Reviewing n8n (Nodemation) the Open Source Workflow Tool

As part of my challenge to make a profitable AI company I’m going to need several tools. If I wanted to run a 90% AI company I could probably do this with pure code & chatGPT, but to stand even a small chance of achieving this, I’m going to need AI workflows. This is my n8n review.

There are several different AI workflow tools which are out and stable, most notably n8n, Gumloop, Langflow, Flowise, Lindy, and Relevance ai.

I’m going to try them all out, starting with n8n because it’s open source.

My n8n Review

What is n8n?

n8n is a workflow tool that lets you wire together many different types of ‘nodes’ which do things. If we break down a task into various stages we can create a n8n workflow representing the task, so that when you click ‘go’ (or you trigger the workflow another way) the actions are carried out sequentially.

n8n is capable of doing all manner of different ‘work’, from asking chatGPT something, writing files, or sending email, all the way up to calling API’s.

Here’s a super simple example:

Walking through the steps in this simple Telegram AI reply bot, this n8n workflow does:

1. Triggered by getting a message in Telegram
2. AI Agent – using a prompt set in its settings, it’ll read the message passed from 1 and craft a reply
3. Finally, the bot will send the AI generated reply.

Now this is a very basic example, but if you imagine all of the possible ‘nodes’, you can see how this might be useful. (In fact it’s essential for my AI business challenge.)

What do I want to do with n8n?

All of the things! But to nail it down a bit, for me n8n (or one of the other AI workflow builders) may be essential in reaching the goal of 100% automation this year.

Tasks I expect to need to address in this challenge, that n8n might help me solve:

• Automatically doing keyword research, then using that research to build out landing pages, (pSEO)
• Automating customer support across channels
• Homebrewed transactional emails
• Social media marketing
• Financial reporting
• Outreach
• … and much more

So without further a do, let’s take n8n for a ride.

First impressions of n8n

When I first signed up to try out n8n I took a browse through the existing workflow templates and was super keen to make my own.

I’ve often done this kind of workflow automation, but it was exciting to be able to do this smoothly in a browser UI.

My first Impressions:

• Easy to sign up, free trial of hosted version available at n8n.io
• Solid examples you can clone/tweak in the workflow template library
• Lots of integrations (1k+)
• Straight forward pricing (Free trial -> £20/£50pm or self host)

n8n Full Test

I spent two full days building up a few different workflows in n8n. I wanted to fully get to grips with the platform, and push it’s limits a bit.

Having automated workflows like this myself in code, I didn’t expect this to offer much value vs just writing the routines in logic.

Test Workflow: Quiz Generation

Marketing is going to be the most important part of this challenge, so I’m conscious of looking for ways to automate my own approach to generating attention for a product. One of the ways I do this is by making quizes.

Quizes are a great example of a ‘free tool’ – you can put them up on your site and provide the user with a fun way to interact with your special knowledge on a topic. For example the AI money maker quiz. They can be entertaining or deathly informational, but good ones attract eyeballs.

I made a quick AI Quiz engine WordPress plugin last month which simplifies the generation of these quizes, but as a test here I wanted to see if an n8n workflow filled to the gills with AI could produce anything like a respectable quiz.

This is what I ended up with:

In essence, this workflow does these steps:

1. Generates ideas for quizes
   • AI comes up with a bunch of ideas
   • Tools agent checks the keyword volume and difficulty for terms related to each idea (I used RapidAPI’s ahref pirate API for this)
   • A list of viable quizes is returned, (if possible)
2. This list is cleaned up and looped through:
   • A php file is written (with 10 questions, quiz copy, functions for returning pretty results etc.)
   • This file is saved and uploaded via SFTP
   • A logo for the quiz is generated
   • Another content-page image is generated
   • The WordPress blog page html is generated

What you see above is a simplified version of this workflow. I had a fuller version of this which would make the page itself in WordPress, and even make a ‘quizes’ homepage.

… but in building that I hit on my first few issues with n8n:

• The throttling of API calls is inconsistent which leads to quickly and easily blowing through API rate limits. (There seem to be ways around this via ‘wait’ nodes and sub-workflows, but I could not even jerry-rig a solution in-UI despite these. A http request via an AI tool agent cannot be throttled sensibly.)
• WordPress node connection seemed to work, then failed on me. I suspect this’ll work perfectly for wordpress.com hosted sites.

Test Workflow outcomes

5 hours in n8n

…or…

2 hours in code

The net outcome of this test was that I achieved the expected outcome in ~5h of messing about, when I could have coded this in 1-2 hours.

Arguably having the workflow in n8n is more accessible, visible, simple etc. So the value of this depends on how comfortable you are writing code.

I was overall impressed at n8n’s potential.

Will I continue to test n8n?

In short, yes. I will do thorough tests of other AI workflow tools for this blog, but something about n8n has captivated me. I enjoy seeing the workflows in logic, and was only partly frustrated by missing developer-friendly elements.

n8n Review: Pro’s

There are a lot of pro’s to using n8n, I’m yet to see how these compare to other AI workflow tools, but after I’ve reviewed them I’ll do a big comparison post and link it back here.

• n8n is Open Source – I love the fact I could self-host this if I wanted to, and the cloud n8n offering is slick and accessible to everyone who doesn’t want to
• Easily wired into APIs – I’ve always enjoyed tools which are truly flexible. n8n can be that, though it’s settings for http requests could do with a little work
• Overall common sense logic and language, was easy to pick it up (as a developer)
• With 1028 integrations there’s a lot that ‘just works’
• Good range of triggers, actions etc. – I like that I can have a webform or email as a trigger, these are no-brainers
• Good UI for arranging items – overall the UI is pretty slick throughout
• Established tool with plenty of community around it

n8n Review: Con’s

In my testing so far I have hit walls with n8n. Not every node/integration ‘just worked’ (though most did). It’s clearly a stable, usable workflow tool, though a few more tweaks and it’d be pretty perfect.

• Half-code setup can be frustrating (to me as an engineer)
• HTTP requests (to APIs) should be simpler – e.g. show me what actual call looks like, I had to build a quick reply api to actually see the format of the request
• Hit API rate limits routinely because in some configurations it’s hard to add batching time gaps (loop & wait doesn’t apply to AI tool requests)
• Can’t directly attach files in UI – this would just make things a little smoother in some workflows
• Loops can get out of hand – I had one loop which would do a follow-on process once it was complete, but on a few occasions it got stuck in an infinite loop and reached 100k items before I could stop it. Then when loading to edit it crashed the browser (which is to be expected, as it was trying to display 100k+ items in output window)
• WordPress integration (connection) seems buggy

n8n Review Summary

It’s clear from my few days testing n8n that it’s a powerful tool for automating workflows. It has a low barrier to entry, especially if you’re familiar with web protocols and code, (if you’re not, you can probably fudge your way through too).

I hit some stumbling blocks that were not quickly remedied, but I suspect if I persevered I could work around them. The fact that this is open-source even means I could fix some of these and submit the code changes.

I was happy to be able to test this quickly on the hosted cloud n8n service, and I will definitely keep using n8n for this challenge, unless one of the other workflow automation tools does a better job (I doubt they will).

For those wanting automated workflows without having to do (much) code, n8n is a good option.

All in all, n8n and tools like it are going to be a key part of ‘work’ as we hammer forward into the AI storm. Embrace it!

n8n Review Final thought

You know what will be cool? In the near future I believe we’ll have AIs which can build these workflows themselves, letting us see their inner workings in similar understandable workflow UI, letting us tweak finer details without even having to architect them.

What do you think of n8n?

Have you used n8n or another AI workflow tool? I’d love to read your thoughts in the comments below.

Trying out n8n?

If you’re thinking of trying out n8n, please do try through this link (gives me a little affiliate return if you sign up).