I see n8n everywhere and while I love automation I can’t think of a use case, that couldn’t be realized in Bash instead.
So I’m wondering, if you use n8n what are you using it for?
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Only semi-related:
How do people pronounce this?
In Ate In?
Nate In?
Innate In?
Nathan?thank you!
Like, what 8 letters are abbreviated between those two Ns? Are we supposed to know?
for real.
what if n nnnnnnnn n
I self host n8n in a docker container on my home lab mainly as something to just fuck about with.
Production workloads include leveraging my work calendar and completing my daily time sheets, cleaning up my mailbox at the end of the week, and providing access alerts for my Traefik proxy.
I’m not using n8n, but I am using Node-RED and would like to hear from people who have used both.
I’m running n8n now, and used Node-RED several years ago.
I’m ultimately coming to the conclusion that I prefer Node-RED. They’re pretty similar in capability, at least for my purposes, and the modern UX of n8n doesn’t make up for its weird license, in-app upsells (e.g. “this feature is only available on the Enterprise plan”), and increasingly AI-centric functionality.
What is n8n?
Also would like to know. Bad title.
Edit: it’s more AI agent shit. Disregard everything. I don’t want to know more.
Edit 2 for some of you:
n8n gives you more freedom to implement multi-step AI agents and integrate apps than any other tool.
Right on the frontpage.
Edit: it’s more AI agent shit. Disregard everything. I don’t want to know more.
n8n can be run with the assistance of AI, and n8n can also be run without AI.
Anything that puts on the front page of its project site the use case for itself to relate to AI agents instantly makes me suspicious and not interested. I can’t help it.
I get it. Some of us are staunch anti-ai. That’s fine. I am not an n8n sales person, but I just wanted to make it clear, there are two versions and you can integrate a host of thing into it. Personally, I would run the AI version with a private AI that doesn’t need an external LLM. But my equipment is not that new and it takes some power to run AI efficiently and effectively. No issues with anyone, it just seemed that there was some confusion.
No it’s not?
n8n gives you more freedom to implement multi-step AI agents and integrate apps than any other tool.
🤷♂️ Guess their frontpage is full of shit then.
could be one of those cases where the product predates ai but some c-level asked an engineer “could we use this for ai” and the engineer said “i mean, technically yes” and then marketing changed every single mention of the product
could be one of those cases where the product predates ai
It does afaik, was around for some years while the AI usecase is very recent.
Possibly 🤷♂️ As soon as I see AI agent, I stop reading.
yeah this project has been on github for six years and seems to have been closed source before that. it’s a graphical automation tool.
like, everything can be used with ai. github itself has “ai agent” plastered everywhere. it’s just a buzzword. doesn’t mean it’s built specifically for ai.
But it does make it its elevator pitch, so call me not interested. And that’s fine.
It’s automation. Skim the link I sent. Something pops up in a log file or an API returns X instead of Y and you can do some logic based on that. Send yourself an email, ping another API, etc. Sure, you can use it to query an LLM API but that’s just marketing. Frontpages are marketing, yes
Skim the link I sent.
Marketing matters. I am not interested. And that’s fine. I don’t have any use for this product, AI or no AI. Everyone can go about their business now and relax all your efforts to make me interested in this. Thank you for showing me that respect.
Thank you. You saved me a Google search.
The comment was wrong. It’s an automation tool. It can use ai, but its not the primary focus.
Wrong?
n8n gives you more freedom to implement multi-step AI agents and integrate apps than any other tool.
It’s the main pitch, bro. It’s the primary focus.
And the vast majority of my automations don’t use it because it isn’t required.
I will stand by what I said, the tool is great even if you don’t touch AI at all with it.
You’re entitled to your opinion. 🤷♂️ I will not go near a product that tries to make anything AI the primary focus of itself. This is my opinion and I’m not really looking for anyone to change it, nor am I looking for anyone whose opinion I can change. 😊
I hear theres a few neo Mennonite colonies starting up that only use tech before the turn of the millenia. Maybe you could look into them.
You can integrate a host of things into n8n including AI, however you can also just run n8n as an automation tool without anything else integrated. It does take a little reading of the docs to figure that out. I am sure that most people run n8n with AI, and admittedly, the front page of the n8n site promotes the AI version because other users would like to run n8n with AI. Some in this thread are suffering from knee jerk syndrome.
You’re welcome, and I’m not wrong.
I came here hoping to read some cool use cases, but so far it’s people doing notifications for services that already provide notifications…
I like to be able to tailor my notifications to me needs.
spoiler
Send GraqhQL requests on incoming webhooks and filesystem changes
The latest thing I’ve cobbled together with n8n is a routine that goes out to https://sol24.net/ and pulls in the current Aurora forecast and the current 7 day video of solar flares into my dashboard. I’ve always had a fascination with how the sun affects the earth and the protective layers of our atmosphere, since I was a child. I built my own 5 watt, code only, transmitter and receiver and would set in my room late nights collecting QSL cards and talking to people from all over the world . I quickly learned that the ionosphere and other protective layers affected how far my little 5 watt signal would bounce. Solar flares burn holes in the ionosphere and prevent a good bounce halfway around the world. So the challenge was to pick days where there was good ionosphere coverage, and minimal solar flares in conjunction with antenna positioning.
This is the current video which takes you from 11/29 to 12/5. It’s mind boggling to me the absolute power and energy represented: https://sol24.net/data/stereo_7day_euvi304.mp4
You could probably conjure up something in bash to do this, but I really like working in n8n.
Here is what I use it for:
- Download top voted pictures from CivitAI
- Pull weather data and get notified if it is going to rain
- Subscribe to events posted by the police (polling their API)
- Scrub lunch restaurants for todays menu
- Get notified when a streamer I follow on twitch starts streaming
- The same for YouTube but I haven’t finished this one yet.
- Webhook (combined when a one file web page) to note down every time my oldest kid has this strange coughing.
- Send me this week’s number (because some people use it and knowing that today is week 50 can be useful a few times a year).
I use ntfy for my notifications. I was also planning to monitor if I sold anything in Guild Wars 2 but I haven’t bothered setting up a table in a database to keep track of if I have seen the latest changes, otherwise I would get the same notification over and over.
Pull weather data and get notified if it is going to rain
That’s a pretty respectful list you have there. I am working on something that will pull in weather data and forecast maps, but haven’t completed the flow yet.
I wanted to do the same for One Punch Man but ended writing a bash script for it instead. File access and variables was the biggest hurdle (but both are solvable).
Knowing if it is going to rain in the next hour is nice because I take the bike to work. I like to know which clothes to take with me.
Local hosted n8n: local AI llm agent (for privacy), that can use tools to search the web, check my emails and calendar, save memories, get Youtube transcript, etc.
Scheduled workflows to get me some stock info every morning.
Working on a research crawler with crawl4AI.
Only limitations seem to be my will to learn new stuff. I’m sure all this could be written in Python or something but I’m not a programmer.
Just to be clear there are two versions. One with nuts for those who want that AI experience, and one without nuts for the anti-ai faction in the group. The n8n ai-starter kit will spin up n8n with AI. I use the plain n8n mainly because I don’t have the equipment to run an in-house AI properly or rather effectively, and I don’t want to connect to AI exterior of my network. A friend of mine runs the ai-starter kit and does some really impressive stuff with it, but he has all the new toys to properly run it.
2 versions? Nuts vs no nuts?
What do you mean? Your not being clear.
The AI starter kit is a docker stack, not a version or flavour of n8n.There is n8n with AI and there is n8n without AI. I run the n8n without AI. AI is not required to run n8n. Both versions can be run in Docker.
I’ve only ever added AI to n8n workflows through ollama nodes/tools and agents and whatnot.
I haven’t seen the version where an AI llm is baked in yet.
I did see we have tables now which is handy.
Like I said, I’m self self-hosted tho so, either way, don’t have to use it if you don’t want. I’d probably recommend anyone just install whichever is easiest unless, it’s forcing you to download the llm blobs/models and you don’t have the space for it.
Only limitations seem to be my will to learn new stuff. I’m sure all this could be written in Python or something but I’m not a programmer.
I’ve been a programmer for 20 years. 100% of my personal projects are vibe coded now. Just throw AI at the code.
I’ve done some of that stuff in Python, and n8n is just lovely, far simpler. You can also add a node that runs Python code in n8n, so you only gain simplicity, but lose almost nothing.
Are there any a|ternatives to n8n?
The helpfully named site AlternativeTo is good for such questions. It’s populated by users and served me well over the years.
IFTTT and Zapier are the primary non-self-hosted alternatives, both have been around for ages and have lots of available integrations.
Node-RED and Huginn are the self-hosted alternatives. Huginn is older than both n8n and Node-RED, afaik, and seems to be primarily focused on online queries like updates to a webpage.
In the end I haven’t used any of the self-hosted ones, since I’m more of a code guy, so can’t say if one is better than another for anything.
I tried Huginn first but I found the documentation better for n8n, and it was easier to use.
I have it read out my calendar events as they happen and make a travel event added before any when I need to be somewhere.
