n8n

Both Zapier and Make obviously target less technical audience segments, so I gave high praise to Pipedream for targeting developers like me and making code a first-class citizen in their low-code platform. In this blog post, I will describe my experience using the n8n self-hosted engine and occasionally compare it with Make, Zapier, and Pipedream. [UPD Jan 2025]: I have launched a ScrapeNinja n8n integration node for web scraping, read more . n8n is a workflow automation tool. Zapier and Make are famous n8n competitors you probably know. The best thing about n8n is that the whole source code of this massive project is available on Github . Now wonder these guys have 41k+ Github stars - this is a big Typescript codebase and you can learn a lot by exploring it. For example, take a look how they are sandboxing external JS code they are using a forked vm2 which I have reviewed a few years ago. server { listen 443 ssl; server name n8n.scrapeninja.net; ssl certificate /etc/ssl/certs/ssl-cert-snakeoil.pem; ssl certificate key /etc/ssl/private/ssl-cert-snakeoil.key; location / { proxy pass proxy http version 1.1; proxy set header Upgrade $http upgrade; websocket support proxy set header Connection "Upgrade"; websocket support proxy set header Host $host; chunked transfer encoding off; proxy buffering off; proxy cache off; } } So, for instance, if I got a big HTTP response with JSON data, I can put just part of this JSON, serialized, back into my DB (NocoDB or Google Sheets) by marshalling it via JSON.stringify called within the n8n node form input. This is really convenient and I don't need to learn new syntax and functions for simple data transformations (like, in Make). Do you see the console.log statement? It is actually printed in Chrome Dev Tools console when I click "Execute workflow" button or "Test step" button. Python engine uses Pyodide under the hood, which transpiles the Python code into Webassembly, which is later executed via node.js (so internally it's still executed on V8 Javascript environment). So easy! Of course if you want to make many requests to ScrapeNinja across your n8n workflows, you should create a new "credential" for ScrapeNinja API key instead of having it hardcoded into particular action. [UPD Jan 2025] You don't need to fight with ScrapeNinja API anymore to use it with n8n! I have built an official n8n ScrapeNinja integration node , which is seriously awesome and includes a lot of free open source features like smart content extraction and html-to-markdown converter. Read more about built-in recursive web crawler as well. Self-hosted is great, but major issue of having your "glue" automation platform self-hosted is that you need to deal with oAuth process of tier1 players like Google. Let's say you want to read and write data to your Google Sheets. In Make, which is a cloud SaaS, all the dirty work of creating Google oAuth Client has been done by Make maintainers: you just authorize in your Google account and start using Google products. However, for me, the experience of creating a new OAuth client in Google Console has consistently been a pain. Even after doing it five times, I still don't enjoy the process. It's much more cumbersome than just copying and pasting an API key (e.g., from the OpenAI dashboard). n8n has two editions: Community edition and Enterprise edition. Both of them could be self-hosted. Let me keep it concise: The difference in features of Community vs Enterprise is thin, so when you get the most basic Community edition of n8n and install it via docker compose on your 3 EUR Hetzner or Vultr server, you get (very roughly) 95% of n8n Enterprise Cloud functionality. Sic! n8n is a "fair use" licensed product. Read their license here. Essentially, if you use n8n as a self-hosted product ("community edition"), it is free for you (unless you are building some sort of SaaS product where n8n is exposed to your end customers where they can enter their authentication details into n