by doppp on 10/9/25, 9:19 AM with 184 comments
by seer on 10/9/25, 4:23 PM
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.
by cube2222 on 10/9/25, 11:23 AM
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.
by viraptor on 10/9/25, 11:23 AM
by BobbyTables2 on 10/9/25, 3:11 PM
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…
by BoredPositron on 10/9/25, 10:57 AM
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.
by ishikawa on 10/9/25, 5:03 PM
by alluro2 on 10/10/25, 9:14 AM
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?
by tomasphan on 10/9/25, 8:00 PM
by mattfrommars on 10/9/25, 11:23 AM
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.
by skrtskrt on 10/9/25, 3:41 PM
by nirav72 on 10/9/25, 5:15 PM
by kamranjon on 10/9/25, 10:59 AM
by foundart on 10/9/25, 3:33 PM
I hope they spend a good bit of the $180M on building out their input connectors.
by Towaway69 on 10/9/25, 5:26 PM
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.
by user3113 on 10/9/25, 11:17 AM
by dvcoolarun on 10/9/25, 4:27 PM
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?
by elAhmo on 10/9/25, 3:01 PM
by rustoo on 10/9/25, 3:12 PM
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?
by simlevesque on 10/9/25, 1:22 PM
by phrotoma on 10/9/25, 11:00 AM
by nomilk on 10/9/25, 11:15 AM
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/...