As I explore alternatives to working within n8n’s licensing restrictions—especially for those building LLM-based SaaS applications—I’ve come across something intriguing: the rise of Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations.
Platforms like Notion, Stripe, Google, Microsoft, and Salesforce are starting to support MCP endpoints or similar architectures. These allow LLMs to interact directly with third-party services through structured, pre-defined interfaces—essentially replacing the need for traditional no-code automation platforms like n8n in some cases.
What’s compelling is that MCPs provide pre-built tools and functions—similar to what n8n nodes offer—but without the platform dependency or licensing limitations. You can connect to these endpoints directly or even host them yourself, making it easier to build agentic SaaS products with deep third-party integrations.
The potential here is big. Companies are publishing their own MCP interfaces, optimized for LLM agents to reason and act through their APIs. Notion’s MCP beta is a great example of where this is heading:
Notion MCP Beta Overview
Curious to hear others’ thoughts:
Could Model Context Protocols make tools like n8n obsolete for LLM-first SaaS development?
I’d argue you are comparing apples to oranges. Here is what I think.
While you are raising a good point - MCP is definitely a major step forward for LLM-native integrations. But in my opinion, it’s not quite accurate to frame MCPs and platforms like n8n as competitors or replacements for one another. They serve very different purposes:
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MCPs are Access Gateways.
MCPs expose structured, agent-friendly interfaces to specific products (like Notion, Stripe, Salesforce, etc.). They’re like smart, LLM-optimized API wrappers that allow models to reason and act on specific services. They’re amazing for enabling deep, context-aware access to a single product’s capabilities.
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n8n (and similar) is Orchestration Layer
n8n is an orchestration platform. It connects multiple services - whether or not they have an MCP interface - into complete workflows. It handles things like triggers, retries, branching logic, conditional execution, cross-service data manipulation, memory/context, storage, and yes, even MCP calls if you want.
IMHO, YMMV.
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Well said @jabbson
I’m specifically referring to the scope of LLM tool calls. If n8n weren’t restricted by its license terms, it would be an ideal platform to define tools and delegate tasks from an LLM. However, n8n’s licensing prohibits the use of customer credentials within workflows, which makes it unsuitable for certain SaaS use cases. That’s where MCP becomes a practical alternative—it can fulfill that specific need when building multi-tenant SaaS applications.
That said, as you mentioned, n8n is a powerful orchestration platform—arguably the best, in my opinion. It can serve as a backend tool for an external LLM application. You can design complex workflows involving agent nodes, conditional logic, and integrations, and expose the entire workflow as a callable tool from an LLM or an MCP server.
The potential with n8n is vast, but it really shines in internal application development. When transitioning to a SaaS model, the licensing restrictions become a major limitation—especially since many useful nodes rely on the ability to use customer-specific credentials, which n8n expressly forbids in its license.
For example, in my current implementation, I use n8n to handle data processing and then return the result to my application. From there, I use the processed data to make API calls to third-party services using my customers’ credentials—on my side, within my application. So if I want to send data to a user’s Google Sheet, I can’t use n8n’s Google Sheets node directly. Instead, I let n8n handle the data transformation, then send the data to Google Sheets through my app using the customer’s authentication context.