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N8n raises $180M

blog.n8n.io

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Re: N8n raises $180M

#111

Post by mnky9800n »

havefunbesafe wrote: post #81
mnky9800n wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: N8n raises $180M

#112

Post by bsnnkv »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #88
bsnnkv wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Re: N8n raises $180M

#113

Post by cap11235 »

kristopherleads wrote: post #100
elAhmo wrote: post #91

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.

Re: N8n raises $180M

#114

Post by adastra22 »

xienze wrote: post #108
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I would’ve. We are rolling out one solution instead due to this.

Re: N8n raises $180M

#116

Post by adastra22 »

bsnnkv wrote: post #51
poly2it wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Re: N8n raises $180M

#117

Post by random3 »

skrtskrt wrote: post #109

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.

Re: N8n raises $180M

#118

Post by cap11235 »

nikanj wrote: post #90
kamranjon wrote: post #3

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?

$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.

Re: N8n raises $180M

#120

Post by cap11235 »

ekianjo wrote: post #25
narrator wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.
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