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.
It seems crazy to me that they impose imaginary limits on the self-hosted version, you can have a server that can handle more executions, but the license won't allow it.
People continue to use these limitations. A long time ago when multicore CPUs were new or even systems with multiple CPUs saw vendors charge higher fees to allow their software to run on more than one core/cpu. My first run in with this was transcoding software with the license running ~$5k per core. To them, it was a whole second computer since everything was single threaded, so they felt it was worth twice as much. All it took was for someone else to not charge per core and took away business for that sales model to go the way of the dodo.
Huh? Isn't that oracle's business strategy in 2025, still?
I mean my current role doesn't put me into these kinds of considerations anymore, but I didn't hear they've changed their ways - so I just thought that's still the way you pay for Oracle DB
Oracle was the first company I thought of who licensed per-CPU.
Many moons ago I was a sysadmin at a company and first heard about their licensing strategy when sizing up some new multi-socket Opteron servers. First time I learned about per-CPU licensing.
It’s per core licensing with core factors. Core factor ranges from 0.25 to 1. I have not checked how it is now, but it used to be as above 5-10 years ago
I can see an argument of "well it typically bogs down and stops being performant at X, and we don't want to get a bad rep because people abuse it, so we don't allow anything over X", but that should still be negotiable if you can show you have plenty of horsepower.
Look I love giving people the benefit of the doubt, but that's not why this pricing model exits. It's because they want to capture a percentage of the value delivered, and the easiest way to do that it to charge by executions
It's an orchestration tool. Backends are a lot more than just orchestration.
There are alternatives to n8n depending on your stack of what is being orchestrated. Node-red, and others have quietly existed for a very long time, similar to how n8n existed for a good while before being discovered by the AI world.
I guess the bigger question is why use two tools when you can use one? Full disclosure I work at Node-RED/FlowFuse, so take that into consideration, but the point remains - if you need to use both an orchestration tool and a flow management/backend management tool, why not use one solution that does both excellently?
I think that's a critical argument that n8n and others will have to overcome - why should users decide to over-specialise one aspect of their stack when they can do so much more and have so much more control elsewhere?
Facing similar issue with monitoring part of executions. What is your solution if I may as - have you taken smth of the shelf and extended to your needs or did you built from the ground up everything?
Honestly we were looking at hatchet / pickaxe - similar vein of a project but more dev focused, but in the end realised our use cases were not all that complex so just built everything in a bespoke manner.
We used n8n for two things mostly - AI agents and process automation.
For AI we just built own MCP servers, and then the agents are quite easy to use as the major frameworks kinda help you with it. N8N’s AI is kinda just a UI layer for langchain - though we just used google’s adk.
For process automation - well there is so much options it’s not even funny.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
It is absolutely not open source.
The "Fair Source" license that n8n invented has two related qualifications that make it not open source:
> You may use or modify the software only for your own internal business purposes or for non-commercial or personal use.
It's not open source if you can't use it professionally or sell work derived from it [ed: comments have correctly called out that this is not the deal, thank you]. There's no chance this license or anything like it is ever going to be an OSI approved open source license. https://opensource.org/licenses
Source Available would be a better descriptor, and with its prevalence in game dev I’m surprised it’s not more commonly used in the broader tech community.
I also find it weird how little use it gets. Possibly a side-effect of true open source having been more popular to the point of source available being historically unknown.
"Internal business purposes" can be professional right? Not saying its an open source license as defined by OSI, just that this license permits the most likely professional use (internal automation).
> It's not open source if you can't use it professionally or sell work derived from it.
Does anyone _really_ use these low/no-code platforms to create products? I was always under the impression that you'd primarily use something like this for "internal business purposes" i.e. little internal utilities that you can't justify spending serious development time on. Which the license lets you do.
This reminds me of a wonderful definition of ownership: You only own something if you can buy and sell it. See: Kindle books/movies "bought" on Apple TV/etc.
As a software engineer I find it cumbersome and frustrating to use. When something doesn't work it can be difficult to see the true cause of the error. That said, those who are slightly less technical like analysts or PMs are able to put together reasonable POC solutions relatively quickly. (Though it remains to be seen how well this holds up when those POCs become business critical)
Further nitpick: Their Python implementation is based on WSAM so libraries that require C compilation won't work.
However if this funding let's them integrate a Claude-Code like tool, they'll have an amazing product.
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?
Yes I migrated workflows which I felt should be promoted as critical/production. Also because I wanted to scale that independently. https://applycreatures.com started as product backed by n8n. It enabled rapid backend tweaks to focus on the frontend. Once MVP was completed, it was time to migrate. I had the code in JavaScript so the core logic could simply be moved over, but a lot of boilerplate code had to be written to create a full fledged nodejs API. It confirmed that n8n was a good decision for early, prototyping the solution.
Most of my workflows remained in n8n, those that are unimportant or turned out unnecessary to the application. It saved me days for each, not having to build an app backend and cicd for those.
I defined it as open (core) source. Because that's what it is. Or source available. Both terms are precise.
But what I explained is that contrary to many open core projects, n8n public sources form a (generous) comprehensive solution, aside a couple of features that should have been public sources, the solution stands as a grea, with little to no limits, platform. Unlimited users, no cap on workflows, no cap on number of nodes etc etc.
Also, their licensing is good, you can pay and get the extra features and do what you want, including modifications if I'm not mistaken. That's free software without the free beer aspect, I never claimed it was free software or pure open source.
I'm also all for free software, but this is the sort of solution that doesn't fit well with the open source philosophy , making it rare to see open sourced. That's all.
Now that they raised significant money, the situation will slowly change to prioritize monetization, I guess.
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.
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
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
> subtlying implying that open-source is old and past it
It's really not that deep; U2 and Mogwai exist in the same timeline, in the same shared canon of contemporary music.
> It's a pre-open source license
This statement is strictly ahistorical; the earliest software licenses which made source code available to everyone and included restrictions on redistribution and/or use date back to the late 1990s[1][2].
You can certainly _try_ to make the case that these are the same as the Xerox license, but I don't think it would be a very strong one.
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.
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.
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.
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
Surely the goal is to ensure that there is no erosion of FOSS as a concept?
The existence and growth of FOSS is something that has happened as a result of considerable advocacy, and while its broad success has become somewhat self-sustaining, there will never not be the risk of a slide into more single-corporation-friendly "source available" realms.
It's not a bad thing to push for "source available" to be considered as not going far enough, and to not let it supplant FOSS through purely pragmatic concerns.
> there will never not be the risk of a slide into more single-corporation-friendly "source available" realms
There is something off about this to me in a world where FOSS exists in it's present form primarily to the outsized benefit of hyperscalers and entrenched incumbents
There was a post on another forum earlier this week on this same broad topic which resonated deeply with me, as someone (who like most of the US population) is a layoff and a medical emergency away from ruin:
> When I started getting interested in open source, I had problems like unreliable software, the inability to inspect or improve it, limited experience with collaborating. Open source solved those, but now my most pressing problem is that the excellent software I use is undermaintained and outright abandoned because the creators can't afford to keep donating time to it. Open source has been a process for solving problems, not the end goal. If it's not capable of solving problems, it's time for new approaches.[1]
As much as I appreciate a good snarky comment, this is a good reminder for contributors to be thoughtful about the licenses under which they contribute code to projects
> Nowhere in any common open license does anyone promise to keep working on their project, much less on particular terms. Any contributor to a permissively-licensed project can license their next contribution however they want. Any steward of a copyleft project with rights to all contributions can, too. Much as you could pick an Apache-licensed project, fork it, and sell your enhanced version under proprietary terms, a project steward can share new work under new terms, as well.
>
> None of this changes the license terms for old releases. Prior versions with MIT or Apache 2 or MPLv2 or what have you in the LICENSE file remain available to use, share, and change under those terms. That includes forking. We see that every time a going-forward relicensing spawns a new one. The reason the new license terms matter for new releases is that those new license terms apply to the diff between the old release and the new one.[1]
Full disclosure, I'm incredibly biased here as I'm a DevRel at FlowFuse, but there's a reason I joined them instead of n8n. On the surface they're comparable, but I think Node-RED (and FlowFuse) is a better solution for a lot of reasons:
First off, Node-RED handles real-time event data much, much better in my experience. Because of where Node-RED came from, there's much better support for IoT, MQTT, Modbus, OPC UA, edge protocols, etc. n8n is much more limited in this regard, and the fact that the Node-RED and FlowFuse community has literally thousands of custom nodes makes the calculus pretty clear.
I also think that FlowFuse/Node-RED has better integration of AI workloads. In theory n8n is designed around AI, but it treats it the same way OpenAI's AgentKit does - as sort of opaque connections. FlowFuse/Node-RED instead treats it as an actual message payload (both in terms of how you connect to the APIs and how you interact with what's generated), so instead of throwing your request into the void and hoping for the best, you can control every minute part of the flow.
That also makes for much more transparent debugging and visual data flow - the whole idea of these low-code environments is to give you the same control as high-code without the headache. Abstracting that away too much gives you less control, which is sort of the antithesis of this approach.
I'm not legally biased similarly (work in finance), and I prefer NodeRED. To me, the black box thing is very significant in the feel of using the tool. When I work on a N8N workflow, it feels like I'm chaining gmail filters. Where as NodeRED, I can mentally map that better to what is actually being run, and so feels more like using ComfyUI's custom node capability. I feel like N8N wants to be no-code, where as NodeRED is very much low-code and embraces that, which I find to be the right balance for me for control vs convenience.
Yeah, exactly! What's so funny to me is that people who think they want no-code really don't want no-code. Because no-code is built for that - but even novices in coding will really quickly outstrip a no-code native environment, whereas low-code will scale with your learning,
No-code: "I don't need code, this is so easy!" 2 weeks later "I wish I had access to literally any code system to make this work."
Low-code: "I don't need code, this is so easy!" 2 weeks later "Oh awesome I can actually use code here!"
Open source does mean source available to many people, especially the non-programmer lay-public, no matter how much OSI and people who adopt OSI’s definition dislike it, c.f. the dictionary https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/open-source
(And BTW I like OSI’s definition!)
Instead of claiming the words “open source” always mean OSI’s definition, it’d be better to clarify up front that you’re talking about OSI’s “Open Source Definition”, which is (effectively) a trademark or term of art and does not preempt all possible definitions of the phrase. (Special note that the words “open source” do not always refer to code.)
The turf battle over the words free and open seems silly to me, with both sides arguing that the other side’s word literally means something other than they intend. Stallman has argued that open means source available, and OSI has argued that free means price. Both sides are right, and both sides are stubborn too.
I would argue completely the opposite, and that we actually have a very clear set of descriptors available to us, each of which is a subset of the following ones:
Yes we have clear & good descriptors available. I wasn’t arguing against those. I was simply pointing out that those aren’t the only definitions of the words free & open, which is a fact. It’s a fact that FSF and OSI have both used in their own arguments! I’m slightly surprised by the pushback and downvotes (which probably means I didn’t state things clearly or come off how I intended). OSI’s definition is logical today but took a long time to develop. It’s one of those things that’s hard to imagine never having heard, but if you had never heard it, you almost certainly wouldn’t jump to OSI’s definition upon hearing “open source” the first time. The lay public generally doesn’t either, and don’t know about licenses and the software community’s terms of art.
Source available but you can't use it professionally or commercially doesn't feel open source at all to me, and I disapprove of trying to weasel word around that.
Rather than clarify confusion & raise a real and important distinction, this post carries water for obfuscation and confusion: if people aren't clear the answer isn't to loosen the definition, it's to make the distinction clearer.
Non-programmers and the lay public do not assume what source available means, nor what open source means, in terms of what you can and can’t do with it. Most lay people would assume that if source is available, then you can do what you want with it. This is what a lot of programmers assumed before OSI and FSF existed. Saying that many people think these two terms (open source, and source available) mean the same thing does not imply that anyone is suggesting that you can’t use code professionally or commercially. It’s a negative assumption on your part to accuse people of weaseling just because they don’t know your industry term of art definition.
Honestly, I never heard of people being confused about open source like this. Either you know about open source and then you know exactly what it means, or you know nothing about it at all. At least, that has been my experience. Open source, FOSS and source available are quite well defined and their definitions commonly known amongst anyone with even the slightest clue about software licenses.
If you clone the Windmill source from GitHub and build it, that’s AGPL.
If you enable the enterprise feature flag or use the Docker image, the result is source available.
I think it’s fair to call Windmill open source. It’s using the open core model for commercialisation. Just because you publish open source it doesn’t obligate you to make all the code you write open source.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Worth noting for NiFi you end up with a bunch of integrations built-in via https://camel.apache.org/ which makes it easy to plug into some small portion of a task and then expand.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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?"
Similar experience. Now for these little automation needs I'm have some LLM write most of the code. Then fix it a bit, then pack into a container - one container image per automation task. Some are in JS, some python, some PHP, one is a nasty shell script with an obscure dependency.
They get a readme, compose.yaml and git repo.
This has worked for set-it-and-forget-it experience.
I tried n8n but for some automation needs, it just wasn't flexible and/or I'd have to build a custom module. My choice was custom code in n8n or custom code in whatever.
Well that really comes down to how much control the solution actually gives you, right? I'm a DevRel at FlowFuse, so yes - biased - but something like Node-RED can give you wild complexity or pretty simple flows. I think where other solutions miss the mark is in trying to abstract control away too readily for the sake of simplicity and polish.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
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!
> Founded in 2019, n8n helps companies automate repetitive computing tasks. As of March, it had more than 230,000 active users and reported annual recurring revenue of over $40 million. The focus for the fresh funding will be on expanding its engineering capabilities and hiring.
$40M rev makes this a 62.5x rev multiple. AI has been around 40x lately so it’s a bit high but it sounds like there was competition to lead and those are March numbers so it’s probably about on par.
Personally I find these multiples absurd but big VC needs to put money somewhere and AI is the new SaaS so here we are.
> The Series C comes less than a year after a $60 million Series B, which valued the German group at a reported $350 million.
That’s a huge step up so maybe their growth numbers are that good.
Add a sprinkle of "quantum" in to get an extra 100M, too. I am profoundly disgusted by the phrase "quantum ML". That's not a thing one can vaguely point to (or its just not a thing period), and of course they never define it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is n8n pivot to AI perhaps them stepping away from that market? Or spreading themselves too thin?
I don't know but their sudden heavy adaption of AI will have detrimental affects on their other business such as integration of less "sexy" basic services such as FTP and SOAP.
I guess it all comes down to how well Claude and Co. work with integrating legacy systems based on priority protocols (in part). Because I assume that's the kind of systems that are coming up for retirement.
I made something similar to n8n. its not visual but it helps you automate things. 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.
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.
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.
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...), that points to high-friction and not enough control. Iterating in just AI for AI's sake isn't going to fix that.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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."
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.
Definitely, no stars have been bought, and none will ever be. It would go literally against everything we stand for and one of our core values, "Act with Integrity".
n8n is low code platform to build various applications. We're using it for some kind of prototyping, when manager builds a prototype backend and then we use it as a starting point to implement a proper backend.
I wouldn't call it "nocode". You need to get pretty techincal to implement useful functionality. You need to write SQL, you need to extract data from XML or JSON, you need to describe HTTP queries and parse responses. You're doing it in a GUI editor, connecting nodes, so it looks like a block diagram with ordinary nodes, conditional splits, loops and so on.
For me, personally, it looks very weird and I wouldn't use this product. It's much easier to just write code. But some people are afraid of code and will jump over all kind of hoops to pretend they're not programming.
The openai agent builder launched 2 days ago is basically inspired by n8n. n8n when launched wasn't an AI tool, it was inspired from numerous enterprise integration tools like Mulesoft, which were inspired by dozens of other enterprise tools, some launched even decades ago.
If you haven't tried you should check it out. Its an amazing way for no-coders to build something substantial in a relatively quick manner.
I used to sell software to CS teachers, and noticed n8n really explode in popularity with that group around 2015-2018. Along with Node-RED, it is a fantastic paradigm for teaching practical applications of computer science, rather than simply having students solve leetcode-type problems.
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)
Yep, this is my recollection. I'm I remember correctly, they used to be "Like Yahoo Pipes" or something similar. They seem to have (quite successfully) latched onto the AI hype and are now regarded as a visual AI building tool
I represent one of those stars. N8N is an amazing system. I use it daily and have seen incredible progress made consistently over the past few years. Currently my team use it for processing millions of workflows each year on a very small server and it hasn't cost us a cent so I would give them more than 1 star if I could. I wouldn't build a new system without it to be honest.
n8n has come up here quite a bit and is one of the biggest projects in is niche, not sure why you think people would be particularly unfamiliar with it.
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.
It seems crazy to me that they impose imaginary limits on the self-hosted version, you can have a server that can handle more executions, but the license won't allow it.
People continue to use these limitations. A long time ago when multicore CPUs were new or even systems with multiple CPUs saw vendors charge higher fees to allow their software to run on more than one core/cpu. My first run in with this was transcoding software with the license running ~$5k per core. To them, it was a whole second computer since everything was single threaded, so they felt it was worth twice as much. All it took was for someone else to not charge per core and took away business for that sales model to go the way of the dodo.
Huh? Isn't that oracle's business strategy in 2025, still?
I mean my current role doesn't put me into these kinds of considerations anymore, but I didn't hear they've changed their ways - so I just thought that's still the way you pay for Oracle DB
Oracle was the first company I thought of who licensed per-CPU.
Many moons ago I was a sysadmin at a company and first heard about their licensing strategy when sizing up some new multi-socket Opteron servers. First time I learned about per-CPU licensing.
It’s per core licensing with core factors. Core factor ranges from 0.25 to 1. I have not checked how it is now, but it used to be as above 5-10 years ago
I can see an argument of "well it typically bogs down and stops being performant at X, and we don't want to get a bad rep because people abuse it, so we don't allow anything over X", but that should still be negotiable if you can show you have plenty of horsepower.
Look I love giving people the benefit of the doubt, but that's not why this pricing model exits. It's because they want to capture a percentage of the value delivered, and the easiest way to do that it to charge by executions
I understood it as a total amount, not how many executions at the same time.
It's an orchestration tool. Backends are a lot more than just orchestration.
There are alternatives to n8n depending on your stack of what is being orchestrated. Node-red, and others have quietly existed for a very long time, similar to how n8n existed for a good while before being discovered by the AI world.
I guess the bigger question is why use two tools when you can use one? Full disclosure I work at Node-RED/FlowFuse, so take that into consideration, but the point remains - if you need to use both an orchestration tool and a flow management/backend management tool, why not use one solution that does both excellently?
I think that's a critical argument that n8n and others will have to overcome - why should users decide to over-specialise one aspect of their stack when they can do so much more and have so much more control elsewhere?
I use both.. And yes, both handle calls between different APIs.
One for the many, and maybe one for a different audience.
Node-red didn't have a login at the time, and was well geared towards direct IoT type flowing. I loved how I can just jump into the logic and flows.
N8N has a lot of pre-configured connectors.
If Node-red had the pre-configured connectors to different systems as easy as n8n, I think the point here would be even stronger.
It's why I use both. I start with the low level, and if orchestration beyond it is needed, I can tie in another tool if needed.
Facing similar issue with monitoring part of executions. What is your solution if I may as - have you taken smth of the shelf and extended to your needs or did you built from the ground up everything?
Honestly we were looking at hatchet / pickaxe - similar vein of a project but more dev focused, but in the end realised our use cases were not all that complex so just built everything in a bespoke manner.
We used n8n for two things mostly - AI agents and process automation.
For AI we just built own MCP servers, and then the agents are quite easy to use as the major frameworks kinda help you with it. N8N’s AI is kinda just a UI layer for langchain - though we just used google’s adk.
For process automation - well there is so much options it’s not even funny.
[dead]
Surely you can negotiate an unlimited amount of executions?
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?
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.
Only by installing nodeRED.
Well there's always YC's n8n competitor
https://www.activepieces.com/
They are open core I think (MIT+enterprise features model)
[dead]
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
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZHGg1QIAQk
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.
> 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.
It is absolutely not open source.
The "Fair Source" license that n8n invented has two related qualifications that make it not open source:
> You may use or modify the software only for your own internal business purposes or for non-commercial or personal use.
It's not open source if you can't use it professionally or sell work derived from it [ed: comments have correctly called out that this is not the deal, thank you]. There's no chance this license or anything like it is ever going to be an OSI approved open source license. https://opensource.org/licenses
Source Available would be a better descriptor, and with its prevalence in game dev I’m surprised it’s not more commonly used in the broader tech community.
Yeah, it's the proper standard term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software
I also find it weird how little use it gets. Possibly a side-effect of true open source having been more popular to the point of source available being historically unknown.
"Internal business purposes" can be professional right? Not saying its an open source license as defined by OSI, just that this license permits the most likely professional use (internal automation).
> It's not open source if you can't use it professionally or sell work derived from it.
Does anyone _really_ use these low/no-code platforms to create products? I was always under the impression that you'd primarily use something like this for "internal business purposes" i.e. little internal utilities that you can't justify spending serious development time on. Which the license lets you do.
This reminds me of a wonderful definition of ownership: You only own something if you can buy and sell it. See: Kindle books/movies "bought" on Apple TV/etc.
Does n8n have an app store for such products?
Apparently there is a total market of Ableton addons[1] (for example) sold on separate markets. I would call such addons (or packs) "low code".
So there is definitely a potential market for "add ons". But does n8n a) support that and b) encourage such markets for money?
[1] https://www.ableton.com/en/packs/
n8n reddit is overrun with get rich quick workflows.
I would’ve. We are rolling out one solution instead due to this.
As a software engineer I find it cumbersome and frustrating to use. When something doesn't work it can be difficult to see the true cause of the error. That said, those who are slightly less technical like analysts or PMs are able to put together reasonable POC solutions relatively quickly. (Though it remains to be seen how well this holds up when those POCs become business critical)
Further nitpick: Their Python implementation is based on WSAM so libraries that require C compilation won't work.
However if this funding let's them integrate a Claude-Code like tool, they'll have an amazing product.
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?
Yes I migrated workflows which I felt should be promoted as critical/production. Also because I wanted to scale that independently. https://applycreatures.com started as product backed by n8n. It enabled rapid backend tweaks to focus on the frontend. Once MVP was completed, it was time to migrate. I had the code in JavaScript so the core logic could simply be moved over, but a lot of boilerplate code had to be written to create a full fledged nodejs API. It confirmed that n8n was a good decision for early, prototyping the solution.
Most of my workflows remained in n8n, those that are unimportant or turned out unnecessary to the application. It saved me days for each, not having to build an app backend and cicd for those.
Wow, thanks a lot for this extensive response, appreciate it a lot!
n8n is not open core/open source. it is not free software at all.
I defined it as open (core) source. Because that's what it is. Or source available. Both terms are precise.
But what I explained is that contrary to many open core projects, n8n public sources form a (generous) comprehensive solution, aside a couple of features that should have been public sources, the solution stands as a grea, with little to no limits, platform. Unlimited users, no cap on workflows, no cap on number of nodes etc etc.
Also, their licensing is good, you can pay and get the extra features and do what you want, including modifications if I'm not mistaken. That's free software without the free beer aspect, I never claimed it was free software or pure open source.
I'm also all for free software, but this is the sort of solution that doesn't fit well with the open source philosophy , making it rare to see open sourced. That's all.
Now that they raised significant money, the situation will slowly change to prioritize monetization, I guess.
It’s not open core (which is a type of open source), it’s not open source, and it’s not “not pure open source”.
It’s not open at all. It’s a nonfree license.
It’s neither free as in freedom nor free as in beer.
You’re not “all for free software” if you carry water like this for a proprietary nonfree source-available package such as you are here.
It’s close enough for me
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
Using another company's funding announcement to shill your own is lame.
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
Sure, but it is (nearly) the entire purpose of this forum.
What gives you that impression?
Ever notice all the YC hiring / launch announcements? This is literally an advertising / jobs board for them.
Not on someone else’s post/announcement. That is bad form.
All is fair in Love and PR
Absolutely not. That's a good way to get yourself banned, and also a good way to make sure I never use your product.
one man's bad form is another man's good grindset
[dead]
Shame it's not FOSS. There's still https://www.windmill.dev/ though.
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/
"post-open source license"
That's a terrible reimagining, subtlying implying that open-source is old and past it.
It's a pre-open source license. They've not quite made the bar.
> subtlying implying that open-source is old and past it
It's really not that deep; U2 and Mogwai exist in the same timeline, in the same shared canon of contemporary music.
> It's a pre-open source license
This statement is strictly ahistorical; the earliest software licenses which made source code available to everyone and included restrictions on redistribution and/or use date back to the late 1990s[1][2].
You can certainly _try_ to make the case that these are the same as the Xerox license, but I don't think it would be a very strong one.
[1]: https://spdx.org/licenses/Aladdin.html
[2]: https://spdx.org/licenses/QPL-1.0.html
It's a license that tastes like the usual embrace, extend, extinguish.
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.
Sir, this is a VC forum for people that are trying to make money
So, a forum full of people who will be very much affected by restrictions on commercial use?
Too real
And I thought that we do everything for prestige /s
> 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.
They only added that qualification after huge community backlash. Last time I looked they still called themselves open source despite that claim.
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.
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
Surely the goal is to ensure that there is no erosion of FOSS as a concept?
The existence and growth of FOSS is something that has happened as a result of considerable advocacy, and while its broad success has become somewhat self-sustaining, there will never not be the risk of a slide into more single-corporation-friendly "source available" realms.
It's not a bad thing to push for "source available" to be considered as not going far enough, and to not let it supplant FOSS through purely pragmatic concerns.
> there will never not be the risk of a slide into more single-corporation-friendly "source available" realms
There is something off about this to me in a world where FOSS exists in it's present form primarily to the outsized benefit of hyperscalers and entrenched incumbents
There was a post on another forum earlier this week on this same broad topic which resonated deeply with me, as someone (who like most of the US population) is a layoff and a medical emergency away from ruin:
> When I started getting interested in open source, I had problems like unreliable software, the inability to inspect or improve it, limited experience with collaborating. Open source solved those, but now my most pressing problem is that the excellent software I use is undermaintained and outright abandoned because the creators can't afford to keep donating time to it. Open source has been a process for solving problems, not the end goal. If it's not capable of solving problems, it's time for new approaches.[1]
[1]: https://lobste.rs/c/d4kmra
Look at the other comments, one states "Oh, it's open (core) source."
Not exactly the fault of n8n, but the confusion is there to clear up. That is all I'm reading into it.
> Not exactly the fault of n8n
They did start out by incorrectly calling themselves open-source, but to their credit they stopped doing that and have been very clear ever since.
How much equity did they kick back to the devs from the open source era?
As much as I appreciate a good snarky comment, this is a good reminder for contributors to be thoughtful about the licenses under which they contribute code to projects
> Nowhere in any common open license does anyone promise to keep working on their project, much less on particular terms. Any contributor to a permissively-licensed project can license their next contribution however they want. Any steward of a copyleft project with rights to all contributions can, too. Much as you could pick an Apache-licensed project, fork it, and sell your enhanced version under proprietary terms, a project steward can share new work under new terms, as well.
>
> None of this changes the license terms for old releases. Prior versions with MIT or Apache 2 or MPLv2 or what have you in the LICENSE file remain available to use, share, and change under those terms. That includes forking. We see that every time a going-forward relicensing spawns a new one. The reason the new license terms matter for new releases is that those new license terms apply to the diff between the old release and the new one.[1]
[1]: https://writing.kemitchell.com/2023/09/23/Two-Kinds-Relicens...
The term you are looking for is “source available” license.
Maybe we can solve the "free" vs "libre" vs "open" debate first
There’s no debate. These terms were completely settled more than a decade ago.
A few days ago I looked into n8n and saw that people are switching to node-red.
Are these projects comparable?
Full disclosure, I'm incredibly biased here as I'm a DevRel at FlowFuse, but there's a reason I joined them instead of n8n. On the surface they're comparable, but I think Node-RED (and FlowFuse) is a better solution for a lot of reasons:
First off, Node-RED handles real-time event data much, much better in my experience. Because of where Node-RED came from, there's much better support for IoT, MQTT, Modbus, OPC UA, edge protocols, etc. n8n is much more limited in this regard, and the fact that the Node-RED and FlowFuse community has literally thousands of custom nodes makes the calculus pretty clear.
I also think that FlowFuse/Node-RED has better integration of AI workloads. In theory n8n is designed around AI, but it treats it the same way OpenAI's AgentKit does - as sort of opaque connections. FlowFuse/Node-RED instead treats it as an actual message payload (both in terms of how you connect to the APIs and how you interact with what's generated), so instead of throwing your request into the void and hoping for the best, you can control every minute part of the flow.
That also makes for much more transparent debugging and visual data flow - the whole idea of these low-code environments is to give you the same control as high-code without the headache. Abstracting that away too much gives you less control, which is sort of the antithesis of this approach.
Like I said though, SUPER biased here.
I'm not legally biased similarly (work in finance), and I prefer NodeRED. To me, the black box thing is very significant in the feel of using the tool. When I work on a N8N workflow, it feels like I'm chaining gmail filters. Where as NodeRED, I can mentally map that better to what is actually being run, and so feels more like using ComfyUI's custom node capability. I feel like N8N wants to be no-code, where as NodeRED is very much low-code and embraces that, which I find to be the right balance for me for control vs convenience.
Yeah, exactly! What's so funny to me is that people who think they want no-code really don't want no-code. Because no-code is built for that - but even novices in coding will really quickly outstrip a no-code native environment, whereas low-code will scale with your learning,
No-code: "I don't need code, this is so easy!" 2 weeks later "I wish I had access to literally any code system to make this work."
Low-code: "I don't need code, this is so easy!" 2 weeks later "Oh awesome I can actually use code here!"
Compare the workflows/templates shared by each community:
https://flows.nodered.org/
https://n8n.io/workflows/
Are you referring to the license? Cause the source seems to be open as in "available on GitHub".
That's not what open source means. Open source licences are well defined and listed here https://opensource.org/licenses
With extra restrictions, n8n is at most "source available".
Open source does mean source available to many people, especially the non-programmer lay-public, no matter how much OSI and people who adopt OSI’s definition dislike it, c.f. the dictionary https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/open-source
(And BTW I like OSI’s definition!)
Instead of claiming the words “open source” always mean OSI’s definition, it’d be better to clarify up front that you’re talking about OSI’s “Open Source Definition”, which is (effectively) a trademark or term of art and does not preempt all possible definitions of the phrase. (Special note that the words “open source” do not always refer to code.)
The turf battle over the words free and open seems silly to me, with both sides arguing that the other side’s word literally means something other than they intend. Stallman has argued that open means source available, and OSI has argued that free means price. Both sides are right, and both sides are stubborn too.
I would argue completely the opposite, and that we actually have a very clear set of descriptors available to us, each of which is a subset of the following ones:
* Free Software - meets FSF's four freedoms
* Open Source - meets OSI's definition
* Source Available - you can read the source code
Yes we have clear & good descriptors available. I wasn’t arguing against those. I was simply pointing out that those aren’t the only definitions of the words free & open, which is a fact. It’s a fact that FSF and OSI have both used in their own arguments! I’m slightly surprised by the pushback and downvotes (which probably means I didn’t state things clearly or come off how I intended). OSI’s definition is logical today but took a long time to develop. It’s one of those things that’s hard to imagine never having heard, but if you had never heard it, you almost certainly wouldn’t jump to OSI’s definition upon hearing “open source” the first time. The lay public generally doesn’t either, and don’t know about licenses and the software community’s terms of art.
Source available but you can't use it professionally or commercially doesn't feel open source at all to me, and I disapprove of trying to weasel word around that.
Rather than clarify confusion & raise a real and important distinction, this post carries water for obfuscation and confusion: if people aren't clear the answer isn't to loosen the definition, it's to make the distinction clearer.
Non-programmers and the lay public do not assume what source available means, nor what open source means, in terms of what you can and can’t do with it. Most lay people would assume that if source is available, then you can do what you want with it. This is what a lot of programmers assumed before OSI and FSF existed. Saying that many people think these two terms (open source, and source available) mean the same thing does not imply that anyone is suggesting that you can’t use code professionally or commercially. It’s a negative assumption on your part to accuse people of weaseling just because they don’t know your industry term of art definition.
Honestly, I never heard of people being confused about open source like this. Either you know about open source and then you know exactly what it means, or you know nothing about it at all. At least, that has been my experience. Open source, FOSS and source available are quite well defined and their definitions commonly known amongst anyone with even the slightest clue about software licenses.
Some might argue this confusion is intentional and injected by people trying to obfuscate that their fav is in fact not open source.
In my view this is little more than FUD.
Okay, you're referring to the license. Got it.
Can you give me more information about your experience with it?
If we're being strict, Windmill is also not FOSS.
This is not an argument in favor of n8n.
If you clone the Windmill source from GitHub and build it, that’s AGPL.
If you enable the enterprise feature flag or use the Docker image, the result is source available.
I think it’s fair to call Windmill open source. It’s using the open core model for commercialisation. Just because you publish open source it doesn’t obligate you to make all the code you write open source.
windmill is open-core.
Is open-core a sub-genre of post-hardcore? I generally prefer midwest emo, to be honest.
What’s with the windmill plug? It’s not even the same cateogry
I also prefer Windmill. A category they both fall into is workflow automation. n8n is useful when collaborating with non-coding colleagues.
[flagged]
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
This money will be gone in 2-3 years! They say engineering but I bet half goes to marketing.
> The focus for the fresh funding will be on expanding its engineering capabilities and hiring.
https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/ai-agent-startup-n8n-lan...
what about marketing and sales?
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.
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.
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.
If you want to something similar to n8n but with a professional tool, better use NiFi
Worth noting for NiFi you end up with a bunch of integrations built-in via https://camel.apache.org/ which makes it easy to plug into some small portion of a task and then expand.
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.
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.
Can you share some examples of the workflows that you had success with?
They've been growing exponentially the last couple years because of affiliate marketing in large part
Any more details on how they made this work for them? Hard to pull off.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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?
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
[dead]
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.
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.
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?"
I wish I had gone into medicine like my parents wanted
I think about going to law school more with every passing day.
Just imagine all the vibe coded nonsense your clients would bring to the table. Billable hours sure, but still.
"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."
Similar experience. Now for these little automation needs I'm have some LLM write most of the code. Then fix it a bit, then pack into a container - one container image per automation task. Some are in JS, some python, some PHP, one is a nasty shell script with an obscure dependency.
They get a readme, compose.yaml and git repo.
This has worked for set-it-and-forget-it experience.
I tried n8n but for some automation needs, it just wasn't flexible and/or I'd have to build a custom module. My choice was custom code in n8n or custom code in whatever.
Well that really comes down to how much control the solution actually gives you, right? I'm a DevRel at FlowFuse, so yes - biased - but something like Node-RED can give you wild complexity or pretty simple flows. I think where other solutions miss the mark is in trying to abstract control away too readily for the sake of simplicity and polish.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Don't forget praising a completely closed competitors with zero sense of irony.
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.
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?
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.
Do you have paying customers? Putting money into customer acquisition and retention is where a lot of money can go versus R&D.
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).
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!
> Founded in 2019, n8n helps companies automate repetitive computing tasks. As of March, it had more than 230,000 active users and reported annual recurring revenue of over $40 million. The focus for the fresh funding will be on expanding its engineering capabilities and hiring.
$40M rev makes this a 62.5x rev multiple. AI has been around 40x lately so it’s a bit high but it sounds like there was competition to lead and those are March numbers so it’s probably about on par.
Personally I find these multiples absurd but big VC needs to put money somewhere and AI is the new SaaS so here we are.
> The Series C comes less than a year after a $60 million Series B, which valued the German group at a reported $350 million.
That’s a huge step up so maybe their growth numbers are that good.
https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/ai-agent-startup-n8n-lan...
There is no accurate valuation in this space.
They seem to be pushing their message now as an easy way to integrate AI to workflows.
$180m seeds make sense if you remember to say AI lots. See Thinking Machines for example.
Add a sprinkle of "quantum" in to get an extra 100M, too. I am profoundly disgusted by the phrase "quantum ML". That's not a thing one can vaguely point to (or its just not a thing period), and of course they never define it.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
Is n8n pivot to AI perhaps them stepping away from that market? Or spreading themselves too thin?
I don't know but their sudden heavy adaption of AI will have detrimental affects on their other business such as integration of less "sexy" basic services such as FTP and SOAP.
I guess it all comes down to how well Claude and Co. work with integrating legacy systems based on priority protocols (in part). Because I assume that's the kind of systems that are coming up for retirement.
I made something similar to n8n. its not visual but it helps you automate things. 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.
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?
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.
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.
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...), that points to high-friction and not enough control. Iterating in just AI for AI's sake isn't going to fix that.
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.
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.
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?
It's pronounced Nathan ?
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-n...
What a stupid naming convention, I'm not surprised it's something coming from the javascript ecosystem. Nodemation would have been perfectly fine.
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.
What is this thing? IFTTT?
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.
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.
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."
an MLM scheme
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
[1] https://github.com/EvanLi/Github-Ranking/blob/master/Top100/...
[2] https://www.star-history.com/#n8n-io/n8n&Date
Definitely, no stars have been bought, and none will ever be. It would go literally against everything we stand for and one of our core values, "Act with Integrity".
Well done, you earned them :)
(sorry for doubting)
Thanks a lot!
And all fine. I know there is a lot of that going on out there. So, I can not blame you at all.
n8n is low code platform to build various applications. We're using it for some kind of prototyping, when manager builds a prototype backend and then we use it as a starting point to implement a proper backend.
I wouldn't call it "nocode". You need to get pretty techincal to implement useful functionality. You need to write SQL, you need to extract data from XML or JSON, you need to describe HTTP queries and parse responses. You're doing it in a GUI editor, connecting nodes, so it looks like a block diagram with ordinary nodes, conditional splits, loops and so on.
For me, personally, it looks very weird and I wouldn't use this product. It's much easier to just write code. But some people are afraid of code and will jump over all kind of hoops to pretend they're not programming.
Its all over youtube. Its the de-facto way to build agents if you are searching youtube. Just try "Create agent" and see.
https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/agent-builder
The openai agent builder launched 2 days ago is basically inspired by n8n. n8n when launched wasn't an AI tool, it was inspired from numerous enterprise integration tools like Mulesoft, which were inspired by dozens of other enterprise tools, some launched even decades ago.
If you haven't tried you should check it out. Its an amazing way for no-coders to build something substantial in a relatively quick manner.
N8n is extremely popular among CS educators. I imagine at least a few thousand of those stars are from students who learned to code with n8n.
interesting! In what kind of contexts/classes is it used?
I used to sell software to CS teachers, and noticed n8n really explode in popularity with that group around 2015-2018. Along with Node-RED, it is a fantastic paradigm for teaching practical applications of computer science, rather than simply having students solve leetcode-type problems.
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)
Yep, this is my recollection. I'm I remember correctly, they used to be "Like Yahoo Pipes" or something similar. They seem to have (quite successfully) latched onto the AI hype and are now regarded as a visual AI building tool
I represent one of those stars. N8N is an amazing system. I use it daily and have seen incredible progress made consistently over the past few years. Currently my team use it for processing millions of workflows each year on a very small server and it hasn't cost us a cent so I would give them more than 1 star if I could. I wouldn't build a new system without it to be honest.
You could let your team mates to star as well.
n8n has come up here quite a bit and is one of the biggest projects in is niche, not sure why you think people would be particularly unfamiliar with it.
It got viral on Tiktok of all places a while back, so I'm not surprised at the number of stars.
Surprised there's much overlap between users of Tiktok and GitHub, but perhaps I'm just old :)
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.