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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 experienc

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.
        bix6 1y ago
        All is fair in Love and PR
        adastra22 1y ago
        Absolutely not. That's a good way to get yourself banned, and also a good way to make sure I never use your product.
        blitzar 1y ago
        one man's bad form is another man's good grindset
  - meiraleal 1y ago
    [dead]
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- knowitnone3 1y ago
  what's lame about it? I read the comments specifically for alternative tools. Often times, commenters provide links to other tools and nobody has ever complained...until you came along
hirako2000 1y ago
n8n in my experience using it for 2 years now, and compared to similar solutions as there are many doing quite the same thing: it is just a very good product. It's stable. It has a gazillion integrations out of the box and is architectured as a module system so it's easy to create your own. It is very community centric, with community workflows and also integration modules people kindly publish on GitHub. Oh, it's open (core) source. And while certain (just a couple of) enterprise features should have been made open to qualify as being called open source, it's very close to that. Most powerful features are open, ready to self host, modify and make your own. Does it end up driving webs of python partials forming apps. Absolutely. Does it scale ? It does. Do complex flow remain maintainable? As a coder I prefer to maintain a repo of code than visual elements made of snippets. But, the critical advantage is productivity, for simple flows the community intelligence solves everything so you can get an operational set of valuable solutions within hours, even minutes once proficient with the interface. Another factor is, you can deploy pilot flow acting as applications, test them with production data, and make that live with the press of a button once pilot testing is done. With a code project you would need a robust and well polished cicd pipeline to get that. The limit or cons to me is a logic and compute heavy solution just isn't a fit to run on an n8n platform, scaling n8n just isn't as intuitive as scaling pure application component that do one thing. An example you may have a cpu heavy node, and a memory heavy node. It makes scaling the whole instance very inefficient. Scaling memory of a dedicated memory intensive application and scaling compute for the compute intensive component simply is far more optimal. If resource cost is not significant relative to the value of your flows then just scale a self hosted n8n and you only need to digest having to maintain, following your analogy, a "nest of pythons". Note: n8n sadly only supports python or JavaScript for custom code nodes, would have been nicer had they built a polyglot runtime instead. That's however more than what every other flow platforms let users do.
- cube2222 1y ago
  Wow, thanks a lot for this extensive response, appreciate it a lot!
- turnsout 1y ago
  This is so helpful, thank you. I've been evaluating n8n as a way to build things quickly for clients, but I do wonder about what happens when they want to turn the automation into a full app. I wish there was a first-party way to export an n8n workflow as a plain Python script or set of scripts. Have you ever had to migrate a project from n8n to code?
SafeDusk 1y ago
Building close to this space[0] too but starting with low code instead of no code. Still wondering in node-based GUI is the way to go, another alternative is something like Lovable where it is entirely chat based. [0]: https://github.com/aperoc/toolkami https://github.com/aperoc/toolkami

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.
      - bix6 1y ago
        All is fair in Love and PR
        adastra22 1y ago
        Absolutely not. That's a good way to get yourself banned, and also a good way to make sure I never use your product.
        blitzar 1y ago
        one man's bad form is another man's good grindset
- meiraleal 1y ago
  [dead]
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
knowitnone3 1y ago
what's lame about it? I read the comments specifically for alternative tools. Often times, commenters provide links to other tools and nobody has ever complained...until you came along

hirako2000 1y ago

n8n in my experience using it for 2 years now, and compared to similar solutions as there are many doing quite the same thing: it is just a very good product. It's stable. It has a gazillion integrations out of the box and is architectured as a module system so it's easy to create your own. It is very community centric, with community workflows and also integration modules people kindly publish on GitHub. Oh, it's open (core) source. And while certain (just a couple of) enterprise features should have been made open to qualify as being called open source, it's very close to that. Most powerful features are open, ready to self host, modify and make your own. Does it end up driving webs of python partials forming apps. Absolutely. Does it scale ? It does. Do complex flow remain maintainable? As a coder I prefer to maintain a repo of code than visual elements made of snippets. But, the critical advantage is productivity, for simple flows the community intelligence solves everything so you can get an operational set of valuable solutions within hours, even minutes once proficient with the interface. Another factor is, you can deploy pilot flow acting as applications, test them with production data, and make that live with the press of a button once pilot testing is done. With a code project you would need a robust and well polished cicd pipeline to get that. The limit or cons to me is a logic and compute heavy solution just isn't a fit to run on an n8n platform, scaling n8n just isn't as intuitive as scaling pure application component that do one thing. An example you may have a cpu heavy node, and a memory heavy node. It makes scaling the whole instance very inefficient. Scaling memory of a dedicated memory intensive application and scaling compute for the compute intensive component simply is far more optimal. If resource cost is not significant relative to the value of your flows then just scale a self hosted n8n and you only need to digest having to maintain, following your analogy, a "nest of pythons". Note: n8n sadly only supports python or JavaScript for custom code nodes, would have been nicer had they built a polyglot runtime instead. That's however more than what every other flow platforms let users do.

cube2222 1y ago
Wow, thanks a lot for this extensive response, appreciate it a lot!
turnsout 1y ago
This is so helpful, thank you. I've been evaluating n8n as a way to build things quickly for clients, but I do wonder about what happens when they want to turn the automation into a full app. I wish there was a first-party way to export an n8n workflow as a plain Python script or set of scripts. Have you ever had to migrate a project from n8n to code?

SafeDusk 1y ago

Building close to this space[0] too but starting with low code instead of no code. Still wondering in node-based GUI is the way to go, another alternative is something like Lovable where it is entirely chat based. [0]: https://github.com/aperoc/toolkami https://github.com/aperoc/toolkami