147k stars and currently the 38th most starred repo on all of GitHub [0, 1]. Seems odd that a project has so many stars yet is largely unfamiliar to much of HN (corrections appreciated).
I asked an LLM if there's ways to detect suspicious starring activity (e.g. if stars were purchased). It suggested checking the project's star history [2] (doesn't appear suspicious).
It also suggested the stars to issues ratio. n8n has 147k:6k (about 25:1) compared to, say, rails with 57k stars and 18k issues (about 3:1).
I haven't looked deeply into n8n (is it 'no-code' for building agents?). I just see hype and am default skeptical.
Definitely, no stars have been bought, and none will ever be. It would go literally against everything we stand for and one of our core values, "Act with Integrity".
n8n is low code platform to build various applications. We're using it for some kind of prototyping, when manager builds a prototype backend and then we use it as a starting point to implement a proper backend.
I wouldn't call it "nocode". You need to get pretty techincal to implement useful functionality. You need to write SQL, you need to extract data from XML or JSON, you need to describe HTTP queries and parse responses. You're doing it in a GUI editor, connecting nodes, so it looks like a block diagram with ordinary nodes, conditional splits, loops and so on.
For me, personally, it looks very weird and I wouldn't use this product. It's much easier to just write code. But some people are afraid of code and will jump over all kind of hoops to pretend they're not programming.
The openai agent builder launched 2 days ago is basically inspired by n8n. n8n when launched wasn't an AI tool, it was inspired from numerous enterprise integration tools like Mulesoft, which were inspired by dozens of other enterprise tools, some launched even decades ago.
If you haven't tried you should check it out. Its an amazing way for no-coders to build something substantial in a relatively quick manner.
I used to sell software to CS teachers, and noticed n8n really explode in popularity with that group around 2015-2018. Along with Node-RED, it is a fantastic paradigm for teaching practical applications of computer science, rather than simply having students solve leetcode-type problems.
They been around for a long time (I was using it back in 2020 i think) but now they are just getting hype by AI. Its not relly AI. Its a no-code platform that has a lot of connections to tools and a few AI nodes. So you can build automations that have a step that uses an AI. But really its more a no code platform for automation (maybe no code is wrong wors and more like visual programming)
Yep, this is my recollection. I'm I remember correctly, they used to be "Like Yahoo Pipes" or something similar. They seem to have (quite successfully) latched onto the AI hype and are now regarded as a visual AI building tool
I represent one of those stars. N8N is an amazing system. I use it daily and have seen incredible progress made consistently over the past few years. Currently my team use it for processing millions of workflows each year on a very small server and it hasn't cost us a cent so I would give them more than 1 star if I could. I wouldn't build a new system without it to be honest.
n8n has come up here quite a bit and is one of the biggest projects in is niche, not sure why you think people would be particularly unfamiliar with it.
I asked an LLM if there's ways to detect suspicious starring activity (e.g. if stars were purchased). It suggested checking the project's star history [2] (doesn't appear suspicious).
It also suggested the stars to issues ratio. n8n has 147k:6k (about 25:1) compared to, say, rails with 57k stars and 18k issues (about 3:1).
I haven't looked deeply into n8n (is it 'no-code' for building agents?). I just see hype and am default skeptical.
[0] https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n
[1] https://github.com/EvanLi/Github-Ranking/blob/master/Top100/...
[2] https://www.star-history.com/#n8n-io/n8n&Date