[reion]

I have been using n8n for over a year. I prefer it over popular Zapier as it gives me more flexibility and I am able to self host. It have its quirks that you learn about only when you work enough with it to look up solutions on community forums. The only thing I wouldn't recommend is their Cloud, it seams more buggy/unstable than my self hosted instance (more timeouts, probably to conserve shared resources). Still I would recommended to anyone looking for a cheap and open source alternative for Zapier.

[JimDabell]

> Still I would recommended to anyone looking for a cheap and open source alternative for Zapier.

It’s not open source, it’s source available with commercial restrictions.

[toomuchtodo]

Right, you can run it yourself or pay n8n to run it. For purists the language matters, realistically for users it does not. You’re not locked into the SaaS platform is the point.

[JimDabell]

It’s not about being a purist, the difference was a $50k/yr hole in our budget for a license.

[toomuchtodo]

I assume because you were not running it for internal business only but were attempting to distribute or white label/SaaS it? Isn’t $50k about 3-4 months of one dev’s time (assuming fully loaded costs)?

https://docs.n8n.io/choose-n8n/faircode-license/

[JimDabell]

> I assume because you were not running it for internal business only but were attempting to distribute or white label/SaaS it?

Yes, we wanted our customers to be able to set up integrations themselves. We didn’t care about white labelling it, we just needed to a) modify it, b) self-host it, and c) use it commercially. Something that open source is ideal for.

> Isn’t $50k about 3-4 months of one dev’s time (assuming fully loaded costs)?

Yes but that means absolutely nothing if you don’t have the budget for it, or even if you do have the budget for it but there are more valuable things for your developers to work on, or if you do have the budget for it but it isn’t worth that much. In our case the value provided by n8n wasn’t anywhere near $50k/yr. And, more to the point, $50k/yr is $50k/yr more expensive than open source. It would have been worth using if it had been open source, but it wasn’t worth using at that price.

[toomuchtodo]

Right, so it prevented freeloading. It’s working as intended. Still usable for those who want to eject from the hosted platform, but if you make money from it, n8n should get paid for that value. You’ve proved the point of why open source would’ve been a suboptimal license for them to use.

Open source was intended as free as in speech, not free as in beer. “Open source because I don’t want to pay something” is…not great.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre

[aliasxneo]

I read the home page twice and struggled to figure out the use case. Is Zapier what it's typically compared to?

[reion]

In footer they have n8n vs Zapier and n8n vs Make pages, I guess other similar software would be IFTTT

[grotorea]

IFTTT is target more at personal usage while the others are more professional or more complex uses. n8n is, as the starting page, open source and self-hosted unlike those two.

[commoner]

n8n is source-available, not open source, because they restrict commercial use. They acknowledge this themselves: https://docs.n8n.io/choose-n8n/faircode-license/#is-n8n-open...

[grotorea]

Thanks for the correction.

The non-commercial aspect seems to be mostly directed at people trying to compete with them, not comercial users.

> You may distribute the software or provide it to others only if you do so free of charge for non-commercial purposes.

> You may use or modify the software only for your own internal business purposes or for non-commercial or personal use.