Only semi-related:
How do people pronounce this?
In Ate In?
Nate In?
Innate In?
Nathan?
this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2025
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Aw man! That's by far the least interesting.
I was hoping for "Nate n", "nation", or multiply them together to get "9 n"
thank you!
Like, what 8 letters are abbreviated between those two Ns? Are we supposed to know?
for real.
what if n nnnnnnnn n
I use n8n self hosted @work and node red on my home assistant instance @home. Both have fantastic use cases but for me I don't see any useful cases at home yet for n8n. Maybe some scraping of specific news items that don't provide rss. Home assistant has a great direct addon of node red which let's you integrate your entities directly with node red. Including notifications to the companion app (Android). @work n8n it is great for processing and optimiseing huge chucks of data for our webshop. It can use logins for office365 (yes I hate it and m$) and saved us a ton of work. Since a few weeks you can even store your own set of data in a light version database which is great for storing some reused datasets.
I'm not using n8n, but I am using Node-RED and would like to hear from people who have used both.
I'm running n8n now, and used Node-RED several years ago.
I'm ultimately coming to the conclusion that I prefer Node-RED. They're pretty similar in capability, at least for my purposes, and the modern UX of n8n doesn't make up for its weird license, in-app upsells (e.g. "this feature is only available on the Enterprise plan"), and increasingly AI-centric functionality.
My thoughts exactly. Node-RED is long overdue for a UI/UX overhaul, but it’s been around forever and is very well established with a lot of plugins.
I started using it for IoT ingestion, but now I use it for all sorts of things (mostly related to home automation).
That said, im also running n8n now due to the hype, and it is nice… but I dont see any differences that would make me move to it for most of what im automating.
I self host n8n in a docker container on my home lab mainly as something to just fuck about with.
Production workloads include leveraging my work calendar and completing my daily time sheets, cleaning up my mailbox at the end of the week, and providing access alerts for my Traefik proxy.
My most common use case is telegram integration via bot API - adding mobile controls to services that otherwise don't have acceptable (for me) UI. I've also tried their LLM integration and tool node to create a simple agent that reaponds directly to messages, but for now it can only save links to my linkwarden instance. I found it acceptable and plan to add more tools. Basically, i want it to automatically decide what to do with stuff that i send to chat.
I can't think of a use case, that couldn't be realized in Bash instead.
Well, everything can be done in bash (or in python, more probably), but n8n makes it easier to tweak. With "batteries included" many stuff can be done without prior research and without external dependencies. They even added built-in databases in recent release.
Send GraqhQL requests on incoming webhooks and filesystem changes
The latest thing I've cobbled together with n8n is a routine that goes out to https://sol24.net/ and pulls in the current Aurora forecast and the current 7 day video of solar flares into my dashboard. I've always had a fascination with how the sun affects the earth and the protective layers of our atmosphere, since I was a child. I built my own 5 watt, code only, transmitter and receiver and would set in my room late nights collecting QSL cards and talking to people from all over the world . I quickly learned that the ionosphere and other protective layers affected how far my little 5 watt signal would bounce. Solar flares burn holes in the ionosphere and prevent a good bounce halfway around the world. So the challenge was to pick days where there was good ionosphere coverage, and minimal solar flares in conjunction with antenna positioning.
This is the current video which takes you from 11/29 to 12/5. It's mind boggling to me the absolute power and energy represented: https://sol24.net/data/stereo_7day_euvi304.mp4
You could probably conjure up something in bash to do this, but I really like working in n8n.
What is n8n?
Also would like to know. Bad title.
Edit: it's more AI agent shit. Disregard everything. I don't want to know more.
Edit 2 for some of you:
n8n gives you more freedom to implement multi-step AI agents and integrate apps than any other tool.
Right on the frontpage.
Edit: it’s more AI agent shit. Disregard everything. I don’t want to know more.
n8n can be run with the assistance of AI, and n8n can also be run without AI.
Anything that puts on the front page of its project site the use case for itself to relate to AI agents instantly makes me suspicious and not interested. I can't help it.
I get it. Some of us are staunch anti-ai. That's fine. I am not an n8n sales person, but I just wanted to make it clear, there are two versions and you can integrate a host of thing into it. Personally, I would run the AI version with a private AI that doesn't need an external LLM. But my equipment is not that new and it takes some power to run AI efficiently and effectively. No issues with anyone, it just seemed that there was some confusion.
No it's not?
n8n gives you more freedom to implement multi-step AI agents and integrate apps than any other tool.
🤷♂️ Guess their frontpage is full of shit then.
could be one of those cases where the product predates ai but some c-level asked an engineer "could we use this for ai" and the engineer said "i mean, technically yes" and then marketing changed every single mention of the product
could be one of those cases where the product predates ai
It does afaik, was around for some years while the AI usecase is very recent.
Possibly 🤷♂️ As soon as I see AI agent, I stop reading.
yeah this project has been on github for six years and seems to have been closed source before that. it's a graphical automation tool.
like, everything can be used with ai. github itself has "ai agent" plastered everywhere. it's just a buzzword. doesn't mean it's built specifically for ai.
But it does make it its elevator pitch, so call me not interested. And that's fine.
It's automation. Skim the link I sent. Something pops up in a log file or an API returns X instead of Y and you can do some logic based on that. Send yourself an email, ping another API, etc. Sure, you can use it to query an LLM API but that's just marketing. Frontpages are marketing, yes
Skim the link I sent.
Marketing matters. I am not interested. And that's fine. I don't have any use for this product, AI or no AI. Everyone can go about their business now and relax all your efforts to make me interested in this. Thank you for showing me that respect.
Thank you. You saved me a Google search.
The comment was wrong. It's an automation tool. It can use ai, but its not the primary focus.
Wrong?
n8n gives you more freedom to implement multi-step AI agents and integrate apps than any other tool.
It's the main pitch, bro. It's the primary focus.
And the vast majority of my automations don't use it because it isn't required.
I will stand by what I said, the tool is great even if you don't touch AI at all with it.
You're entitled to your opinion. 🤷♂️ I will not go near a product that tries to make anything AI the primary focus of itself. This is my opinion and I'm not really looking for anyone to change it, nor am I looking for anyone whose opinion I can change. 😊
I hear theres a few neo Mennonite colonies starting up that only use tech before the turn of the millenia. Maybe you could look into them.
Do you take this so personally that you are now resorting to ad hominems? My guy. 🤭
Is this your personal project? Why are you getting this butthurt? I just don't care about AI, because I don't need to use it. And I don't have to care about AI for anyone.
You should see my inbox full of people just like you yapping on and on about this n8n thing, explaining what it's for, when I explicitly said I don't want to know more.
Listen, so you won't feel so sad anymore: I'm not opposed to using AI, I'm just sick of hearing about it because I don't need it for the reasons everybody is saying I should.
Now can you either act like an adult or not talk to me again? Thanks, my dude.
You can integrate a host of things into n8n including AI, however you can also just run n8n as an automation tool without anything else integrated. It does take a little reading of the docs to figure that out. I am sure that most people run n8n with AI, and admittedly, the front page of the n8n site promotes the AI version because other users would like to run n8n with AI. Some in this thread are suffering from knee jerk syndrome.
You're welcome, and I'm not wrong.
Here is what I use it for:
- Download top voted pictures from CivitAI
- Pull weather data and get notified if it is going to rain
- Subscribe to events posted by the police (polling their API)
- Scrub lunch restaurants for todays menu
- Get notified when a streamer I follow on twitch starts streaming
- The same for YouTube but I haven't finished this one yet.
- Webhook (combined when a one file web page) to note down every time my oldest kid has this strange coughing.
- Send me this week's number (because some people use it and knowing that today is week 50 can be useful a few times a year).
I use ntfy for my notifications. I was also planning to monitor if I sold anything in Guild Wars 2 but I haven't bothered setting up a table in a database to keep track of if I have seen the latest changes, otherwise I would get the same notification over and over.
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I came here hoping to read some cool use cases, but so far it's people doing notifications for services that already provide notifications...
spoiler
I like to be able to tailor my notifications to me needs.
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