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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

#91

Post by Reubend »

rubenfiszel wrote: post #79
hectormalot wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pol…

While you're here, may I ask something about Windmill? My impression of n8n is that it's similar to Zapier in the sense that it mainly focuses on linking pre-made integrations, while Windmill is more of a workflow engine like Temporal. But while I see on your landing page that Windmill also boast lots of integrations, clicking on any of them take me to a sort of community script sharing interface, where it's not really clear how fully fleshed out any of the integrations are.

Are these two things being wrongly compared to each other when they're actually meant for different purposes? Or is Windmill indeed a good point of comparison?

Re: N8n – Flexible AI workflow automation for technical teams

#92

Post by SansGuidon »

As a former user of N8N the tool looked interesting to me but I ended up converting most of my use cases into shell scripts, python scripts executed by cron jobs, and into ci/cd jobs. It gave me more flexibility about the tech stack I need, and a greater ease of debugging and developing robust designed tools.

I guess N8N was not intuitive for simple things and seemed too complicated for me. I'm now happier with cron jobs/GitOps to manage my automations. On the other hand I also had to replace some IFTTT workflows with my own scripts.

More work for me but I gained quality and control.

Re: N8n – Flexible AI workflow automation for technical teams

#93

Post by oulipo »

rubenfiszel wrote: post #78
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 monume…

Honestly, Windmill is just too much cruft, and too much "this feature is only for paying user"

We can't even have the "be notified on workflow error" feature without being a paid customer, at this stage, it's just a joke to call it open-source

Re: N8n – Flexible AI workflow automation for technical teams

#94

Post by sofixa »

sneak wrote: post #90
preya2k wrote: post #8

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

Windmill is also not fully open source; there are major sections of it powering central features that are not released as free software. Also, they require a CLA with copyright assignment so they can reuse your contributions in nonfree software. It’s always shady when companies do this. The open source parts of Windmill are partially Apache and partially AGPL; there are some of us who additionally regard the AGPL as…

> Also, they require a CLA with copyright assignment so they can reuse your contributions in nonfree software. It’s always shady when companies do this.

They sell a version of the software, of course they'd have a CLA. It's not shady, it's a prerequisite to be able to sell - because even if you assume no contributor will decide to retract their contribution later on, many of your customers will ask for guarantees that you fully own, control and can sell the code you're selling them

Re: N8n – Flexible AI workflow automation for technical teams

#95

Post by sneak »

sofixa wrote: post #94
sneak wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windmill is also not fully open source; there are major sections of it powering central features that are not released as free software. Also, they require a CLA with copyright assignment so they can reuse your contributions in nonfree software. It’s always shady when companies do this. The open source parts of Windmill are partially Apache and partially AGPL; there are some of us who additionally regard the AGPL as…

> Also, they require a CLA with copyright assignment so they can reuse your contributions in nonfree software. It’s always shady when companies do this. They sell a version of the software, of course they'd have a CLA. It's not shady, it's a prerequisite to be able to sell - because even if you assume no contributor will decide to retract their contribution later on, many of your customers will ask for guarantees tha…

Yes, that’s why it’s shady. It expects the community to contribute to this free software project, only to use those contributions in nonfree software. It’s trying to leverage community efforts for private gain.

If you believe in the ideology of software freedoms, you don’t release nonfree software. It’s open source cosplay.

Linux is GPL and that hasn’t stopped anyone from adopting it.

Re: N8n – Flexible AI workflow automation for technical teams

#96

Post by sofixa »

sneak wrote: post #95
sofixa wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, they require a CLA with copyright assignment so they can reuse your contributions in nonfree software. It’s always shady when companies do this. They sell a version of the software, of course they'd have a CLA. It's not shady, it's a prerequisite to be able to sell - because even if you assume no contributor will decide to retract their contribution later on, many of your customers will ask for guarantees tha…

Yes, that’s why it’s shady. It expects the community to contribute to this free software project, only to use those contributions in nonfree software. It’s trying to leverage community efforts for private gain. If you believe in the ideology of software freedoms, you don’t release nonfree software. It’s open source cosplay. Linux is GPL and that hasn’t stopped anyone from adopting it.

> If you believe in the ideology of software freedoms, you don’t release nonfree software. It’s open source cosplay

Or, you believe in open source software, want yours to be available, forkable and even why not get community contributions, but you also want a full time job that allows you to eat? How much of the world's software wouldn't exist if we gatekept open source to a volunteer effort only?

Re: N8n – Flexible AI workflow automation for technical teams

#97

Post by sneak »

sofixa wrote: post #96
sneak wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that’s why it’s shady. It expects the community to contribute to this free software project, only to use those contributions in nonfree software. It’s trying to leverage community efforts for private gain. If you believe in the ideology of software freedoms, you don’t release nonfree software. It’s open source cosplay. Linux is GPL and that hasn’t stopped anyone from adopting it.

> If you believe in the ideology of software freedoms, you don’t release nonfree software. It’s open source cosplay Or, you believe in open source software, want yours to be available, forkable and even why not get community contributions, but you also want a full time job that allows you to eat? How much of the world's software wouldn't exist if we gatekept open source to a volunteer effort only?

Obviously, if you don’t dual license, you can’t make any money.

Linux and Python and Wordpress and Redis stand in stark contrast to your basic presumption here.

It’s not gatekeeping to say that if you care about software freedoms, you don’t promote or release nonfree software. It’s just logic.

The choice is not “release only free software xor be commercially successful”.

Re: N8n – Flexible AI workflow automation for technical teams

#98

Post by accountsarelame »

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.

agreed. between this, the license drama, and the "im 12 years old and i want a ricer civic" website theme, Im wondering if I'm being trolled. and their prototypical example: Do you need AI to get somebody a slack account?

Re: N8n – Flexible AI workflow automation for technical teams

#99

Post by ashrafsam »

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…

Curious if you tried us, Activepieces. We have different ways of sharing "pieces" including merging them to our repo, uploading them to an npm registry or uploading them as private pieces in the platform admin. We're also very much loved by both devs and non-technical users. So I'm wondering what you'd think of it.

Re: N8n – Flexible AI workflow automation for technical teams

#100

Post by XCSme »

_pdp_ wrote: post #81

IMHO, N8n isn't great if you care about security. It's not that the tool itself is inherently insecure - it's more about how users are encouraged to use it. Nearly all workflows built using N8n that I've seen face some kind of prompt injection vulnerability. This is primarily because, in most cases, you configure the LLM by directly inserting external data into the system prompt. As many of you know, the system promp…

Isn't it safe if you don't use tool calling?

I prefer to have my flow hard-coded, with specific data input/output between steps, and have the calls be done through n8n connections instead of letting the AI call the tools with arbitrary data.

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