Hey together I have something I think currently a lot about and want to ask some other n8n people.
I keep running into the same pattern across client projects, and I’m curious whether this is just my niche use case or something others deal with too.
Quite often, workflows need more than just automation logic, e.g. they need structured steps involving people and permissions. For example:
submitting a request (e.g. new job/content task/translation request)
putting it into a queue
assigning/reviewing it by a human
approving it
then pushing the result into a third-party system
Yes, technically a lot of this can be modeled directly inside n8n, but in practice the UX isn’t always great for non-technical users who need to interact with those steps. And I also know, that n8n gives you in the business and enterprise licence a lot of role/permission options - but for a lot of clients ist quiet expensive.
In several projects I’ve ended up building small side interfaces or permission layers around n8n just to make the workflows usable for teams.
So I started wondering whether it would make sense to build a community node + lightweight UI that acts as a self-hostable permissions and approval layer on top of n8n. Something that lets you define roles, queues, approval stages, etc., without having to custom-build that part every time.
I’m not sure whether this is something the n8n ecosystem actually wants or needs (or maybe something exactly like this exists), or if I’m solving a problem that most people approach differently.
Do others here run into similar limitations or recurring patterns? How are you currently handling approval flows, human-in-the-loop steps, or user access control in your setups?
Actually, you shouldn’t mix the technical logic with the client-side logic.
n8n is not a client-related application.
All user involvement should occur somewhere on the frontend (usually it’s a ticketing system, like Jira or ServiceNow). n8n is just a technical layer for communication with the ticketing system and other systems.
you can use n8n forms for basic interactions, but it’s not the primary focus
Thanks for your reply, but I don’t think I mix them up. I understand that n8n is something different, and even here n8n tries to implement frontend solutions like you said with Forms, Chats, etc.
In the reality not any project ends with the workflow, and sometimes there is no possibility to integrate it in a third-party-system. The customers want’s a solution for a problem, and n8n can be a good technical layer but the question is a different one: does agencies/freelancer who are working with n8n as a technical layer, have sometimes in customer projects the problem that they need a frontend layer to provide a ui with different permissions, reviewing, etc.
This wouldn’t be a standard integration for n8n, it would be a workflow ui layer for customers - when it is needed. Like retool for very complex internal tools.
You can use tools like Retool for developing a UI.
We often try to keep in inside the applications people are already using. For example a Project management tool they use like Jira or whatever and then just attach backend logic to changed in those kinds of tools.
Baserow is also very nice as an app builder to get this kind of thing done.
Sometimes using forms and multi step forms can be fine, you can do some crazy stuff with that if needed.
But yeah it all depends on what you are doing and what is needed. However, n8n by it self is not a SaaS builder or whatever. So to make it nice it always depends on external tooling.
I have something I think currently a lot about and want to ask some other n8n people.