While n8n is amazing for the odd office automation and giving semi-technical people an enormously powerful tool to get things done, it seems it can’t really replace a real backend, and mostly because of the n8n team choices than any technology.
We were trailing it and wanted to essentially switch our entire backend to it - and technically it seemed to be able to do the job, but their licensing turned out to not be a fit.
For a moderately used app we very quickly burned through their “executions” that were allotted by our license - and that’s where we host it ourselves, configuring and paying for the servers, load balancers, key value store and database, with its failovers and backups.
So the license was to use it on top of all that, and even their highest enterprise license was cutting it close, and if you “run out” of these executions, the service just stops working …
And all of that would have been fair if it was hosted, but sounds ludicrous to me for something we self host.
I think it is an incredible piece of tech, but just not suited for a dynamic startup, and once we spent the time to code up the alternative paths for our use cases, it no longer made sense to use n8n at all, as we mostly solved all the problems it was helping us with.
It seems crazy to me that they impose imaginary limits on the self-hosted version, you can have a server that can handle more executions, but the license won't allow it.
It's an orchestration tool. Backends are a lot more than just orchestration.
There are alternatives to n8n depending on your stack of what is being orchestrated. Node-red, and others have quietly existed for a very long time, similar to how n8n existed for a good while before being discovered by the AI world.
Facing similar issue with monitoring part of executions. What is your solution if I may as - have you taken smth of the shelf and extended to your needs or did you built from the ground up everything?
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.
n8n in my experience using it for 2 years now, and compared to similar solutions as there are many doing quite the same thing: it is just a very good product. It's stable. It has a gazillion integrations out of the box and is architectured as a module system so it's easy to create your own. It is very community centric, with community workflows and also integration modules people kindly publish on GitHub.
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. Most powerful features are open, ready to self host, modify and make your own.
Does it end up driving webs of python partials forming apps. Absolutely. Does it scale ? It does. Do complex flow remain maintainable? As a coder I prefer to maintain a repo of code than visual elements made of snippets. But, the critical advantage is productivity, for simple flows the community intelligence solves everything so you can get an operational set of valuable solutions within hours, even minutes once proficient with the interface. Another factor is, you can deploy pilot flow acting as applications, test them with production data, and make that live with the press of a button once pilot testing is done. With a code project you would need a robust and well polished cicd pipeline to get that.
The limit or cons to me is a logic and compute heavy solution just isn't a fit to run on an n8n platform, scaling n8n just isn't as intuitive as scaling pure application component that do one thing.
An example you may have a cpu heavy node, and a memory heavy node. It makes scaling the whole instance very inefficient. Scaling memory of a dedicated memory intensive application and scaling compute for the compute intensive component simply is far more optimal.
If resource cost is not significant relative to the value of your flows then just scale a self hosted n8n and you only need to digest having to maintain, following your analogy, a "nest of pythons".
Note: n8n sadly only supports python or JavaScript for custom code nodes, would have been nicer had they built a polyglot runtime instead. That's however more than what every other flow platforms let users do.
Building close to this space[0] too but starting with low code instead of no code. Still wondering in node-based GUI is the way to go, another alternative is something like Lovable where it is entirely chat based.
This comment got me digging, n8n actually has a pretty good post-open source license[1] - I'm glad to see more successful examples of this sort of licensing in the wild
Once you hit product-market fit for a SaaS, engineering becomes a smaller proportion of your spending and you start hiring and spending a lot more on sales and marketing. If you know you can earn more than a dollar for every dollar you spend on customer acquisition, you throw as much money as you can at acquiring customers.
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.
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.
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.
One thing I don't get fully is people that say "it's easier to write code" - we use n8n for workflow orchestration - a junior developer can put together some nodes to e.g. get data from an API, transform it (by writing code), prepare a CSV, send an email. In about an hour. You then have a workflow that you set to run every night at 2am, and that you can open, understand visually at a glance, modify, and continue running without any other actions required. All self-hosted on a small VM.
Alternative would be writing custom code, deploying it somewhere, setting it to run automatically on schedule somehow, and modifying it and redeploying through a dozen steps every time.
Of course there is docker and cron and deployment scripts - but all of that is not needed with n8n for these kinds of use-cases.
For me, that's the primary value of n8n - nodes themselves are nice-to-have shortcuts, some of the time. Maybe I'm not familiar with tools that make it easy to "just write code" and have everything else (deployment, orchestration etc) covered?
Question for n8n and other orchestration tool users: Why not use an LLM to vibe code the orchestration? Is it still hard to host or not mature enough?
I tried n8n but found it easier and cheaper to have Claude code something and then throw it in docker as API that I could interact with. Tool integrations were also easy to vibe code. I am maybe more technical than the average n8n user? Not sure
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.
Here come the HN comments from people that work at closed source companies or companies that profit off the free labor of open source devs, wailing and gnashing their teeth that it's not the purest form of open source blessed by Stallman himself and therefore is radioactive and doomed to fail.
I’ve used n8n for local adhoc automation. They had a nice desktop version and had this neat option to export the flow and run it standalone. They got rid of the desktop version. Not sure if there is option to run standalone flows now without hosting the entire n8n app in a container.
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?
Just participated in a hackathon where my team used n8n. We found it didn't have good connectors for getting data from Kinesis streams or Slack. Given the abbreviated timeline of the hackathon we ended up simulating the Kinesis input and dropping the interactive Slack part of our project, which was unfortunate.
I hope they spend a good bit of the $180M on building out their input connectors.
So what is the exit strategy? Sell to OpenAI or NVIDIA?
Or will this become a white elephant too large too sell like Zalando?
Whatever happened to IFTTT?
Edit: It’s a valuation of 2.5 Billion - hence my question. There is snowballs chance that they will ever be worth that much. They are SaaS and not consumer products. They have no side gig like amazon or google - they have a single product in a tight market.
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.
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.
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.
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?
[+] [-] seer|5 months ago|reply
We were trailing it and wanted to essentially switch our entire backend to it - and technically it seemed to be able to do the job, but their licensing turned out to not be a fit.
For a moderately used app we very quickly burned through their “executions” that were allotted by our license - and that’s where we host it ourselves, configuring and paying for the servers, load balancers, key value store and database, with its failovers and backups.
So the license was to use it on top of all that, and even their highest enterprise license was cutting it close, and if you “run out” of these executions, the service just stops working …
And all of that would have been fair if it was hosted, but sounds ludicrous to me for something we self host.
I think it is an incredible piece of tech, but just not suited for a dynamic startup, and once we spent the time to code up the alternative paths for our use cases, it no longer made sense to use n8n at all, as we mostly solved all the problems it was helping us with.
[+] [-] vini|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] raheelrjunaid|5 months ago|reply
I wrote a post on it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45558489
[+] [-] j45|5 months ago|reply
There are alternatives to n8n depending on your stack of what is being orchestrated. Node-red, and others have quietly existed for a very long time, similar to how n8n existed for a good while before being discovered by the AI world.
[+] [-] rkuodys|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jitl|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Onavo|5 months ago|reply
https://www.activepieces.com/
They are open core I think (MIT+enterprise features model)
[+] [-] MasterJJ|5 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] cube2222|5 months ago|reply
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
[+] [-] hirako2000|5 months ago|reply
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. Most powerful features are open, ready to self host, modify and make your own.
Does it end up driving webs of python partials forming apps. Absolutely. Does it scale ? It does. Do complex flow remain maintainable? As a coder I prefer to maintain a repo of code than visual elements made of snippets. But, the critical advantage is productivity, for simple flows the community intelligence solves everything so you can get an operational set of valuable solutions within hours, even minutes once proficient with the interface. Another factor is, you can deploy pilot flow acting as applications, test them with production data, and make that live with the press of a button once pilot testing is done. With a code project you would need a robust and well polished cicd pipeline to get that.
The limit or cons to me is a logic and compute heavy solution just isn't a fit to run on an n8n platform, scaling n8n just isn't as intuitive as scaling pure application component that do one thing.
An example you may have a cpu heavy node, and a memory heavy node. It makes scaling the whole instance very inefficient. Scaling memory of a dedicated memory intensive application and scaling compute for the compute intensive component simply is far more optimal.
If resource cost is not significant relative to the value of your flows then just scale a self hosted n8n and you only need to digest having to maintain, following your analogy, a "nest of pythons".
Note: n8n sadly only supports python or JavaScript for custom code nodes, would have been nicer had they built a polyglot runtime instead. That's however more than what every other flow platforms let users do.
[+] [-] SafeDusk|5 months ago|reply
[0]: https://github.com/aperoc/toolkami
[+] [-] lawnchair|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] viraptor|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] bsnnkv|5 months ago|reply
[1]: https://docs.n8n.io/sustainable-use-license/
[+] [-] k__|5 months ago|reply
Are these projects comparable?
[+] [-] raffael_de|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] CodeCompost|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] moralestapia|5 months ago|reply
This is not an argument in favor of n8n.
[+] [-] brunoqc|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] nextworddev|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] BobbyTables2|5 months ago|reply
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…
[+] [-] JimDabell|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] hu3|5 months ago|reply
Specially if they go the PaaS/SaaS AI route.
[+] [-] bix6|5 months ago|reply
> The focus for the fresh funding will be on expanding its engineering capabilities and hiring.
https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/ai-agent-startup-n8n-lan...
[+] [-] riku_iki|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] BoredPositron|5 months ago|reply
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|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] iyn|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] weird-eye-issue|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] anticorporate|5 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] shiandow|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Bhushan2005|5 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ishikawa|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] alluro2|5 months ago|reply
Alternative would be writing custom code, deploying it somewhere, setting it to run automatically on schedule somehow, and modifying it and redeploying through a dozen steps every time.
Of course there is docker and cron and deployment scripts - but all of that is not needed with n8n for these kinds of use-cases.
For me, that's the primary value of n8n - nodes themselves are nice-to-have shortcuts, some of the time. Maybe I'm not familiar with tools that make it easy to "just write code" and have everything else (deployment, orchestration etc) covered?
[+] [-] tomasphan|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mattfrommars|5 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] skrtskrt|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] nirav72|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] kamranjon|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] foundart|5 months ago|reply
I hope they spend a good bit of the $180M on building out their input connectors.
[+] [-] Towaway69|5 months ago|reply
Or will this become a white elephant too large too sell like Zalando?
Whatever happened to IFTTT?
Edit: It’s a valuation of 2.5 Billion - hence my question. There is snowballs chance that they will ever be worth that much. They are SaaS and not consumer products. They have no side gig like amazon or google - they have a single product in a tight market.
[+] [-] qrios|5 months ago|reply
Like Databricks with no consumer products, no side gig, single product, but 100 billion valuation[1]?
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/sasirekhasubramanian/2025/10/07...
[+] [-] user3113|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] dvcoolarun|5 months ago|reply
I think the pie is big enough for everyone to benefit.
I haven’t tried these agent-and-connector-based approaches yet — where should someone start to get a good grasp of this kind of automation?
[+] [-] elAhmo|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] kristopherleads|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] rustoo|5 months ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] simlevesque|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] phrotoma|5 months ago|reply