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N8n raises $180M

blog.n8n.io

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Re: N8n raises $180M

#21

Post by cube2222 »

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

Re: N8n raises $180M

#22

Post by cinericius »

monkeydust wrote: post #16
weird-eye-issue wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: N8n raises $180M

#23

Post by mattfrommars »

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.

Re: N8n raises $180M

#24

Post by vbezhenar »

nomilk wrote: post #13

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…

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.

Re: N8n raises $180M

#25

Post by ekianjo »

narrator wrote: post #9
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.

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

Re: N8n raises $180M

#26

Post by janober »

nomilk wrote: post #13

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…

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".

Re: N8n raises $180M

#27

Post by murukesh_s »

nomilk wrote: post #13

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…

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.

Re: N8n raises $180M

#28

Post by marktolson »

nomilk wrote: post #13

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…

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.

Re: N8n raises $180M

#29

Post by detaro »

nomilk wrote: post #13

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…

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.

Re: N8n raises $180M

#30

Post by nomilk »

janober wrote: post #26
nomilk wrote: post #13

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…

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)

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