I saw a few YouTube videos about n8n, and on the first glance I was kind of blown away. Then, you know, once the “hype” was over, I thought a bit more about what n8n does, and well - alright, it’s a cool way to build nice “scripts”. Btw, I’m not an expert at all, so please correct me if I simplify it. But essentially, after looking at some flows, I feel like it could be done in basically most programming languages some way or another. The immediate value I found is, that it’s a nice way to present some maybe complex flows to other stakeholders, or if you’re maybe not that good at programming?
I dipped into it, and sure - the way you are building, the list of all the integrations, inspire you to be creative. But after having built a relatively “simple” workflow using 2-3 days, I really feel like I could’ve used my time better. Speed up an EC2 instance, have simple node project or whatever, use some lambdas. Add the same triggers etc. There were many small issues and hurdles, you can’t integrate it that well with LLMs to help you build faster.
Which leads to my question. For the seasoned programmers out there, what does n8n do for you? Like, what’s the value you get out of it? Are there some of the integrations/APIs that are only available, if they are called from the n8n cloud or something? Have I missed something?
Describe the problem/error/question
What is the error message (if any)?
Please share your workflow
(Select the nodes on your canvas and use the keyboard shortcuts CMD+C/CTRL+C and CMD+V/CTRL+V to copy and paste the workflow.)
Share the output returned by the last node
Information on your n8n setup
- n8n version:
- Database (default: SQLite):
- n8n EXECUTIONS_PROCESS setting (default: own, main):
- Running n8n via (Docker, npm, n8n cloud, desktop app):
- Operating system:
Hey @Baseman hope all is good. Welcome to the community.
I think you’ve already nailed one of the truths about n8n: it’s not for everyone - and that’s fine. If you’ve tried it and prefer your usual stack, that’s a valid call and nobody will try to change your mind as you are of course entitled to your opinion.
That said, even some seasoned devs still keep n8n in their toolbox because it offers:
- Fast integration: no boilerplate for auth, retries, pagination, etc
- Built-in orchestration: scheduling, branching, error handling out of the box
- Visual clarity: easier to explain flows to teammates or stakeholders
- Hybrid approach: combine low-code nodes with custom JS/TS
- Connector library: many APIs ready to use without extra coding
The trade-offs are also real: debugging can be slower, and if you’re fluent in code, simple workflows might be quicker to build yourself.
For me, n8n shines when workflows touch multiple systems, need non-dev collaboration, or I want to prototype fast. If that doesn’t fit your needs, you’re probably right - it might not be your tool.
The most significant gains for our team, using n8n instead of a programming language, for integrating dozens (soon to be hundreds) of internal REST/http services, are:
- Visibility - (as you mentioned) it’s way easier to validate the “business process” with non-technical stakeholders.
- Ease of Modification - No matter how much modularity a developer tries to write into a “coded” sequence of service calls, it inevitably requires a great deal of effort to rearrange the order of things, or insert an additional step. With n8n (or any orchestration/workflow tool really) that is a lot quicker, and requires a lot less regression testing.
- Encapsulation of “quirks”. - Each thing integrated in a workflow is wrapped in a “node” that encapsulates the unique aspects of making a service call, authenticating, capturing the response, etc. It’s fairly easy to take a look at the configuration settings of a node, especially an
HTTP Request node, and see how the request is formatted, what headers are needed, what to expect as a response, and so on. Examining even your own code after a few weeks have passed, can take a lot more time, and is often a lot more error prone. Duplicating a call to a particular service in another workflow, or sharing the credentials is also frequently just a quick copy/paste in n8n.
There are certainly lots of other reasons to use n8n instead of writing code, and there are many reasons writing code would be better for some things. You could write code instead to do anything/everything n8n does. n8n itself is written in TS/JS after all. As with any higher level tool, the differentiator is what features and functions the tool does that you won’t have to write code to do. The key consideration for our team, when choosing which tool to use in each use case, is understanding each tool’s strengths and tradeoffs. Once you spend a bit of time with n8n, those factors will be more familiar to you too, I’m sure.
Thanks for the reply mate, much appreciated.
How long have you been a dev?
You are very welcome, if that helped, kindly mark the answer as solution.
I was coding on and off for the last 15 years