldn't dilute the FOSS label.
    - bsnnkv 1y ago
      > but shouldn't dilute the FOSS label This is such a strange thing to post in response to a link which states: > Although n8n's source code is available under the Sustainable Use License, according to the Open Source Initiative (OSI), open source licenses can't include limitations on use, so we do not call ourselves open source.
      - poly2it 1y ago
        I don't think it's strange at all. These licenses obviously have rhetoric reminiscent of FOSS licenses. These companies just don't want to call their technology proprietary.
        bsnnkv 1y ago
        I'm not sure what else you and others who make these kinds of comments are looking for from projects like these who are already explicitly and clearly stating that they are _not_ FOSS projects It's as if you don't want source code to be available _at all_ unless it's under a FOSS license
cube2222 1y ago
Kudos to the n8n team! Seems like the focus is increasingly shifting to AI. Question to folks who’ve used n8n extensively, I’m curious, what are your experiences with n8n, and how much does it end up being a web of verbose “visual python” in practice? I’m very much biased here and have a vested interest, because I’ve been working on a new product not far from this space, but much more oriented at technical users (platform engineers, primarily, see [0] and [1] for a shameless plug, not released yet), but really, I’m curious about what experiences folks have had here, and what your main issues with it were, esp. if you used it in a platform/devops engineering role, or maybe why you decided not to use it. [0]: https://spacelift.io/flows https://spacelift.io/flows [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZHGg1QIAQk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZHGg1QIAQk
- lawnchair 1y ago
  Using another company's funding announcement to shill your own is lame.
  - blitzar 1y ago
    Sure, but it is (nearly) the entire purpose of this forum.
    - adastra22 1y ago
      What gives you that impression?
      - bix6 1y ago
        Ever notice all the YC hiring / launch announcements? This is literally an advertising / jobs board for them.
        adastra22 1y ago
        Not on someone else’s post/announcement. That is bad form.
mattfrommars 1y ago
I have come to realize these drag and drop no code solution are good for low complexity solution. If project scales, it is better to write code. I kid you not, we use another no code solution at work and it was originally meant for PM to create workflows. It came to us the devs to make it and we resent daily working on it. Our life would have been much similar if our workflows had been written in code.
- hannofcart 1y ago
  PM (at the next sprint meeting): "So, Matt, for your next story here's this 48000 line code base that I vibe coded for the new vendor interop feature you said would be difficult to implement correctly. Of course this is a standalone page written in some language that I forget. I think Cursor mentioned some animal name... anyway. Can you please put this into our product please?"
  - blitzar 1y ago
    "I haven't run or tested it yet, but I am sure it will work. At worst it will just need a few tweaks, an hour or two max."
  - an0malous 1y ago
    I wish I had gone into medicine like my parents wanted
    - PyWoody 1y ago
      I think about going to law school more with every passing day.
      - inhumantsar 1y ago
        Just imagine all the vibe coded nonsense your clients would bring to the table. Billable hours sure, but still.
- edoceo 1y ago
simlevesque 1y ago
It's pronounced Nathan ?
- Deukhoofd 1y ago
  It was originally called Nodemation, but the creator thought it was too long, so he shortened it to that, pronounced n-eight-n. https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n?tab=readme-ov-file#what-does-n8n-mean https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n?tab=readme-ov-file#what-does-n...
  - shrx 1y ago
    What a stupid naming convention, I'm not surprised it's something coming from the javascript ecosystem. Nodemation would have been perfectly fine.
    - JimDabell 1y ago
      This doesn’t come from the JavaScript ecosystem. Numeronyms have been in use in the computer industry since before JavaScript existed. “i18n” (“internationalisation”) has been in use since the mid-80s, for instance.
elAhmo 1y ago
That is a lot of money! Seems like a great product, but for something that there is plenty of alternatives or players in a similar space, it is hard to see how this money wont be spent to just increase sales / AI push, which is not necessarily a good thing.
- kristopherleads 1y ago
  It's also just not where the product needs to go. When a lot of users get frustrated and jump back to high-code environments (https://www.reddit.com/r/n8n/comments/1mcm9d2/why_i_left_n8n_for_python_and_why_it_was_the_best/ https://www.reddit.com/r/n8n/comments/1mcm9d2/why_i_left_n8n...), that points to high-friction and not enough control. Iterating in just AI for AI's sake isn't going to fix that.
  - cap11235 1y ago
    Behold the cargo cult. DAGs are not new at all, and N8N doesn't haven't any "special sauce". Its AI integration is kind of a joke, since its similar to what my phone tacked on as "features": summarization and translation and visual style editing. For serious usage in an ML system, you want gradients and experiments to be run, and N8N is not that. It feels like systemd got reimplemented with a GUI and a lot of gaffer tape.
    - kristopherleads 1y ago
      That's how I explained it to someone else recently - a lot of solutions on the hype train right now feel like they're made with duct tape and popsicle sticks.
BobbyTables2 1y ago
For me the Math isn’t Mathing. Hiring 50 fairly well paid developers is roughly $15M/year, maybe more if one insists on SV compensation which always seem a bit absurd. $240M total funding is a lot of money. They’ve only been around for about 5 years and probably didn’t start out fully staffed. So they’re basically covered for the next 10-15 years even if they had zero sales ? Having 500 employees won’t speed things up and would actually slow down development - so why so much funding? Or who actually waits that long? The first version of Windows 10 was released about 10 years ago and soon will be EOL. I feel software investment is like some oil ETFs — there is more investment money than the thing to invest in…
- hu3 1y ago
  Since their betting on AI integration, I'm guessing a good part of their spending will be on GPUs/Cloud. Specially if they go the PaaS/SaaS AI route.
  - hobofan 1y ago
    The AI integrations are bring-your-own-key, so they have 0 GPU/AI-Cloud spend (outside of their dev/test work). For their Business (self-hosted) plan, they have essentially 0 cost per customer.
- riku_iki 1y ago
  what about marketing and sales?
- JimDabell 1y ago
  Once you hit product-market fit for a SaaS, engineering becomes a smaller proportion of your spending and you start hiring and spending a lot more on sales and marketing. If you know you can earn more than a dollar for every dollar you spend on customer acquisition, you throw as much money as you can at acquiring customers.
  - hobofan 1y ago
    n8n is already very obviously marketing + sales driven, which is where there valuation originates and where the money will go to. Of course that valuation makes sense if you've seen the insane prices they charge.
rustoo 1y ago
This is such great news. My question to non-tech folks who used n8n, especially marketers: what has been your experience with n8n? Did it help you automate creative things like blogs, newsletters, white papers, etc? What tips would you give about n8n?
foundart 1y ago
Just participated in a hackathon where my team used n8n. We found it didn't have good connectors for getting data from Kinesis streams or Slack. Given the abbreviated timeline of the hackathon we ended up simulating the Kinesis input and dropping the interactive Slack part of our project, which was unfortunate. I hope they spend a good bit of the $180M on building out their input connectors.
skrtskrt 1y ago
Here come the HN comments from people that work at closed source companies or companies that profit off the free labor of open source devs, wailing and gnashing their teeth that it's not the purest form of open source blessed by Stallman himself and therefore is radioactive and doomed to fail.
- random3 1y ago
  Only here to reply. For context, I worked on open source while at a “closed source” company and founded a “closed source” company. I want to address at least a part of the open/closed pet peeve. The problem, in general is not about “unpure” OSS. The problem is “free riding” by slapping “open source” marketing without any real or meaningful open source contribution, nor any intent.
  - echelon 1y ago
    Fair source, open core, non-commercial, "do not compete with us" / "no reselling", and MAU/MRR caps are all better than closed source. We should be happy when companies do this.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
- scosman 1y ago
  Don't forget praising a completely closed competitors with zero sense of irony.
- nailer 1y ago
  There is no ‘purest form of open source’. There is software that meets the open source definition and software that doesn’t. If you’re on HN it’s surprising you’re not aware of this. stallman is from the free software movement which doesn’t agree with open source since FSF is concerned with moral freedoms.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
seer 1y ago
While n8n is amazing for the odd office automation and giving semi-technical people an enormously powerful tool to get things done, it seems it can’t really replace a real backend, and mostly because of the n8n team choices than any technology. We were trailing it and wanted to essentially switch our entire backend to it - and technically it seemed to be able to do the job, but their licensing turned out to not be a fit. For a moderately used app we very quickly burned through their “executions” that were allotted by our license - and that’s where we host it ourselves, configuring and paying for the servers, load balancers, key value store and database, with its failovers and backups. So the license was to use it on top of all that, and even their highest enterprise license was cutting it close, and if you “run out” of these executions, the service just stops working … And all of that would have been fair if it was hosted, but sounds ludicrous to me for something we self host. I think it is an incredible piece of tech, but just not suited for a dynamic startup, and once we spent the time to code up the alternative paths for our use cases, it no longer made sense to use n8n at all, as we mostly solved all the problems it was helping us with.
- jitl 1y ago
  Surely you can negotiate an unlimited amount of executions?
  - spwa4 1y ago
    Only by installing nodeRED.
  - kristopherleads 1y ago
    You could, but then you start getting into additional costs, controlling how much of your metrics are surfaced vs. kept internal, etc. At that point, why not just go for another solution? Like you could make a car like a truck, but why not just buy a truck in the first place?
    - jitl 1y ago
      It's more like they sell a truck, but disable it remotely if I drive more than 50 miles a day. And I want to drive unlimited miles. > then you start getting into additional costs, controlling how much of your metrics are surfaced vs. kept internal, etc I don't know what this means. In my experience with anything sold B2B, all the terms are negotiable. If you want unlimited everything, you can ask for that.
dvcoolarun 1y ago
Two days ago, with the launch of OpenAI’s AgentKit, people were claiming that similar tools and startups would become obsolete. I think the pie is big enough for everyone to benefit. I haven’t tried these agent-and-connector-based approaches yet — where should someone start to get a good grasp of this kind of automation?
- Towaway69 1y ago
  I doubt it, looking at the VCs involved, this is probably a pump & dump to have an exit to OpenAI. Hence also the strong repositioning towards AI - which n8n seemed to have done in this year.
ishikawa 1y ago
What surprised me the most was to know the company is from Germany. That shows that with a good product you don't need necessarily to be in the US.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
nirav72 1y ago
I’ve used n8n for local adhoc automation. They had a nice desktop version and had this neat option to export the flow and run it standalone. They got rid of the desktop version. Not sure if there is option to run standalone flows now without hosting the entire n8n app in a container.
Towaway69 1y ago
So what is the exit strategy? Sell to OpenAI or NVIDIA? Or will this become a white elephant too large too sell like Zalando? Whatever happened to IFTTT? Edit: It’s a valuation of 2.5 Billion - hence my question. There is snowballs chance that they will ever be worth that much. They are SaaS and not consumer products. They have no side gig like amazon or google - they have a single product in a tight market.
- qrios 1y ago
  > They are SaaS and not consumer products. They have no side gig like amazon or google - they have a single product in a tight market. Like Databricks with no consumer products, no side gig, single product, but 100 billion valuation[1]? [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/sasirekhasubramanian/2025/10/07/databricks-a-much-anticipated-ipo-but-will-the-honeymoon-last/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/sasirekhasubramanian/2025/10/07...
  - Towaway69 1y ago
    Databricks collects data, does n8n collect data? I thought they sell compute for various visual desgned workflows? So data does not stay on premises or? Geniunely asking since I do wonder what their USP is and why it's worth 2.5B.
    - qrios 1y ago
      Databricks offers an engineering, management, ETL (focussed on data) platform as SaaS/PaaS. As far as I can see, this is what the revenue comes from. n8n offers an orchestration, integration, ETL platform as SaaS/PaaS (plus self-hosted). For many medium sized and enterprise companies such a service is as important as the data platform from Databricks. From my personal experience in a small EU-wide enterprise in finance sector, the budget for the data platform is in the lower 7digits/year. For automation and workflows multiple solutions in place. Some are outdated for years (on mainframes) or with an EoL in the next years (due to retirements in-house or at the datacenter provider). Since decades such companies externalize their own business logic – formally running on homegrown software – to SaaS vendors. Established workflows are quite often not able to integrate these kind of "modern" integration. REST? GraphQL? WebSocket? We speak SOAP and FTP! So, from my point of view n8n is a valid solution in a growing market.
tomasphan 1y ago
Question for n8n and other orchestration tool users: Why not use an LLM to vibe code the orchestration? Is it still hard to host or not mature enough? I tried n8n but found it easier and cheaper to have Claude code something and then throw it in docker as API that I could interact with. Tool integrations were also easy to vibe code. I am maybe more technical than the average n8n user? Not sure
- rizky05 1y ago
  [dead]
alluro2 1y ago
One thing I don't get fully is people that say "it's easier to write code" - we use n8n for workflow orchestration - a junior developer can put together some nodes to e.g. get data from an API, transform it (by writing code), prepare a CSV, send an email. In about an hour. You then have a workflow that you set to run every night at 2am, and that you can open, understand visually at a glance, modify, and continue running without any other actions required. All self-hosted on a small VM. Alternative would be writing custom code, deploying it somewhere, setting it to run automatically on schedule somehow, and modifying it and redeploying through a dozen steps every time. Of course there is docker and cron and deployment scripts - but all of that is not needed with n8n for these kinds of use-cases. For me, that's the primary value of n8n - nodes themselves are nice-to-have shortcuts, some of the time. Maybe I'm not familiar with tools that make it easy to "just write code" and have everything else (deployment, orchestration etc) covered?

N8n raises $180M

235 points by doppp 1y ago

phrotoma 1y ago

What is this thing? IFTTT?

tom1337 1y ago
As far as I used it (which was for like 15minutes) it's like Zapier but with deeper customizability and you can self host it.
Deukhoofd 1y ago
It's basically a piece of software for doing visual programming where workflows can be triggered by events (webhooks, web calls, and a bunch of other things). Has a self-hosting option which is quite nice.
sharpfuryz 1y ago
More like an actor engine than IFTTT, a simple and good tool that can simplify workflows like "daily export data from HubSpot to Google spreadsheet, then send emails."
yuvadam 1y ago
an MLM scheme

BoredPositron 1y ago

5000 n8n workflows that made me millions. 1 n8n workflow that made me 5k per hour... It's an okay product I appreciate that it's selfhosted with good documentation but they absolutely destroyed their brand with excessive affiliate marketing and now nothing of substance is left if you search for it anywhere.

mnky9800n 1y ago
When I think of n8n I think of the n8n subreddit of people posting about how their workflow is broken and they lost all their customers and don't know how to make it work and the obvious solution is that if they had written actual software with tests, fallbacks, etc. this wouldn't have happened.
- narrator 1y ago
  I have written some stuff with n8n and I think it's is better than most no code platforms because it's debuggable. For example, it keeps all the historical executions so you can see what happened when the workflows failed and what all the data going in and out of each component in the system was during the failed run. It also has real detailed error messages instead of just vague "An Error Occurred" popup boxes that don't provide any information. Also, it's different from most nocode platforms in that it is self-hostable and you can easily export and import programs from it and share them with other people.
  - ekianjo 1y ago
    If you want to something similar to n8n but with a professional tool, better use NiFi
    - cap11235 1y ago
      Worth noting for NiFi you end up with a bunch of integrations built-in via https://camel.apache.org/ https://camel.apache.org/ which makes it easy to plug into some small portion of a task and then expand.
- havefunbesafe 1y ago
  That subreddit is the new r/dropshipping. I joined to see what fun tooling people were building, and I found it mostly populated with people attempting to setup a "business" with a single feature solution.
  - mnky9800n 1y ago
    It was a giant disappointment to me as well. I guess it’s reasonable that people want something for nothing otherwise the lottery wouldn’t make any money. But it is rather unfortunate that something that could be otherwise a cool community of people making automations is instead just get rich quick schemes. I suppose we could all try building a n8n community that is not focused on get rich quick schemes. But tbh anything I need automated is far easier in python especially when all the connectors in n8n that you may not know the particular python library for (e.g., some Reddit comment aggregator) you can easily convince Claude code to generate for you.
weird-eye-issue 1y ago
They've been growing exponentially the last couple years because of affiliate marketing in large part
- monkeydust 1y ago
  Any more details on how they made this work for them? Hard to pull off.
  - cinericius 1y ago
    Is it hard to pull off? Give people a cut of the revenue from new paying customers who first visit by clicking their referral link. Everyone else does the work for you, but you lose control of the brand as people who only care about making a quick buck use your name to spam low-quality videos and medium articles.
  - weird-eye-issue 1y ago
    Have a good product and then pay people a percentage when they sell it on your behalf. Works amazingly in some niches. I personally paid out affiliates around $1m for my SaaS
anticorporate 1y ago
This. I like n8n. It feels a little less rough around the edges for visual coding than something like huggin or nodered. The documentation is good, but finding examples and things like that offsite is impossible.
- rehevkor5 1y ago
  The documentation leaves a lot to be desired. Especially regarding custom node development. But also on the user side, for example the kaka trigger node has zero info on its doc page.
shiandow 1y ago
I'm currently dealing with some of the fallout of their marketing, could you explain a bit better what you mean? It was good but isn't any more?
iyn 1y ago
Can you share some examples of the workflows that you had success with?
Bhushan2005 1y ago
[flagged]

kamranjon 1y ago

I’m just wondering if anyone that is closer to this space could shed some light on if this $2.5B valuation seems more or less accurate? I have played around with n8n - I just didn’t know if it was ubiquitous/profitable. $180m round seemed pretty huge but maybe it’s really a unicorn?

binarymax 1y ago
There is no accurate valuation in this space.
helsinki 1y ago
I built a GitHub-native coding / review agent that outperforms CodeRabbit (by a lot), and it only took me like two hundred hours. There are a few of us using it at work, meanwhile CodeRabbit is valued at $550M.
- dpflan 1y ago
  Do you have paying customers? Putting money into customer acquisition and retention is where a lot of money can go versus R&D.
  - helsinki 1y ago
    No, I don’t. I built it inside of my employer’s walls (hedge fund), so I’d have to rebuild it from scratch in order to acquire paying customers (not a bad idea).
    - dpflan 1y ago
      True, from scratch, may need to be cautious regarding re-creating it having built it on your employer's time and machinery/property, check your employment contract. Still very cool that you built this!
erredois 1y ago
They seem to be pushing their message now as an easy way to integrate AI to workflows.

nomilk 1y ago

147k stars and currently the 38th most starred repo on all of GitHub [0, 1]. Seems odd that a project has so many stars yet is largely unfamiliar to much of HN (corrections appreciated). I asked an LLM if there's ways to detect suspicious starring activity (e.g. if stars were purchased). It suggested checking the project's star history [2] (doesn't appear suspicious). It also suggested the stars to issues ratio. n8n has 147k:6k (about 25:1) compared to, say, rails with 57k stars and 18k issues (about 3:1). I haven't looked deeply into n8n (is it 'no-code' for building agents?). I just see hype and am default skeptical. [0] https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n [1] https://github.com/EvanLi/Github-Ranking/blob/master/Top100/Top-100-stars.md https://github.com/EvanLi/Github-Ranking/blob/master/Top100/... [2] https://www.star-history.com/#n8n-io/n8n&Date https://www.star-history.com/#n8n-io/n8n&Date

jychang 1y ago
It got viral on Tiktok of all places a while back, so I'm not surprised at the number of stars.
- nomilk 1y ago
  Surprised there's much overlap between users of Tiktok and GitHub, but perhaps I'm just old :)
  - krapp 1y ago
    Why wouldn't there be an overlap? Over a billion people use TikTok, it would be weird if that set didn't include most of the people who use Github.
victorbjorklund 1y ago
They been around for a long time (I was using it back in 2020 i think) but now they are just getting hype by AI. Its not relly AI. Its a no-code platform that has a lot of connections to tools and a few AI nodes. So you can build automations that have a step that uses an AI. But really its more a no code platform for automation (maybe no code is wrong wors and more like visual programming)

user3113 1y ago

I made something similar to n8n. its not visual but it helps you automate things. https://rapidforge.io/ https://rapidforge.io/. Despite they are visual they also have learning curve. I think most of these tools are great but I feel they are overvalued. Its my take I might be wrong.

viraptor 1y ago

Shame it's not FOSS. There's still https://www.windmill.dev/ https://www.windmill.dev/ though.

bsnnkv 1y ago
This comment got me digging, n8n actually has a pretty good post-open source license[1] - I'm glad to see more successful examples of this sort of licensing in the wild [1]: https://docs.n8n.io/sustainable-use-license/ https://docs.n8n.io/sustainable-use-license/
- poly2it 1y ago
  It's great and all that their business strategy is working out, but anyone looking to use a FOSS solution isn't going to care at all. This is basically just allowing self-hosting of a third-party's cloud, which is an improvement over traditional SaaS, but shouldn't dilute the FOSS label.
  - bsnnkv 1y ago
    > but shouldn't dilute the FOSS label This is such a strange thing to post in response to a link which states: > Although n8n's source code is available under the Sustainable Use License, according to the Open Source Initiative (OSI), open source licenses can't include limitations on use, so we do not call ourselves open source.
    - poly2it 1y ago
      I don't think it's strange at all. These licenses obviously have rhetoric reminiscent of FOSS licenses. These companies just don't want to call their technology proprietary.
      - bsnnkv 1y ago
        I'm not sure what else you and others who make these kinds of comments are looking for from projects like these who are already explicitly and clearly stating that they are _not_ FOSS projects It's as if you don't want source code to be available _at all_ unless it's under a FOSS license

cube2222 1y ago

Kudos to the n8n team! Seems like the focus is increasingly shifting to AI. Question to folks who’ve used n8n extensively, I’m curious, what are your experiences with n8n, and how much does it end up being a web of verbose “visual python” in practice? I’m very much biased here and have a vested interest, because I’ve been working on a new product not far from this space, but much more oriented at technical users (platform engineers, primarily, see [0] and [1] for a shameless plug, not released yet), but really, I’m curious about what experiences folks have had here, and what your main issues with it were, esp. if you used it in a platform/devops engineering role, or maybe why you decided not to use it. [0]: https://spacelift.io/flows https://spacelift.io/flows [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZHGg1QIAQk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZHGg1QIAQk

lawnchair 1y ago
Using another company's funding announcement to shill your own is lame.
- blitzar 1y ago
  Sure, but it is (nearly) the entire purpose of this forum.
  - adastra22 1y ago
    What gives you that impression?
    - bix6 1y ago
      Ever notice all the YC hiring / launch announcements? This is literally an advertising / jobs board for them.
      - adastra22 1y ago
        Not on someone else’s post/announcement. That is bad form.

mattfrommars 1y ago

I have come to realize these drag and drop no code solution are good for low complexity solution. If project scales, it is better to write code. I kid you not, we use another no code solution at work and it was originally meant for PM to create workflows. It came to us the devs to make it and we resent daily working on it. Our life would have been much similar if our workflows had been written in code.

hannofcart 1y ago
PM (at the next sprint meeting): "So, Matt, for your next story here's this 48000 line code base that I vibe coded for the new vendor interop feature you said would be difficult to implement correctly. Of course this is a standalone page written in some language that I forget. I think Cursor mentioned some animal name... anyway. Can you please put this into our product please?"
- blitzar 1y ago
  "I haven't run or tested it yet, but I am sure it will work. At worst it will just need a few tweaks, an hour or two max."
- an0malous 1y ago
  I wish I had gone into medicine like my parents wanted
  - PyWoody 1y ago
    I think about going to law school more with every passing day.
    - inhumantsar 1y ago
      Just imagine all the vibe coded nonsense your clients would bring to the table. Billable hours sure, but still.
edoceo 1y ago

simlevesque 1y ago

It's pronounced Nathan ?

Deukhoofd 1y ago
It was originally called Nodemation, but the creator thought it was too long, so he shortened it to that, pronounced n-eight-n. https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n?tab=readme-ov-file#what-does-n8n-mean https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n?tab=readme-ov-file#what-does-n...
- shrx 1y ago
  What a stupid naming convention, I'm not surprised it's something coming from the javascript ecosystem. Nodemation would have been perfectly fine.
  - JimDabell 1y ago
    This doesn’t come from the JavaScript ecosystem. Numeronyms have been in use in the computer industry since before JavaScript existed. “i18n” (“internationalisation”) has been in use since the mid-80s, for instance.

elAhmo 1y ago

That is a lot of money! Seems like a great product, but for something that there is plenty of alternatives or players in a similar space, it is hard to see how this money wont be spent to just increase sales / AI push, which is not necessarily a good thing.

kristopherleads 1y ago
It's also just not where the product needs to go. When a lot of users get frustrated and jump back to high-code environments (https://www.reddit.com/r/n8n/comments/1mcm9d2/why_i_left_n8n_for_python_and_why_it_was_the_best/ https://www.reddit.com/r/n8n/comments/1mcm9d2/why_i_left_n8n...), that points to high-friction and not enough control. Iterating in just AI for AI's sake isn't going to fix that.
- cap11235 1y ago
  Behold the cargo cult. DAGs are not new at all, and N8N doesn't haven't any "special sauce". Its AI integration is kind of a joke, since its similar to what my phone tacked on as "features": summarization and translation and visual style editing. For serious usage in an ML system, you want gradients and experiments to be run, and N8N is not that. It feels like systemd got reimplemented with a GUI and a lot of gaffer tape.
  - kristopherleads 1y ago
    That's how I explained it to someone else recently - a lot of solutions on the hype train right now feel like they're made with duct tape and popsicle sticks.

BobbyTables2 1y ago

For me the Math isn’t Mathing. Hiring 50 fairly well paid developers is roughly $15M/year, maybe more if one insists on SV compensation which always seem a bit absurd. $240M total funding is a lot of money. They’ve only been around for about 5 years and probably didn’t start out fully staffed. So they’re basically covered for the next 10-15 years even if they had zero sales ? Having 500 employees won’t speed things up and would actually slow down development - so why so much funding? Or who actually waits that long? The first version of Windows 10 was released about 10 years ago and soon will be EOL. I feel software investment is like some oil ETFs — there is more investment money than the thing to invest in…

hu3 1y ago
Since their betting on AI integration, I'm guessing a good part of their spending will be on GPUs/Cloud. Specially if they go the PaaS/SaaS AI route.
- hobofan 1y ago
  The AI integrations are bring-your-own-key, so they have 0 GPU/AI-Cloud spend (outside of their dev/test work). For their Business (self-hosted) plan, they have essentially 0 cost per customer.
riku_iki 1y ago
what about marketing and sales?
JimDabell 1y ago
Once you hit product-market fit for a SaaS, engineering becomes a smaller proportion of your spending and you start hiring and spending a lot more on sales and marketing. If you know you can earn more than a dollar for every dollar you spend on customer acquisition, you throw as much money as you can at acquiring customers.
- hobofan 1y ago
  n8n is already very obviously marketing + sales driven, which is where there valuation originates and where the money will go to. Of course that valuation makes sense if you've seen the insane prices they charge.

rustoo 1y ago

This is such great news. My question to non-tech folks who used n8n, especially marketers: what has been your experience with n8n? Did it help you automate creative things like blogs, newsletters, white papers, etc? What tips would you give about n8n?

foundart 1y ago

Just participated in a hackathon where my team used n8n. We found it didn't have good connectors for getting data from Kinesis streams or Slack. Given the abbreviated timeline of the hackathon we ended up simulating the Kinesis input and dropping the interactive Slack part of our project, which was unfortunate. I hope they spend a good bit of the $180M on building out their input connectors.

skrtskrt 1y ago

Here come the HN comments from people that work at closed source companies or companies that profit off the free labor of open source devs, wailing and gnashing their teeth that it's not the purest form of open source blessed by Stallman himself and therefore is radioactive and doomed to fail.

random3 1y ago
Only here to reply. For context, I worked on open source while at a “closed source” company and founded a “closed source” company. I want to address at least a part of the open/closed pet peeve. The problem, in general is not about “unpure” OSS. The problem is “free riding” by slapping “open source” marketing without any real or meaningful open source contribution, nor any intent.
- echelon 1y ago
  Fair source, open core, non-commercial, "do not compete with us" / "no reselling", and MAU/MRR caps are all better than closed source. We should be happy when companies do this.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
scosman 1y ago
Don't forget praising a completely closed competitors with zero sense of irony.
nailer 1y ago
There is no ‘purest form of open source’. There is software that meets the open source definition and software that doesn’t. If you’re on HN it’s surprising you’re not aware of this. stallman is from the free software movement which doesn’t agree with open source since FSF is concerned with moral freedoms.

deleted 1y ago

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seer 1y ago

While n8n is amazing for the odd office automation and giving semi-technical people an enormously powerful tool to get things done, it seems it can’t really replace a real backend, and mostly because of the n8n team choices than any technology. We were trailing it and wanted to essentially switch our entire backend to it - and technically it seemed to be able to do the job, but their licensing turned out to not be a fit. For a moderately used app we very quickly burned through their “executions” that were allotted by our license - and that’s where we host it ourselves, configuring and paying for the servers, load balancers, key value store and database, with its failovers and backups. So the license was to use it on top of all that, and even their highest enterprise license was cutting it close, and if you “run out” of these executions, the service just stops working … And all of that would have been fair if it was hosted, but sounds ludicrous to me for something we self host. I think it is an incredible piece of tech, but just not suited for a dynamic startup, and once we spent the time to code up the alternative paths for our use cases, it no longer made sense to use n8n at all, as we mostly solved all the problems it was helping us with.

jitl 1y ago
Surely you can negotiate an unlimited amount of executions?
- spwa4 1y ago
  Only by installing nodeRED.
- kristopherleads 1y ago
  You could, but then you start getting into additional costs, controlling how much of your metrics are surfaced vs. kept internal, etc. At that point, why not just go for another solution? Like you could make a car like a truck, but why not just buy a truck in the first place?
  - jitl 1y ago
    It's more like they sell a truck, but disable it remotely if I drive more than 50 miles a day. And I want to drive unlimited miles. > then you start getting into additional costs, controlling how much of your metrics are surfaced vs. kept internal, etc I don't know what this means. In my experience with anything sold B2B, all the terms are negotiable. If you want unlimited everything, you can ask for that.

dvcoolarun 1y ago

Two days ago, with the launch of OpenAI’s AgentKit, people were claiming that similar tools and startups would become obsolete. I think the pie is big enough for everyone to benefit. I haven’t tried these agent-and-connector-based approaches yet — where should someone start to get a good grasp of this kind of automation?

Towaway69 1y ago
I doubt it, looking at the VCs involved, this is probably a pump & dump to have an exit to OpenAI. Hence also the strong repositioning towards AI - which n8n seemed to have done in this year.

ishikawa 1y ago

What surprised me the most was to know the company is from Germany. That shows that with a good product you don't need necessarily to be in the US.

deleted 1y ago
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nirav72 1y ago

I’ve used n8n for local adhoc automation. They had a nice desktop version and had this neat option to export the flow and run it standalone. They got rid of the desktop version. Not sure if there is option to run standalone flows now without hosting the entire n8n app in a container.

Towaway69 1y ago

So what is the exit strategy? Sell to OpenAI or NVIDIA? Or will this become a white elephant too large too sell like Zalando? Whatever happened to IFTTT? Edit: It’s a valuation of 2.5 Billion - hence my question. There is snowballs chance that they will ever be worth that much. They are SaaS and not consumer products. They have no side gig like amazon or google - they have a single product in a tight market.

qrios 1y ago
> They are SaaS and not consumer products. They have no side gig like amazon or google - they have a single product in a tight market. Like Databricks with no consumer products, no side gig, single product, but 100 billion valuation[1]? [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/sasirekhasubramanian/2025/10/07/databricks-a-much-anticipated-ipo-but-will-the-honeymoon-last/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/sasirekhasubramanian/2025/10/07...
- Towaway69 1y ago
  Databricks collects data, does n8n collect data? I thought they sell compute for various visual desgned workflows? So data does not stay on premises or? Geniunely asking since I do wonder what their USP is and why it's worth 2.5B.
  - qrios 1y ago
    Databricks offers an engineering, management, ETL (focussed on data) platform as SaaS/PaaS. As far as I can see, this is what the revenue comes from. n8n offers an orchestration, integration, ETL platform as SaaS/PaaS (plus self-hosted). For many medium sized and enterprise companies such a service is as important as the data platform from Databricks. From my personal experience in a small EU-wide enterprise in finance sector, the budget for the data platform is in the lower 7digits/year. For automation and workflows multiple solutions in place. Some are outdated for years (on mainframes) or with an EoL in the next years (due to retirements in-house or at the datacenter provider). Since decades such companies externalize their own business logic – formally running on homegrown software – to SaaS vendors. Established workflows are quite often not able to integrate these kind of "modern" integration. REST? GraphQL? WebSocket? We speak SOAP and FTP! So, from my point of view n8n is a valid solution in a growing market.

tomasphan 1y ago

Question for n8n and other orchestration tool users: Why not use an LLM to vibe code the orchestration? Is it still hard to host or not mature enough? I tried n8n but found it easier and cheaper to have Claude code something and then throw it in docker as API that I could interact with. Tool integrations were also easy to vibe code. I am maybe more technical than the average n8n user? Not sure

rizky05 1y ago
[dead]

alluro2 1y ago

One thing I don't get fully is people that say "it's easier to write code" - we use n8n for workflow orchestration - a junior developer can put together some nodes to e.g. get data from an API, transform it (by writing code), prepare a CSV, send an email. In about an hour. You then have a workflow that you set to run every night at 2am, and that you can open, understand visually at a glance, modify, and continue running without any other actions required. All self-hosted on a small VM. Alternative would be writing custom code, deploying it somewhere, setting it to run automatically on schedule somehow, and modifying it and redeploying through a dozen steps every time. Of course there is docker and cron and deployment scripts - but all of that is not needed with n8n for these kinds of use-cases. For me, that's the primary value of n8n - nodes themselves are nice-to-have shortcuts, some of the time. Maybe I'm not familiar with tools that make it easy to "just write code" and have everything else (deployment, orchestration etc) covered?