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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

#71

Post by photon_garden »

We’ve been using n8n in production for the last few months at my startup and are planning on migrating to regular backend code.

Pros:

- Good observability. It’s handy that they track all executions and let you see when workflows run.

- Usable for non-technical people.

- They’ve had all the integrations we needed.

Cons:

- Implementing parallel execution for async parts of the workflow is complicated and flaky.

- Pricing is expensive for the hosted version.

- Version control is bad.

- If you have engineering capacity, it’s faster and simpler to write some more backend code if you already have a backend.

Re: N8n – Flexible AI workflow automation for technical teams

#73

Post by pinkmuffinere »

senordevnyc wrote: post #27
c_hastings wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From their GitHub: “ What does n8n mean? Short answer: It means "nodemation" and is pronounced as n-eight-n. Long answer: "I get that question quite often (more often than I expected) so I decided it is probably best to answer it here. While looking for a good name for the project with a free domain I realized very quickly that all the good ones I could think of were already taken. So, in the end, I chose nodemation.…

This sounds like excellent evidence that they picked a terrible name and should change it.

It is definitely a bad name, even once you know the real name it feels unnatural to say. It might be too late to change though. Maybe better to ret-con it to just be “Nathan” :/

Re: N8n – Flexible AI workflow automation for technical teams

#74

Post by sally_glance »

rkuodys wrote: post #58
XCSme wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Can I ask you why so many things with N8N is connected over Telegram it seems versus for example slack? Not a user of Telegram so I honestly am curious about this choice

I can only talk about the Slack integration story since I never worked with the Telegram API, but over the last couple of years it has become an incredible mess. There are various ways to do the same thing, different permission models, deprecated endpoints without clear alternatives... It has become a pain honestly.

Re: N8n – Flexible AI workflow automation for technical teams

#76

Post by fzysingularity »

We (at https://vlm.run) use n8n internally for a lot of automations and it’s been great (Reddit/HN scraping), slack automations, cron jobs for sales etc.

We also made a custom node for popular document/image/video ETL jobs like document-to-markdown, audio/video transcriptions with VLMs (Vision Language Models).

https://github.com/vlm-run/n8n-nodes-vlmrun

https://www.npmjs.com/package/@vlm-run/n8n-nodes-vlmrun/v/0....

Re: N8n – Flexible AI workflow automation for technical teams

#77

Post by mbesto »

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.

I've used Node Red and n8n both on my homelab and deleted Node Red after awhile. The UI, workflow and 3rd party service support is simply just better on n8n. I could see Node Red having its advantages if you're used to writing code all day (I'm not).

Re: N8n – Flexible AI workflow automation for technical teams

#78

Post by rubenfiszel »

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…

> That said, we tried Windmill first and while it was cool for the devs who were able to see the vision, the non-technical users hated it

Founder of Windmill here. This is not too surprising although we are working on it by leveraging AI and just better DX/design. Pleasing devs in the most demanding orgs and the ever-changing expectations is challenging by itself. Pleasing both devs AND non-technical user is a monumental task that we are now giving more attention to by focusing on 2 aspects:

- A better DX/UX that does not sacrifice power-user capabilities but has a less step learning-curve and more intuitiveness to it. That is mostly about good design and hard work. We are taking inspiration from the best and on the intuitiveness, we've learned a lot from n8n and other leaders in the space.

- leveraging AI capabilities in a state-of-the-art way to have the best models generate the code for non-technical users. That is basically just adopting the best practices inspired by cursor such as great auto-completion, great inline code-gen, excellent semantic search.

Re: N8n – Flexible AI workflow automation for technical teams

#79

Post by rubenfiszel »

hectormalot wrote: post #16
preya2k wrote: post #8

If you’re looking for an Open Source alternative, give Windmill a try.

Having some experience with both, I think they are quite different. N8n looks quite polished and seems primarily concerned about connecting pre-made blocks. There are custom code blocks (JS and Python only, with limited ability to import libraries), but it’s not something you’d use by default. I thinks it great for less-technical users when compared to windmill. Windmill OTOH supports a bunch of programming languages…

Founder of windmill.

I'm not ashamed to admit than n8n feels more polished. There are a few reasons:

- Our team was and is still much smaller. We were 5 for the first 2 years, we are now 10 (year 3), and are continuing to hire to follow our growth.

- They have been around for longer and mature for longer, more time to iterate. We have reached some level of maturity recently and are now spending more iterations on polishing rather than new features.

- Their surface area is smaller, windmill does A LOT and expose more for the better or worse.

n8n has done a lot of things really well and although we have a different audience, there is a lot to learn from what they did very well and we have the upmost respect for them. We have some overlap, but I think ultimately we strive in different kind of orgs and will cohabit rather than compete.

Re: N8n – Flexible AI workflow automation for technical teams

#80

Post by preya2k »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #10
preya2k wrote: post #8

If you’re looking for an Open Source alternative, give Windmill a try.

Just to clarify. The reason why you aren't saying N8n is open source because of its license right? I haven't read its license but it does seem to me to have quite some restrictions. And whereas Windmill seems to be agpl + apache. So that is what you are mentioning, right?

Yes, n8n is not open source. It’s “source available”.
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