First posting here! I’ve been loving n8n ever since I needed to find something less expensive than zapier. However, I’m not a programmer, and honestly AI has given me the confidence to explore automation. As a copier salesman, I’ve been looking for opportunities to automate parts of my job and honestly it’s become somewhat of a hobby beyond work. When considering ways to automate other parts of our small business, I realized a limitation of N8N. How do you connect/ make workflows for apps without API. This lead me and my AI copilot down the road of RPA’s.
What is a simple way to connect an RPA that controls a browser or the desktop? My criteria is Free or low cost, similar to N8n’s pricing structure. Low or no code or documented enough that AI can coach me through implementation. Here’s what I’ve found but please let me know if you have any other recommendations:
For Web Browsing RPA- Automa
Using Automa’s Web extension, N8n now has the ability to connect with data gathered from any website or webapp that dosen’t have API using a simple HTTP call/Webhook. I eventually would like to learn how to make nodes and intergate that further.
For Desktop RPA: UI Vision RPA
This has proved to be more challenging as the UI is less friendly and ChatGPT 4o isn’t too successful with zero shot recommendations on workflows.(which I believe is due to limited documentation and forums). However, I have successfully integrated with n8n by running a powershell HTTP Request and copying the returned data from N8n to the clipboard. UI Vision can then use that data as a variable for further control. I don’t think it’s a great solution but it works for now and can do things like getting/sending data to a desktop app that dosen’t have API.
I wanted to share these findings with the community and see if you have found any web/desktop RPA solutions that can be controlled by n8n?
I’ve imagined something like Robot Framework would be cool to run through code nodes but that’s very code heavy and I’m not there yet. It would be great if one app could do both web and desktop RPA and even greater if N8n could do it all!
I have used n8n with RocketBot in the past and some of the UIPath solutions, Most RPA solutions will have a method to trigger an event based on a message coming in or a file based operation.
How have you found the pricing of RocketBot and UIPath?
Also, did you work with passing variables between the programs? I see most are limited to triggers but I was curious if variables could be transferred to control the RPA from N8n.
I think UI Path is always going to be a pricier option but when it comes to RPA I do believe they are the “standard”, Rocketbot had fairly good pricing from what I remember and they were releasing new features fairly quickly, Solid team behind it as well.
With UIPath you can use webhooks from your workflow and post any data you want to pick up as variables you can then use a browser or command line option from your RPA project to call a webhook in n8n to start something else.
With RocketBot you can pretty much do the same thing, The other approach would be to use files or databases with cron / schedule events depending on what is being built.
Some of this may have changed as I have not really dug into RPA for a few years now.
I’m currently investigating using SSh node to send powershell commands to control libraries like .Net’s UI automation. This allows for variables to be sent from n8n and is free. Claude 3.5 is also really good at writing the scripts for the test I’ve tried. Like solving math equations using the calculator app. (1 shot prompting) I know there’s other libraries I may need to investigate like robot framework.
If I make any progress I’ll report what I find but if anyone else has dabbled I’d be interested to learn.
I did try UI vision but found it to be a whole other learning curve on top of n8n. In addition, I would have to send any api request back and forth between the two apps so that’s why i settle on trying to make RPA features inside of N8N. I’m hoping to release the library soon so you can all use it!
