I’m not usually a fan of no-code or vibe coding tools. They’re great for automating a lot of things, but they fall short when you need out-of-the-box solutions, which is pretty common in real-world systems. That often forces migrations, which can be painful for startups or fast-growing teams.

That said, I really liked N8N. The native integrations (Gmail, LLMs, AWS, etc.) are solid, and being able to run Python and JavaScript adds nice flexibility.

What I liked

Webhooks make it easy to connect more complex flows built with other stacks.

It’s great for steps that need manual intervention, or when non-devs (like business analysts) need to tweak parts of a flow.

Handling input/output between steps with expressions is clean and straightforward, much simpler than AWS Step Functions and Airflow.

Also, it’s lightweight and doesn’t eat up tons of RAM just sitting idle.

What I didn’t like

> Self-hosting docs are weak

In many real systems, self-hosting isn’t optional, especially for legal reasons around data residency. N8N Cloud runs in Germany (as far as I know), which can be a problem depending on the data. But the self-hosting docs are outdated, and setting it up with Kubernetes + Runner Tasks felt as complex as Airflow, which already has a reputation for being hard to maintain.

> Pricing

€667 PER MONTH for a self-hosted business license is rough. This is my biggest problem right now. It will cost more than running it on AWS with autoscaling.

I also wouldn’t be surprised if the free community edition disappears. Their trajectory looks similar to other tools that went fully paid (hi MinIO team). If you just want to learn, the free N8N Cloud plan would be probably your safest bet, even with its limitations.

Considerations

> For personal use

I run my own Kubernetes cluster (8 nodes) for automations and daily-use tools. I started with Airflow, it worked, but building and maintaining workflows was tedious. Then I moved to Argo Workflows, which I like, but right now I care more about productivity than robustness. N8N seems to fit that much better.

> For professional use

I’ll be presenting N8N to my team next week. Some internal workflows are a great fit, especially since business analysts could adjust flows without relying on engineers. If it proves itself, we might even connect it to our main data pipelines.

The main blocker is licensing. I can’t propose using the free version, our audits won’t allow it, and that would become a problem quickly. And the high licensing costs will raise many questions about whether it will be worthwhile or not.