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N8n – Flexible AI workflow automation for technical teams

n8n.io

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Re: N8n – Flexible AI workflow automation for technical teams

#31

Post by claytongulick »

jasongill wrote: post #21

n8n has been good but not great in our organization (and we pronounce it "Nathan", to answer someone else's question). It's effectively a self-hosted version of Zapier and has quite a few built-in integrations. It's a bit more annoying to use than Zapier (but the price is right), and the AI features are currently about like the AI features of every other product: basically sufficient to tell investors "we do AI!" but…

How would you compare it with Node Red?

I've just poked at them, but my impression was that Node Red much more capable.

IIRC one of my issues with n8n was the lack of streaming ability, which kills it for large datasets.

Re: N8n – Flexible AI workflow automation for technical teams

#32

Post by victorbjorklund »

k8sToGo wrote: post #12
victorbjorklund wrote: post #2

N8N is great. Been self-hosting for years.

Can you provide a few examples for what you use it for privately?

An example i set up recently was getting a notification on telegram whenever I deploy a vercel site (our build process is slow so can take 20 min). Webhook from Vercel -> filter on the author -> send notification to telegram.

The perfect usecase for n8n is when you got integrations and you dont need to run the workflow so often

Re: N8n – Flexible AI workflow automation for technical teams

#33

Post by cluckindan »

simple10 wrote: post #28
nico wrote: post #13

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

I can highly recommend n8n. I prefer it over Make.com, Pipedream, Zapier, etc. for automations and AI agent tasks. Basically, anything you want to automate but don't want to spin up a custom code server each time. The main reasons I switched to n8n are it's open source, meaning I can run it locally without limits, and it supports code nodes in javascript and python. Make.com used to drive me bonkers when it took 10+…

It’s not open source though.

Re: N8n – Flexible AI workflow automation for technical teams

#34

Post by jasongill »

claytongulick wrote: post #31
jasongill wrote: post #21

n8n has been good but not great in our organization (and we pronounce it "Nathan", to answer someone else's question). It's effectively a self-hosted version of Zapier and has quite a few built-in integrations. It's a bit more annoying to use than Zapier (but the price is right), and the AI features are currently about like the AI features of every other product: basically sufficient to tell investors "we do AI!" but…

How would you compare it with Node Red? I've just poked at them, but my impression was that Node Red much more capable. IIRC one of my issues with n8n was the lack of streaming ability, which kills it for large datasets.

Have not used Node Red in production and only played with it briefly, but n8n is more of a Zapier replacement whereas Node Red I believe is more of an IoT automation platform.

n8n is made so that you can set it up and give your staff access and they can manage their own workflows (like "when a customer opens a support ticket, update their Salesforce record to increment the number of tickets they have opened").

It's clearly aimed at non technical users being able to develop their own solutions to problems (for better or for worse), more so than Windmill which is made for developers to solve their own problems or develop solutions that non-technical people can use. Node Red if I remember correctly is more heavily weighted toward real time events for dev (especially hardware/IoT dev) use than "let the support team manage their own workflows for routing customer complaints"

Re: N8n – Flexible AI workflow automation for technical teams

#36

Post by bevenky »

jasongill wrote: post #21

n8n has been good but not great in our organization (and we pronounce it "Nathan", to answer someone else's question). It's effectively a self-hosted version of Zapier and has quite a few built-in integrations. It's a bit more annoying to use than Zapier (but the price is right), and the AI features are currently about like the AI features of every other product: basically sufficient to tell investors "we do AI!" but…

How would you compare it with activepieces.com? It’s also self hostable but OSS license.

Re: N8n – Flexible AI workflow automation for technical teams

#37

Post by aerhardt »

jasongill wrote: post #21

n8n has been good but not great in our organization (and we pronounce it "Nathan", to answer someone else's question). It's effectively a self-hosted version of Zapier and has quite a few built-in integrations. It's a bit more annoying to use than Zapier (but the price is right), and the AI features are currently about like the AI features of every other product: basically sufficient to tell investors "we do AI!" but…

Zapier has fundamental issues in control flow and exception handling in my experience.

Custom apps aside, how do Zapier and n8n compare in your experience?

Re: N8n – Flexible AI workflow automation for technical teams

#38

Post by XCSme »

nico wrote: post #13

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

I recently started using it, and as an experienced developer, I love it.

It's really easy to automate tasks and schedule things.

For example, I connected it to my UXWizz MySQL database, asked the AI in UXWizz to give me a query with the funnel conversions for today (visits/pricing/checkout/sales) compared to last week, copied that into n8n and made it send me an emoji-formatted daily Telegram message.

I am now using it to implement an AI chat-bot/support ticket responder, and I'm planning to migrate a Node.js auto-poster to it, so I can easily change the schedule/model/content of the post without having to edit any code.

I like that it has good documentation for integrations. For example, I was testing Google Ads, and I want to do conversion tracking without adding the Google JS to my page. Again, I used an MySQL connection to my UXWizz analytics dashboard to select the gclid for all visits that lead to a conversion event, then with n8n I upload those daily to a Google Sheet, which is then used by Google Ads to properly track conversions. The Google Sheet integration is not trivial (you need Google Cloud account, create an app, create oauth login, etc.), but the n8n docs were clear enough to follow and up-to-date enough to work.

Re: N8n – Flexible AI workflow automation for technical teams

#39

Post by Towaway69 »

claytongulick wrote: post #31
jasongill wrote: post #21

n8n has been good but not great in our organization (and we pronounce it "Nathan", to answer someone else's question). It's effectively a self-hosted version of Zapier and has quite a few built-in integrations. It's a bit more annoying to use than Zapier (but the price is right), and the AI features are currently about like the AI features of every other product: basically sufficient to tell investors "we do AI!" but…

How would you compare it with Node Red? I've just poked at them, but my impression was that Node Red much more capable. IIRC one of my issues with n8n was the lack of streaming ability, which kills it for large datasets.

For doing streaming in Node-RED, I created a library[1] - it's been through exacatly one example flow[2] - for that it worked well. I've not had a use case for it, it was just an idea of mine to implement an ETL pipeline using NodeRED.

The library just uses the streaming API[3] of NodeJS - effectively converting lines of CSV (for example) into individual messages that flow through NodeRED.

NodeRED isn't great for handling large messages but perfect for directing many small messages.

[1] https://flows.nodered.org/node/@gregoriusrippenstein/node-re...

[2] https://flowhub.org/f/c520d9da20ad7f1d

[3] https://nodejs.org/dist/latest-v18.x/docs/api/stream.html

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