n8n.io - A powerful workflow automation tool

We&#x27;re using this tool for some of our project. Basically our manager with zero programming skills was able to build a quite complex backend, which uses postgres, some REST APIs. It runs scheduled tasks and webhook-initiated tasks. It was impressive for me.<p>One of the downsides is that we have sporadic errors which we just live with, with retries. Probably will be fixed in the foreseeable future.<p>I, personally, don&#x27;t have interest with this tool, I prefer proper programming stack. However I can suggest this kind of tool for someone with lacking programming skills (however it&#x27;s expected that you understand some SQL, some databases fundamentals, some HTTP fundamentals).<p>We self host it within our kubernetes cluster, it&#x27;s not a worst thing I had to deal with. Of course free version is quite restricted when it comes to user management, etc, can&#x27;t even think about oidc integration. But we&#x27;re cheapos, don&#x27;t have money for software, so better than nothing.

The problem I see in n8n is that a lot of the integrations seem a little half baked. We tried to use it instead of Zapier something less than an year ago:<p>- you have an FTP node, but it doesn&#x27;t work with FTP over TLS<p>- you have an AWS SES node, but cannot attach files to the email<p>- you have a Salesforce node, but it only has very few options available<p>Just to name a few that I remember now, we were quite disappointed. It is a great software crafted with care, but the integration nodes seem to be built on a hurry to say &quot;over N integrations available&quot;.<p>Maybe it changed now that it reached 1.0, I don&#x27;t know but they need to invest a bit into it.

Sustainable Use License<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;n8n-io&#x2F;n8n&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;LICENSE.md">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;n8n-io&#x2F;n8n&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;LICENSE.md</a>

&quot;Interesting&quot; I think -- &quot;I wonder if it can parse a PDF?&quot; I check, and there is an action to parse a PDF. I just want to see how well it does that...<p>&lt;three hours later&gt;<p>Okay, not really, but it has been something like 20-30 minutes, and I&#x27;m still nowhere near being able to test this one action.<p>Can I upload a file manually from my computer? Seems not.<p>Can I read it from Google Drive? There&#x27;s an action for that, but authentication hell took five minutes of my life and did not succeed.<p>Just getting set up took several minutes.<p>So, yeah, it&#x27;s not looking good for me at this point.

How does this compare to Node-RED? My impression is that Node-RED is more flexible and extendable than n8n but I&#x27;ve hardly used n8n.<p>By the sound of it Node-RED has simpler licensing, its completely open source.

Anyone know how this compares to Huginn? I&#x27;ve built out some self hosted automation on Huginn and it works great once it&#x27;s set up, but it&#x27;s just a bit janky and difficult to use. And getting initial flows set up can be frustrating as the diagnostics aren&#x27;t always great.

I have been using n8n for over a year. I prefer it over popular Zapier as it gives me more flexibility and I am able to self host. It have its quirks that you learn about only when you work enough with it to look up solutions on community forums. The only thing I wouldn&#x27;t recommend is their Cloud, it seams more buggy&#x2F;unstable than my self hosted instance (more timeouts, probably to conserve shared resources). Still I would recommended to anyone looking for a cheap and open source alternative for Zapier.

I evaluated this as a sort of batch job UI for internal staff, but it doesn&#x27;t handle even moderately large files and has no concept of streaming.<p>If you want to do a basic task like download and load a file into a database, n8n doesn&#x27;t work well unless the file will fit entirely into memory.<p>I&#x27;m sure it&#x27;s great for other use cases, but that limitation ruled it out for me (for this use case).

Looking at self hosting, one of the requirements is docker. Is there another tool with similar UI to automate workflows on your computer locally (windows, Linux etc)? I just realized there are a few very good android automation tools which monitor various states and can act on apps and settings but I haven&#x27;t seen anything that intuitive for windows.

What do people use these tools for?<p>I’ve yet to find a need for Zapier, etc but know it’s hugely popular &amp; generates a ton of revenue.

I found n8n some years ago and dexcided to use NodeRed instead. It has a large Community and more built in features

After the license change we switched to Elsa and contribute code together with other companies that made the switch. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;elsaworkflows.io" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;elsaworkflows.io</a>

Related:<p><i>N8n.io – Workflow automation alternative to Zapier</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21191676">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21191676</a> - Oct 2019 (196 comments)

Someone should look at a very different take on this space based on cause and effect based modeling.<p>DX based on cause and effect is a.lot more intuitive for users and reasoning agents

Always adored tools like this, Isoflow for isometric flowcharts is another one that was closed sources but is being opened up one feature at a time.

Ok slightly off topic, but how do you pronounce&#x2F;say n8n? Like nation?

Locale is easy to install and difficult to add to the server.

Anybody have experience with this in comparison to parabola?

As per its description on github: N8n is a Free and source-available fair-code licensed workflow automation tool.<p>Not really OSS.<p>Check out: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.activepieces.com&#x2F;">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.activepieces.com&#x2F;</a><p>MIT open source.

I really want to like these tools. Yet every time I consider Zapier or IFTTT, their integrations are a mile wide and an inch deep. I’ll see that they integrate with XYZ corp, but then it’s only with a handful of endpoints.<p>Like say I wanted to gather attendees from my Google Meet, Zoom, Webex, etc and send them to salesforce. I’d look at Zapier and see they work with Google. Then I’d look for Google Meet and see there’s nothing there.<p>I get that these connectors can only integrate with existing endpoints. I’m not criticizing. I’m just confused. How do people actually use these services?