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.
N8n raises $180M
91–100 of 198 posts
Re: N8n raises $180M
#92Earlier 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…
Source Available would be a better descriptor, and with its prevalence in game dev I’m surprised it’s not more commonly used in the broader tech community.
Yeah, it's the proper standard term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software
I also find it weird how little use it gets. Possibly a side-effect of true open source having been more popular to the point of source available being historically unknown.
Re: N8n raises $180M
#93Earlier 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.
Sir, this is a VC forum for people that are trying to make money
So, a forum full of people who will be very much affected by restrictions on commercial use?
Re: N8n raises $180M
#94It's pronounced Nathan ?
It was originally called Nodemation, but the creator thought it was too long, so he shortened it to that, pronounced n-eight-n. https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n?tab=readme-ov-file#what-does-n...
What a stupid naming convention, I'm not surprised it's something coming from the javascript ecosystem. Nodemation would have been perfectly fine.
Re: N8n raises $180M
#95Shame it's not FOSS. There's still https://www.windmill.dev/ though.
A few days ago I looked into n8n and saw that people are switching to node-red. Are these projects comparable?
Full disclosure, I'm incredibly biased here as I'm a DevRel at FlowFuse, but there's a reason I joined them instead of n8n. On the surface they're comparable, but I think Node-RED (and FlowFuse) is a better solution for a lot of reasons:
First off, Node-RED handles real-time event data much, much better in my experience. Because of where Node-RED came from, there's much better support for IoT, MQTT, Modbus, OPC UA, edge protocols, etc. n8n is much more limited in this regard, and the fact that the Node-RED and FlowFuse community has literally thousands of custom nodes makes the calculus pretty clear.
I also think that FlowFuse/Node-RED has better integration of AI workloads. In theory n8n is designed around AI, but it treats it the same way OpenAI's AgentKit does - as sort of opaque connections. FlowFuse/Node-RED instead treats it as an actual message payload (both in terms of how you connect to the APIs and how you interact with what's generated), so instead of throwing your request into the void and hoping for the best, you can control every minute part of the flow.
That also makes for much more transparent debugging and visual data flow - the whole idea of these low-code environments is to give you the same control as high-code without the headache. Abstracting that away too much gives you less control, which is sort of the antithesis of this approach.
Like I said though, SUPER biased here.
Re: N8n raises $180M
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Open source does mean source available to many people, especially the non-programmer lay-public, no matter how much OSI and people who adopt OSI’s definition dislike it, c.f. the dictionary https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/open-source (And BTW I like OSI’s definition!) Instead of claiming the words “open source” always mean OSI’s definition, it’d be better to clarify up front that you’re talking about OSI’s…
Honestly, I never heard of people being confused about open source like this. Either you know about open source and then you know exactly what it means, or you know nothing about it at all. At least, that has been my experience. Open source, FOSS and source available are quite well defined and their definitions commonly known amongst anyone with even the slightest clue about software licenses.
Some might argue this confusion is intentional and injected by people trying to obfuscate that their fav is in fact not open source.
Re: N8n raises $180M
#97Re: N8n raises $180M
#98For me the Math isn’t Mathing.
Hiring 50 fairly well paid developers is roughly $15M/year, maybe more if one insists on SV compensation which always seem a bit absurd.
$240M total funding is a lot of money. They’ve only been around for about 5 years and probably didn’t start out fully staffed.
So they’re basically covered for the next 10-15 years even if they had zero sales ?
Having 500 employees won’t speed things up and would actually slow down development - so why so much funding?
Or who actually waits that long? The first version of Windows 10 was released about 10 years ago and soon will be EOL.
I feel software investment is like some oil ETFs — there is more investment money than the thing to invest in…
Re: N8n raises $180M
#99This is such great news.
My question to non-tech folks who used n8n, especially marketers: what has been your experience with n8n? Did it help you automate creative things like blogs, newsletters, white papers, etc? What tips would you give about n8n?
Re: N8n raises $180M
#100That 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.