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 u…
Since their betting on AI integration, I'm guessing a good part of their spending will be on GPUs/Cloud.
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.
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.
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.
It's a license that tastes like the usual embrace, extend, extinguish.
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.
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, e…
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.
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 op…
> 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-commerci…
> 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.
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.
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 u…