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.
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.
I made something similar to n8n. its not visual but it helps you automate things. https://rapidforge.io/. Despite they are visual they also have learning curve. I think most of these tools are great but I feel they are overvalued. Its my take I might be wrong.
nomilk 18 minutes ago [-]
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 has 147k:6k (about 25:1) compared to, say, rails with 57k stars and 18k issues (about 3:1).
I haven't looked deeply into n8n (is it 'no-code' for building agents?). I just see hype and am default skeptical.
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.
marktolson 7 minutes ago [-]
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.
vbezhenar 9 minutes ago [-]
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.
victorbjorklund 12 minutes ago [-]
They been around for a long time (I was using it back in 2020 i think) but now they are just getting hype by AI. Its not relly AI. Its a no-code platform that has a lot of connections to tools and a few AI nodes. So you can build automations that have a step that uses an AI. But really its more a no code platform for automation (maybe no code is wrong wors and more like visual programming)
janober 8 minutes ago [-]
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".
nomilk 3 minutes ago [-]
Well done, you earned them :)
(sorry for doubting)
detaro 5 minutes ago [-]
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.
jychang 15 minutes ago [-]
It got viral on Tiktok of all places a while back, so I'm not surprised at the number of stars.
nomilk 12 minutes ago [-]
Surprised there's much overlap between users of Tiktok and GitHub, but perhaps I'm just old :)
kamranjon 34 minutes ago [-]
I’m just wondering if anyone that is closer to this space could shed some light on if this $2.5B valuation seems more or less accurate? I have played around with n8n - I just didn’t know if it was ubiquitous/profitable. $180m round seemed pretty huge but maybe it’s really a unicorn?
helsinki 2 minutes ago [-]
I built a GitHub-native coding / review agent that outperforms CodeRabbit (by a lot), and it only took me like two hundred hours. There are a few of us using it at work, meanwhile CodeRabbit is valued at $550M.
binarymax 25 minutes ago [-]
There is no accurate valuation in this space.
phrotoma 33 minutes ago [-]
What is this thing? IFTTT?
Deukhoofd 20 minutes ago [-]
It's basically a piece of software for doing visual programming where workflows can be triggered by events (webhooks, web calls, and a bunch of other things). Has a self-hosting option which is quite nice.
tom1337 27 minutes ago [-]
As far as I used it (which was for like 15minutes) it's like Zapier but with deeper customizability and you can self host it.
sharpfuryz 18 minutes ago [-]
More like an actor engine than IFTTT, a simple and good tool that can simplify workflows like "daily export data from HubSpot to Google spreadsheet, then send emails."
BoredPositron 36 minutes ago [-]
5000 n8n workflows that made me millions. 1 n8n workflow that made me 5k per hour...
It's an okay product I appreciate that it's selfhosted with good documentation but they absolutely destroyed their brand with excessive affiliate marketing and now nothing of substance is left if you search for it anywhere.
mnky9800n 31 minutes ago [-]
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.
narrator 26 minutes ago [-]
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 don't provide any information. Also, it's different from most nocode platforms in that it is self-hostable and you can easily export and import programs from it and share them with other people.
ekianjo 9 minutes ago [-]
If you want to something similar to n8n but with a professional tool, better use NiFi
shiandow 20 minutes ago [-]
I'm currently dealing with some of the fallout of their marketing, could you explain a bit better what you mean? It was good but isn't any more?
anticorporate 27 minutes ago [-]
This.
I like n8n. It feels a little less rough around the edges for visual coding than something like huggin or nodered. The documentation is good, but finding examples and things like that offsite is impossible.
weird-eye-issue 29 minutes ago [-]
They've been growing exponentially the last couple years because of affiliate marketing in large part
monkeydust 16 minutes ago [-]
Any more details on how they made this work for them? Hard to pull off.
cinericius 10 minutes ago [-]
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.
Rendered at 11:33:48 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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
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.
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 has 147k:6k (about 25:1) compared to, say, rails with 57k stars and 18k issues (about 3:1).
I haven't looked deeply into n8n (is it 'no-code' for building agents?). I just see hype and am default skeptical.
[0] https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n
[1] https://github.com/EvanLi/Github-Ranking/blob/master/Top100/...
[2] https://www.star-history.com/#n8n-io/n8n&Date
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.
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.
(sorry for doubting)
It's an okay product I appreciate that it's selfhosted with good documentation but they absolutely destroyed their brand with excessive affiliate marketing and now nothing of substance is left if you search for it anywhere.
I like n8n. It feels a little less rough around the edges for visual coding than something like huggin or nodered. The documentation is good, but finding examples and things like that offsite is impossible.