Clarification On PostHog Integration

Can any of the n8n team members provide clarification on the following release notes bullet point introduced in version 0.192.0?

  • Core and editor: integrate PostHog.

It looks to me from the PRs where this is added (#3753, #3779, #3789) that telemetry has been added to the web application, but I haven’t dived in too deep to look at the code changes to confirm that.

Assuming that my guess is correct, I have a few follow-up questions. Does this affect people self-hosting n8n or is it only for users of the cloud service? Is this functionality opt-in or opt-out? What telemetry is collected and who is it shared with? Are there any other relevant details that people concerned about privacy and protecting their personal data should be aware of?

Hi @mark-monteiro, I believe this question is best answered by the product team themselves. @sirdavidoff can you help out here please?

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Hi Mark, thanks for your question.

n8n does collect telemetry (details here) — this is something that’s been there for a while and you can read the community discussion we had before implementing it.

You can opt out of it on self-hosted by setting the relevant environment variable explained in the link above, or by contacting us if you’re on Cloud.

The recent change is that we’ve integrated Posthog, which you rightly picked up on. The main reason for doing this is for their A/B testing and feature flag functionality, which allows us to test whether improvements we make to the product are moving the needle (particularly with onboarding, where there’s a lot of work still to be done). On Cloud we also plan to use Posthog’s anonymous session recording (with all PII obfuscated), but this is never turned on for self-hosted. Nevertheless, if you turn off telemetry, Posthog will also be completely deactivated.

We only use telemetry for improving the product and never share it with 3rd parties (apart from data processors — which right now are Rudderstack and Posthog).

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Thanks for the clarification, that all sounds good to me :+1: