We're using this tool for some of our project. Basically our manager with zero programming skills was able to build a quite complex backend, which uses postgres, some REST APIs. It runs scheduled tasks and webhook-initiated tasks. It was impressive for me.
One of the downsides is that we have sporadic errors which we just live with, with retries. Probably will be fixed in the foreseeable future.
I, personally, don't have interest with this tool, I prefer proper programming stack. However I can suggest this kind of tool for someone with lacking programming skills (however it's expected that you understand some SQL, some databases fundamentals, some HTTP fundamentals).
We self host it within our kubernetes cluster, it's not a worst thing I had to deal with. Of course free version is quite restricted when it comes to user management, etc, can't even think about oidc integration. But we're cheapos, don't have money for software, so better than nothing.
> I, personally, don't have interest with this tool, I prefer proper programming stack. However I can suggest this kind of tool for someone with lacking programming skills (however it's expected that you understand some SQL, some databases fundamentals, some HTTP fundamentals).
It's an interesting dilemma. End users who are directly generating the requirements can do amazing things when empowered by these tools. But they have zero understanding of some of the unreducible complexities that bedevil almost any system that gets beyond a toy level size. Transactions ... error handling... race conditions ... throttling / load balancing ... computing costs etc etc.
We use Apache Camel for something similar to this and it's a full programming stack (mostly JVM based so you have to be in that scene really). You can get diagrams out the other end. It's not too bad if you want to do all this programmatically. But the end users have zero mechanism to do anything. I wouldn't mind having something that was hybrid and we had a graceful / gradual mechanism to let users build simple things and then onramp them to fully engineered solutions.
The lack of user management was what killed it for me. I was ready to sell it for management when our Zapier bill was growing to equivalent salary of a FTE support person, but it wouldn't work if there was at least no basic separation for accounts.
Totally understandable. We have however basic user management in n8n for quite a while already and it is available for free. Since the beginning of the year we also have built collaboration, that is however a paid feature.
One of the downsides is that we have sporadic errors which we just live with, with retries. Probably will be fixed in the foreseeable future.
I, personally, don't have interest with this tool, I prefer proper programming stack. However I can suggest this kind of tool for someone with lacking programming skills (however it's expected that you understand some SQL, some databases fundamentals, some HTTP fundamentals).
We self host it within our kubernetes cluster, it's not a worst thing I had to deal with. Of course free version is quite restricted when it comes to user management, etc, can't even think about oidc integration. But we're cheapos, don't have money for software, so better than nothing.