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N8n raises $180M

blog.n8n.io

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Re: N8n raises $180M

#161

Post by echelon »

random3 wrote: post #117
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.

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.

Re: N8n raises $180M

#162

Post by Towaway69 »

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.

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/

Re: N8n raises $180M

#163

Post by comprev »

ffsm8 wrote: post #157
dylan604 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

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.

Re: N8n raises $180M

#165

Post by qrios »

Towaway69 wrote: post #160
qrios wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Re: N8n raises $180M

#166

Post by tomasphan »

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

Re: N8n raises $180M

#167

Post by Towaway69 »

qrios wrote: post #165
Towaway69 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 finan…

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.

Re: N8n raises $180M

#168

Post by [deleted] »

echelon wrote: post #161
random3 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: N8n raises $180M

#169

Post by MasterJJ »

seer wrote: post #133

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…

[dead]

Re: N8n raises $180M

#170

Post by MasterJJ »

rkuodys wrote: post #138
seer wrote: post #133

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…

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?

[dead]
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