Thanks a lot for posting! Even though I had actually planned to post it later myself ;-) Happy to see my project finally live on hacker news!<p>n8n is a free node-based "Open Source" (Apache 2.0 with Commons Clause) Workflow Automation Tool. It can be self-hosted, easily extended, and so also used with internal tools.
Currently, there is no hosted version yet but you can sign up on the website if you are interested to get informed once it is ready.<p>I created it initially because I realized that every time I wrote a script to automate a small task it took me a very long time. Depending on the task it normally involved: reading documentation, writing code, committing to Github, deploying on a server, error reporting, SSL, make sure it restarts on a crash, and so on. So even very small tasks took at least half a day or day till everything was up and running properly. Existing Open Source solutions were not up to the task and also commercial ones like Zapier did not work for various reasons. Some being that they do not work well with in-house tools or complicated tasks and it gets expensive quite fast, ...<p>So hope n8n is as helpful for other people as it is for me. Also, all help with further improving the project and create more integrations is very welcome!<p>The project website with the nodes which exist and example workflows:<p><a href="https://n8n.io" rel="nofollow">https://n8n.io</a><p>You can find the source code on Github:
<a href="https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n</a><p>The whole project is written in TypeScript and uses Vue for the frontend. So it should be easily extendable for everybody with web development experience.<p>If you have any problems, questions or need an integration which does not exist yet you can post it to the forum:
<a href="http://community.n8n.io" rel="nofollow">http://community.n8n.io</a><p>Documentation can be found here:
<a href="https://docs.n8n.io" rel="nofollow">https://docs.n8n.io</a><p>Your feedback is highly appreciated!<p>Thanks a lot!!<p>UPDATE:<p>[Sorry are unable to answer any questions right now as it always displays me that I am posting to fast. Will answer as soon as HN allows me!]
Zapier has about 1,000 integrations, more than any of their closest competitors and at a price that is far less than others in their space. What you've done here is great! The UX seems better than Zapier and the extensibility & community approach terrific. The key, though, is going to be adding integrations rapidly. I might also stress:<p>- Bulk actions.
- Sync actions.<p>And support for other programming languages (eg. python)<p>Hope that helps.
I've seen enough of these supposedly non-programmer-friendly interfaces to judge them all guilty until proven innocent (not that many, to be honest, but I am scarred nonetheless). Looking at the video, it's not the worst I've seen. But please, I beg you (the authors here or anyone building a similar product):<p>- Provide first class debugging and dry-run support. Don't make people either run in prod (as the demo video effectively does) or set up full testing environments.<p>- Strict, comprehensible scoping rules. Non-programmers will have more, not less trouble with having named data propagated everywhere for reasons that aren't visually clear. Global state is still bad.<p>- Don't make users think about JSON.<p>- Supply auto-layout. Don't force users to manually reposition things to get a decent layout, and ideally don't let them. The demo video seems to show at least the first half in place, so that's good.<p>- Version control. Possibly via...<p>- Ideally an isomorphically editable text representation. You can switch between graphical and text representations and have changes propagate.<p>Maybe this project checks more of these boxes than I've seen so far. I'm pathologically optimistic, so there's a good chance I'll work with this enough to find out.<p>I don't really know why everyone wants to keep making these benighted flow-chart UIs instead of using the relatively proven Scratch UI model.
Crowded space, but darn few (if any) shared source or community based solutions. Here's a several examples from a market study I did in 2018: Workato, Apiant, Inegromat, Snaplogic, CloudHQ, Boomi, Tibco, Jitterbit, AWS Lambda, Mulesoft, Tray.io, ApacheNiFi, Stringify, Adeptia, Kotive, Cazoomi, Scribesoft and several more.<p>I really think the community angle is unique.
HN usually finds a theme to complain about with any cool project. Looks like this time they picked licensing. Just wanted to say thank you for making this project. I think tech like Zapier/IFTTT are really cool, but I would never trust a closed platform of this sort.<p>But something like n8n I would consider using, because you've provided an escape hatch to lock-in by making the source available. I think it's totally reasonable to prevent other companies from profiting from your work. I also think it falls under the umbrella of "open source". If someone wants a truly FLOSS version of this, they're welcome to make it themselves. But they won't, they'll just complain and keep using n8n, because the licensing is good enough for 99.9% of use cases.<p>EDIT: I just want to point out that there's been some discussion of licensing here which I've personally found interesting and instructive. I've seen several people suggest that there is a definition of the term "open source" that is essentially universally agreed upon (that being the Open Source Initiative definition [0]), and that that is the only valid definition. I've worked in what I consider to be open source for many years, and wasn't aware that such consensus had been reached. My personal views have not changed as of yet, but my paradigm has definitely shifted. I intend to pay closer attention to how others use this term, and carefully attempt to be clear about my usage in the future. Having a single agree-upon definition of things is always valuable, and if that's where we're at I'm all for it. I'm just not convinced yet that it's actually 100% agreed upon.<p>That said, I think the author of n8n was pretty dang clear.<p>[0] <a href="https://opensource.org/" rel="nofollow">https://opensource.org/</a>
Cool project. One aspect of these integration systems is that the volume and velocity of integration development is one of the main ways they show value. Zapier claims 1500+ integrations, and they have many competitor with similar counts of integrations. Somehow, they always seem to not have that thing I need.<p>I wonder why, in this era of Swagger / OpenAPI / Postman Collections / API Gateways ... why this is so difficult? I feel like there was a promise that integration would become more magical at a rapid clip, but as it stands it just seems like there are more options but no less headaches.
Look awesome, and although the license is definitely NOT open source (although you DO say the parts that people care the most are best-effort open source to the community), this has the potential to motivate other people to work on similar projects or suggest improvements to yours.<p>However...
The beauty of Zapier relies on its amount of pluggable blocks. I don't think there's anyone in this market that has as many operations as Zapier and using custom blocks you can do pretty much anything. Yes I am totally a fan of Zapier as I have been using it for years!
Zapier is like LEGO, there are many clones of LEGO but only one true LEGO (ouch my feet hurt just by thinking about it ;) )
I really hope you can get people to contribute more and more integrations as that's what really matters at the end of the day: The ability to use little or no-code to achieve automation between various platforms!
We're using n8n in production for a month now and are pretty happy with it.<p>Easily extendable and new integrations can be built easily.<p>Also helps that the author works here and is generally a great guy ;-)
Super happy to see this effort and eager to check the code out soon!<p>As someone who relies on a lot of Zapier-style API connections, I’d love to hear more about how people approach it - how you go about managing env vars (keys/token), abstracting similar service procedures (oauth, webhooks) and generally monitoring 3rd party API endpoints for keeping the connections healthy? Any advice from Zapier / IFTTT veterans?<p>Edit: the n8n docs seem good and also address most of my questions [1]<p>[1] <a href="https://docs.n8n.io/#/nodes" rel="nofollow">https://docs.n8n.io/#/nodes</a>
question: if I have a project management software saas, and I want to integrate n8n to make automations (for example: when a task is marked as completed), is the license valid for this use?
This is really neat! I'm generally prohibited from using stuff like Zapier at work, since we handle a lot of client data and passing it through any third party opens up a Pandora's Box of legal reviews. The self-hosted nature of this would bypass a lot of that hassle.<p>Public Service Announcement for anyone at BigCorp: Microsoft has it's own tool in this space called Microsoft Flow[1]. It's not as feature-filled as Zapier, but it works in a pinch and you get access to it automatically as part of an Office/Microsoft 365 license. So unless your corporate IT has gone to great lengths to explicitly disable access to it, you can leverage it to make your life at least a bit easier.<p>[1] <a href="https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/" rel="nofollow">https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/</a>
Sorry unsure, but perhaps this is similar?<p><a href="https://stdlib.com" rel="nofollow">https://stdlib.com</a><p>> Standard Library: APIs as Building Blocks
Leaving the UI aside, how is this different from Huginn? I have a few Huginn agents running menial tasks, but I find time consuming to debug issues. Does N8n have more connectors? What are the strengths compared with Huginn?
In terms of the licensing debate... Did you bother to actually read the Common Clause FAQ? Here are the first 2 FAQ entries:<p>"What is Commons Clause? The Commons Clause is a license condition drafted by Heather Meeker that applies a narrow, minimal-form commercial restriction on top of an existing open source license to transition the project to a source-availability licensing scheme. The combined text replaces the existing license, allowing all permissions of the original license to remain except the ability to "Sell" the software as defined in the text.<p>This Clause is not intended to replace licenses of existing open source projects in general, but to be used by specific projects to satisfy urgent business or legal requirements without resorting to fully "closing source".<p>Is this “Open Source”? No.<p>“Open source”, has a specific definition that was written years ago and is stewarded by the Open Source Initiative, which approves Open Source licenses. Applying the Commons Clause to an open source project will mean the source code is available, and meets many of the elements of the Open Source Definition, such as free access to source code, freedom to modify, and freedom to re-distribute, but not all of them. So to avoid confusion, it is best not to call Commons Clause software “open source.” "
Have you thought about teaming up with an ESB like <a href="https://zato.io/" rel="nofollow">https://zato.io/</a> ? Could really help both of you, I think.
Thanks for this! I was just yesterday looking for good workflow automation tools, and was leaning towards Huginn, but I will definitely check this out.
Do I understand this correctly?<p>- I'm allowed to setup an instance and charge clients to use it.<p>- I'm NOT allowed to host the instance for clients and charge for that hosting.
I really don't like when people say they are the "x" of "x" or the alternative to "x", doesn't that just drive people to look at "x". Sure it gets the idea across but there are other words to do that. Otherwise, great looking product
Good god Jan, you are amazing! Liked what you did with "link fish" and "ninja crib" but this takes things to a whole new level. I would love the chance to learn from you!!!
Congrats, I'm pretty sure this project will be a big success
This reminds me a lot of a visual code based data processing tool developed out of the NSA. Apache NiFi. The difficulty with all these low/no code environments is getting scale and maintaining enough widget blocks for it to be productive quickly.
This really looks like a great software and seems that the guy behind it knows what his doing. Additionally being open and fair about the licence. I will try it ASAP and wish the project gets BIG.
I love how you licensed it. I'm seeing a trend in how developers are being thoughtful about the licensing and how it will help monetize their efforts later. Excited to see how this goes.
> I hereby grant anybody the right to do consulting/support without prior permission as long as it is less than 30.000 USD per year.<p>technical note: USD uses commas to denote thousands. So, in USD 30.000 == $30 which isn't worth the time spent to do the research to pick up the first phone call.<p>Social note: in many US cities $30k isn't enough to survive. In the US it's certainly not enough to live _well_. So, you're basically saying "Hey, I give you permission to make an important contribution to the success and community of this project as long as you're willing to take an absolutely CRAP salary for it."<p>that's.... not really cool.<p>I don't think it should matter how much a support person can make supporting your project. The only way a support person will be crazy successful financially is if your tool is ALSO crazy successful. It's a mutually beneficial situation. Don't limit them. Their success is your success.
Nit: This is not open source - it is source available.(THANK-YOU for being upfront about the license though!)<p>Still, I might use this, and thanks for releasing