Your thoughts on community extensions for n8n

[ivov]

We’re exploring the idea of enabling the community to build extensions for n8n, so you can extend n8n’s frontend and backend with custom views, routes, hooks, etc. Think VSCode extensions, Chrome extensions, Wordpress plugins, and so on.

We’d love to hear your thoughts:

1. Has there been a time when you needed functionality that n8n didn’t support and that could have been an extension? What were you trying to accomplish, and what was missing?
2. Can you think of any specific integration points that would be most valuable to you?
3. What existing pain points in n8n are you hoping extensions could address?

This is an early exploration, so your input will help shape how we approach this feature. We want what we build to help empower the developers in our community.

Thank you for your feedback!

[rbreen]

Hi!

I’m not sure if this is in scope of what you’re asking, but here’s an idea:

I find myself creating a lot of AI agent-style steps in n8n that do a variety of tasks (e.g., answering questions, booking appointments, generating content). I often get inspiration from what other creators are building.

Idea: It would be amazing to use AI agents created by others as installable “apps” or extensions within n8n — kind of like reusable workflows, but with custom logic, views, and maybe even their own UI components.

This could create an ecosystem where we don’t just share workflows, but entire smart agents people can plug into their automations.

[SolomonChrist]

(Note: I Used ChatGPT to help me clean my original text up a bit lol - The message is the same just a lot cleaner and easier to understand hopefully)

As much as I love new features, I personally believe one of the best things the n8n team can do is double down on stability and polish—really battle-test n8n so it runs seamlessly in production environments. That’s where I see the greatest long-term value (just my opinion!).

That said, if I could wave a magic wand and get exactly what I needed, here’s what I’d love to see in an extensions ecosystem:

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1. Has there been a time when you needed functionality that n8n didn’t support and that could have been an extension? What were you trying to accomplish, and what was missing?

Absolutely. I often work with clients in AI and automation, and it would be a game-changer to easily build custom extensions for client-facing views.

Sometimes I want to build lightweight frontends (or even WordPress plugins) where clients can interact with workflows without exposing the actual n8n interface. Currently, it’s difficult to give them access without risking them breaking something. Extensions would help me create safer, simplified user experiences while maintaining control over the backend.

Another big area: failure alerts and analytics. Right now, unless I manually add error nodes, I don’t get alerts when a flow fails (until a client says it’s not working). An extension that provides customizable failure notifications, analytics on usage, or even uptime monitoring for specific workflows would be incredibly useful—especially when building micro-SaaS platforms using n8n.

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2. Can you think of any specific integration points that would be most valuable to you?

Yes, a few:

• Custom code injection into both frontend and backend—something more flexible than current webhook or function nodes, which are per-workflow (Unless there is a way already to do this, I just haven’t found it yet).
• Modular plugin system similar to WordPress, with a web store or marketplace to install or purchase extensions.
• Ability to build UI components or dashboards for clients directly within n8n (or embedded from it), securely and modularly.
• Extensions for centralized monitoring tools for multi-instance management would be amazing. (Currently dealing with several customers and in the future plan for many more implementations of n8n and really need a way to manage all those implementations and analyze them and save money)

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3. What existing pain points in n8n are you hoping extensions could address?

Here are a few that extensions could solve:

• Error handling and alerting: Better tools to track and notify when flows fail or stall, without needing complex workarounds.
• Production reliability: Monitoring tools to ensure workflows and integrations stay up 24/7, especially for client deployments.
• AI-assisted workflow building: Imagine prompting an AI to create optimized workflows using plain language—an extension could bring this to life.
• Learning and onboarding: A gamified learning path or in-platform tutorial system would help new users master n8n faster, especially for agencies training new staff.
• Multi-instance management: I work with multiple clients, and managing all their n8n deployments is a hassle. A centralized dashboard to monitor, update, and analyze all instances would be huge.
• Workflow cost analytics: Tracking usage and API costs per workflow (e.g., OpenAI calls), helping spot inefficiencies or even potential abuse (like stolen keys).

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Yes, that’s a lot! But I’m actively running an AI automation business in USA with clients in the Los Angeles, California area as well as building a community online for other AI Automators like myself (AI + ML & Automation Mastery) as well as constantly learning and growing my n8n skills and these are real needs I’m facing at the moment. I love n8n and see huge potential—extensions could open the door to scalable solutions for developers like me serving multiple clients, students and community members.

Thanks for opening up the conversation! (Note: This is just all my opinion, feel free to pick and choose what works for you guys )

[sirdavidoff]

Thanks for the input, @SolomonChrist - some good ideas in there.

I just wanted to check whether you’re aware of error workflows that run when there’s any kind of error in your main workflow?

[SolomonChrist]

Yes so with that error node, that’s fine for the basics and then ofcourse the execution list is where we go to review the run items and kinda understand where things have happened.

What would probably be better in the future is to apply AI to it somehow and let the AI report to us why a workflow could be failing and how to fix it.

Ex. When a flow has a loop and runs through the data and then on run 17 / 30 it fails and the whole flow stops. AI could understand that (for example) the email string on run 17 coming from the Hubspot node was a null value, and then report back something like “Your flow XYZ stopped on the 17/30 run due to a Hubspot value for email being null or empty, you should either set to “Always Output Data” or use an IF node to address this issue or Solution A, B or C…would you like me to implement one of these solutions for you?” (And if the user likes a solution, the AI could go and manipulate that part of the workflow and add the solution).

For an extension version of the above, an extension that can do more detailed error checking could include additional details, heat maps, users who used it, details of those who called the workflow (Ex. if a workflow was called from an iPhone user using an n8n frontend webhook and the data now comes in all the time buggy because of an iPhone/iOS formatting issue, but comes in fine via Android, data analytics like that could help us to address those edge cases because we now understand these more detailed error analytics.).

btw thats not something I’d expect the n8n team to go deep on but an extension creator who would dedicate their time to build out a tool that could extend n8n functionality in the future potentially.

Other data such as understanding time of day, location in the world where something is run, services that are taking longer (Ex. How much time did node A take to execute in general on average? Could it be that the api call is taking long due to the service or did the data that the node was passing have some bad character in it that is causing the API to loop longer than usual before returning data back?). If someone was able to write an extension that was focued on error checking, they could make an additional service for n8n users and with an asset store of some kind, n8n team could be controlling that revenue maybe with an 80/20 split and getting 20% of all asset sales thus adding an additional revenue stream.

In any case, just throwing ideas out there.

Thanks for building such a great system and I look forward to being part of its growth over the years

[octionic]

Awesome idea! Just recently I started building a chrome extension trying to extend some UI functionalities, but that way it feels just wrong.

It would be highly beneficial if n8n extensions could access the canvas, so the entire react flow component and also be able to access the live workflow configuration with all its properties being able to modify them during runtime.

Some events would also be super useful, like on load, when clicking test workflow, clicking save, etc.

Would be awesome if it would be allowed to write those extensions also in JS, not just TS.

[Olek]

Extending n8n capabilities by enabling contributors is a great idea.

@ivov

Has there been a time when you needed functionality that n8n didn’t support and that could have been an extension? What were you trying to accomplish, and what was missing?

Often issues with a workflow stem from the data processed (as opposed to the nodes mis-use/mis-configuration errors). Sharing workflow with the community when seeking help has a pain-point – n8n wouldn’t allow to pin binary data (I assume due to the ways the binary data is stored and its life cycle handled internally). Yet it would be helpful.

Now I am thinking of an extension that could help overcome this by employing a 3rd party cacheing service. The extension would detect pinning events, capture the binary data, store it, provide it and delete on unpinning event.

The backend logic is absolutely implementable by an n8n workflow. So, a parametrized workflow execution could work well. It would be nice if the execution would count as a test execution or against the extension user’s executions quota.

I can imagine there will be service abuse scenarios possible if this comes for “free”. I guess this concern is valid for any type of extensions relying on n8n workflows as their backend. Although I believe strategies to counter the abuse while not affecting the UX and DX are not something that is impossible to implement.

[HenryPuppet]

Will community nodes be available for cloud services?

[Jim_Hankins]

@ivov

backend with custom views, routes, hooks, etc. Think VSCode extensions, Chrome extensions, Wordpress plugins, and so on.

Love the idea. Currently we integrate using your existing rest API and provide a means to quickly get N8N installed and provisioned with a shared database along with our application stack. This is actually pretty powerful in and of itself, it turns out. As you can leverage your existing nodes, http endoints and do things in a low latency fasion with standards based integration points. As an example, we can act as a buffer in front of N8N with durable jobs to feed N8N work preventing it from being overwealmed. Hooks for execution performance metrics would be handy as we can surface those kinds of things in dynamic visual reports that off load that behavior from N8N so it can focus on the task at hand. Excecution state info to be used externally to grade effectiveness of prompts (as we currently previde a way to present a simple UI for dynamic user and system prompts, we could update these prompts with performance metrics that could be used to adjust weights on prompts used in dynamic prompt switching.

[Neil_Carmichael]

I think it’s a great idea you could even have an idea forum for people to suggest things, for example I would like a full intergration with Wikipedia’s graph database “wikidata” as it could “fill in the blanks” with things (as it has a lot of links and “common knowledge”)

[Neil_Carmichael]

Arguably “community extensions” could help as people could work on their own “edge cases” and leave the main team to focus on the core functionality

[FelixL]

I’ve already added additional buttons (tampermonkey) on the n8n canvas to execute small n8n workflows with the currently opened workflow as input data.

For example:

• Show diagram of all related workflows to the current opened one. (relations could be “execute workflow”, “webhooks to other n8n workflow/instance” and in some special cases “execute workflow” where the workflowid to executes comes from a database.)
• Generate embedable workflow Link – Generates a Link which points to a workflow which returns a html page which shows the workflow with some additional information. This page gets embeded in outline (getoutline.com)
• Open Documentation Page of this workflow – automatically links to the outline (getoutline.com) page of this workflow if it exists.

[Leo_Erdman_AI]

Hey, this is a great thing to do!

Groups like in comfy UI or canvas in MIRO. The main thing - when you drag the group, all inside is moving too. This would be very convinient

[applause.for.the.fea]

Hello, I am terribly sorry for my English, but I want to say something thet can be a great mechanism. I am thinking about own alternative project for more that 1 year and I’am using another way of creating steps. Shortly: this is artefact oriented-arcitecture: there are operations and fields for them (arguments and return values). You know, sometimes the different operations have the same arguments (or return values), for example, there are few ways to calculate triangle square and all the way can be independent operation. So we need to link them. I called it Generalization - it has getters with generalization_id and operation_field_id.

And for now, let imagine there are operations:
OperationA (fields: fieldA1: int , fieldA2: str) (returns: resultA: float);
OperationB (fields: fieldB1: float, fieldB2: bytes) (returns: resultB: str);
OperationC (fields: fieldC1: str, fieldC2: List[str]) (returns: resultC: dict).

Let’s make a suggestion that resultA is the same field as fieldB1. And resultB is the same field as fieldC1.

Artefact-oriented arcitecture for me means that I need to choose only Artefact, for example, resultC. And after with help of described above mechamism, the system can pitch me fill the following fields: fieldC1 and fieldC2 as they are arguments to get resultC, but also since fieldC1 is the same field as resultB, it can pitch me to fill fieldB1 and fieldB2 and the reson for it is simply that they can help me get resultB. And of course, there is last link connecting resultA and fieldB1. That means if i don’t know value of fieldB1, but fieldA1 and fieldA2 are known values, I can fill them instead of filling fieldB1.

This is a way to construct graph with optional parameters.
Did you know about UE blueprints? Take a look and imagine that fields without links are components. In your system they are steps. To build workflow we can load few steps and make matches between their fields.

And last idea: I noticed in self-hosted version that there are variables in your system. This is great and I will use it in my app, but I suggest you to add Context. This allow you to fill the fields using previous runs. To manage it more intelligent, I realised freeze and unfreeze buttons (or single field and for all [filled if needed]). This will lead to Favourite Contexts which are templates for fast filling the fields. Also there are default values for fields.

[greysolve]

Honestly I would improve the documentation and add examples I don’t have to click on and launch in N8N… they get stale and the node versions march on… it’s not very helpful… just standard regular documentation with working examples by the founders would really help…

[Dr.K]

It’s a great idea.

The obvious extension that n8n needs is an AI helper extension that can view all the workflows, help finding the specific workflow that does something. Helps debug specific cases by having access to the nodes outputs, helps building or proposing new workflows. And does not have access to credentials for security reason.

[jreyesr]

Hello! I’m a bit late to the party, but here goes the braindump:

• Being able to add custom UI to various points, as in the current Insights example that lives in the repo, is definitely very cool. For example, things like new sections in the sidebar (e.g. near the Templates, Variables and Help buttons, to the bottom left), or to the top bar, or on the cards for each workflow in the table, or wherever. I’m thinking along the lines of Mattermost’s component extensions (“Register your own React components to be added to the channel header, sidebars, user details popover, main menu and other supported components”, Web app plugins), or the Modules that are available to Jira apps (e.g. Jira apps can hook into the admin page, create custom fields, add issue actions, add records on the Activity tab of an issue, add JQL functions for searching, and a few more. See https://developer.atlassian.com/platform/forge/manifest-reference/modules/index-jira/)
• An extension to custom components: full pages.
• Presumably related to the above: adding custom routes, such that Vue components can call backend code. Ideally, this backend code should have access to the whole application context, such as the Services that power most/all of N8N’s backend. In this way, extensions would be able to access the DB or get user information
• Giving extensions the ability to register their own page in Settings, such as for configuring API keys in a hypothetical Sentry extension that logs all workflow errors
• Perhaps extensions could supersede, or at least include the functionality of, the Hooks feature. Something like that is already available, I think. Extensions may be interested in general events such as a workflow/step starting/finishing/erroring, or a workflow being created/saved/deleted
• I’d really like for extensions to be able to access the canvas, as indicated in post #9, though that may sounds quite difficult. I was recently trying to make N8N’s editor fully multiplayer (think Google Docs or Lucidchart, with the mouse cursors for each user dancing around on the canvas, such that if someone drags a node everyone else sees it at once. I even wanted to have a shared test execution between everyone who is in the same workflow). I couldn’t find a way to access the canvas state, I think Vueflow is being used as the primary source of that state, and N8N simply receives changes and doesn’t push them into Vueflow.
• Allow extensions to add entirely new node UIs.
  • For example, in N8N all nodes have the same UI (they are squares/rectangles in the canvas, and you double click them to open the parameters panel for the node). There’s one exception that comes to mind, the Sticky Notes node. That has entirely separate render code, and double-clicking it doesn’t pop up a panel. I have many times wanted to have a “pen” tool to scribble things on the canvas (think Zoom’s drawing functionality where you can just draw things on top of a shared screen). That could be served by an extension, as long as extensions can fully control how that node type is rendered (as opposed to custom nodes that can control which fields are shown in the node’s settings, but can’t break out of the settings panel).
  • Another one: I maintain an OpenCV node, which is used for image processing, and I’d love to have a “preview” node that acts like a TV: you connect it somewhere, and it always displays an image that is in its input data. Something like this (imagine that the yellow sticky notes display an image that changes with the input items):
    
    
    
    Or consider the second image in post #16, that looks like some sort of AI image generation UI, and I assume the pictures that appear in the flow change dynamically. N8N would need a wholly new node UI, which a simple custom node can’t provide
  • Another one, perhaps separate: allow extensions to register new custom node UI element types. Admittedly, that’s less useful since it requires node creators to know about, and use, that new element type, unless the same person writes the extension and the custom nodes. For example, that could be used to change the UI that is used to provide HTTP headers from pairs of text fields (one pair for each Name+Value for each header) into a table like the one found in Postman/Insomnia/Bruno/whichever HTTP client (two columns, Name and Value, and as many rows as headers)
• Giving the ability to publish extensions in NPM, maybe just like the experience for discovering and installing community nodes. Just mentioning it because installing things via NPM is much easier than having to drop folders in-tree inside N8N’s source code, which is where the current sample extension lives
• Allowing extensions to add arbitrary data to N8N entities (e.g. workflows, executions, folders, projects, users). With this, an extension could, for example, add a property “docsLink” to each workflow and folder, such that it could somehow surface that link in the UI (as described by the third bullet point in post #15). Or it could add a “isVerified” property to workflows to give them some sort of badge like the one Twitter or Youtube accounts can have, with the idea of giving people some sort of official guidance on known-good workflows to get them started. Or adding a Slack ID to each user so they can be pinged whenever their workflows fail
  • Possible extension: allowing extensions to register their own tables/models in the N8N database, perhaps even giving them access to their own migration files, but I could see that becoming complex with the different DB engines, dependencies between the core DB state and the extension, and perhaps even conflicts between extensions
• Allow extensions to hook into the Tournament evaluator, to add either new functions on already existing data types (e.g. adding new functions on String or Object) or entirely new global functions/variables (such as adding $tomorrow that returns a DateTime object just like $today). This would benefit, for example, this custom node https://www.npmjs.com/package/n8n-nodes-text-manipulation. It exposes, for example, a “Kebab Case” operation, but having to add an entire node for that seems slightly overkill. If it could be a new function on the String type, such that we could do {{ $json.someField.toKebabCase() }}, that’d be useful. Similarly, we could have {{ $randomChoice(1, 6) }} if global functions can be registered. Or perhaps that’d be better served by allowing custom nodes to hook into Tournament, I don’t know. For inspiration, see Jira, where apps can add custom JQL functions that are used by Jira’s magical custom search language

That’s all I can think of right now. Hope some of it is useful! And, BTW, extensions sound amazing. There’s just so much potential there…