"Open source version of coze" is popular, with financing exceeding 460 million! Now Docker pulls more than 100 million, with 77.5k stars
Open source workflow automation tool n8n received huge financing, with over 77.5k GitHub stars!
Core content:
1. n8n's financing situation and investor composition
2. n8n's functional features and application integration scope
3. n8n's development history and market performance
The round was led by Highland Europe, with participation from HV Capital and previous investors Sequoia, Felicis and Harpoon.
n8n is an open source, extensible workflow automation tool that provides an intuitive interface that allows users to connect different applications and services in a drag-and-drop manner to create customized automation processes. n8n supports 400+ application and service integrations, including various common applications and services such as Google, Slack, GitHub, Trello, etc.
“Automation shouldn’t be a black box — businesses need transparency, customization, and cost-effectiveness,” said Jan Oberhauser, founder and CEO of n8n. “With n8n, we’ve built more than just a platform; we’ve built a community that loves us and trusts us. From individual contributors to global enterprises, n8n empowers everyone with the power of a 10x developer, which is critical as AI explodes in the workplace.”
n8n has experienced explosive growth over the past year, with more than 200,000 active users and a 5x increase in annual recurring revenue (ARR).
Currently, n8n has received 77.5k stars on the GitHub platform. So why is this open source software so popular?
GitHub project address : https://github.com/n8n-io
Jan Oberhauser founded n8n, a workflow automation platform, in 2019. The platform combines AI capabilities with business process automation to provide technology teams with a solution that combines the flexibility of code with the speed of no-code operations.
Jan Oberhauser, Founder and CEO of n8n
Like many founders, Jan Oberhauser initially created n8n to solve technical problems he encountered.
September 2018 n8n (pre-release version)
Jan Oberhauser worked in the visual effects industry for many years, helping artists get rid of tedious repetitive tasks and improve work efficiency through automation technology. This experience made him discover a long-overlooked problem: the high dependency of automation tools. Whenever the team encountered a workflow problem, they had to wait for engineers to develop a custom solution, while those who really needed automation could not solve the problem independently.
This insight gave him the idea to start a business.
Jan started this project in 2018 with the original intention of solving practical problems he encountered. At that time, he investigated existing solutions and found that they were not ideal, so he decided to design tools according to his own needs. In the next year and a half, he used his spare time to develop - he still worked in other startups during the day and worked another part-time job to maintain his income.
In June 2019, he named his initial solution "Nodemation" - a platform that allows users to automate tasks through a visual interface (rather than code). But because the domain name was taken, he eventually simplified it to n8n (short for "Nodemation") and officially launched it.
In early 2020, n8n completed its first round of financing of US$1.5 million, and welcomed the first four team members in April of the same year. Before receiving this financing, Jan had been maintaining the project alone.
In 2021, n8n raised another $12 million in a Series A round. The round was led by Felicis Ventures, with participation from Sequoia Capital, firstminute Capital, and Harpoon Ventures. Unnamed early employees from Google and Zendesk also reportedly participated in the round. The startup has raised about $14 million as of 2021, but has not disclosed its valuation.
According to n8n, most tools in the current €22.1 billion workflow automation space are unable to cope with complex and high-volume workflows. This limitation forces enterprise teams to rely on time-consuming and difficult-to-maintain internal development and custom scripts, and n8n was born to solve this problem.
n8n is essentially a visual workflow automation tool (similar to Zapier or Make.com, but with a different focus). It uses a node editor mode: each node represents an independent operation, and users can pass data between different nodes through wires. For example: when there is a new lead in PipeDrive CRM, an email notification is automatically sent. These workflows can be very simple, or they can build automated processes with complex logic such as conditional branches and data merging, allowing users to quickly complete the automation of various complex tasks.
According to Jan, node-based design is n8n's unique innovation in the field of automation. Compared with other tools: Zapier uses a linear process suitable for beginners, and Make (formerly Integromat) supports branches but is still not a true visual programming. n8n realizes a true visual programming paradigm through complete "if-else" conditional nodes. This higher-level abstraction capability is both the most prominent advantage and indeed raises the threshold for use.
Regarding the target user group, Jan said that he established the design philosophy of "two-way adaptation" when he first started the project:
For business personnel: retain the ease of use of drag-and-drop operations to meet basic automation needs;
For developers: open JavaScript custom nodes, API calls and other advanced features;
This design is based on Jan's observations in the film and television industry - the most effective tool should be able to satisfy artists' quick operation and engineers' deep customization. n8n is essentially trying to solve this universal contradiction: how to balance "ease of use" and "flexibility".
Today, n8n supports mission-critical workflows for more than 3,000 companies, enabling them to seamlessly integrate any language model (including state-of-the-art models such as DeepSeek), combine it with custom code steps, and incorporate human-machine interaction mechanisms to maintain control and compliance. n8n says this approach enables companies to have full control over their automation and AI infrastructure.
From frustration to rapid growth
The early days were challenging—Jan would often code late into the night, and at one point he doubted whether anyone would want what he was developing. But then people started using n8n, sharing their workflows, and building on top of the project. The community naturally grew and the number of users kept growing.
As for why it is experiencing rapid growth, the reason is simple: it can handle complex scenarios with simple operations.
n8n uses a node-based architecture that allows users to easily connect various systems, cloud services, databases, and applications to build customized automated processes.
On this platform, each node represents an independent functional module that can perform specific operations such as reading files, sending emails, triggering notifications, etc. These nodes can be run independently or connected to each other through a visual interface to form a complete automated workflow. This design enables n8n to handle both simple daily task automation and complex business scenario integration.
It also has rich functions and flexible scalability.
Specifically, the n8n platform has built-in more than 600 predefined workflow templates, covering most common business automation scenarios, allowing teams to quickly automate processes and significantly improve work efficiency.
The workflow configuration is saved in JSON format. This design not only makes it easy for users to reuse and share their own automation solutions, but also makes full use of the massive template resources of the open source community.
In terms of integration capabilities, n8n already natively supports more than 350 mainstream applications, but its real advantage lies in its nearly unlimited scalability. Even if some tools are not on the official support list, users can still connect to their API interfaces through HTTP request nodes to achieve custom integration. This means that whether it is a niche tool or an internal enterprise system, as long as an API interface is provided, n8n can achieve seamless docking.
More importantly, n8n is not just a simple automation tool, it is a complete workflow development platform. The platform uses an intuitive visual operation interface, which lowers the threshold for use and allows non-technical personnel to quickly get started. At the same time, it retains sufficient flexibility and supports writing custom logic through JavaScript to meet the advanced needs of developers.
The platform also provides a process snapshot function, which can completely save the workflow configuration to avoid repeated construction. In terms of enterprise-level applications, n8n can support the processing of high concurrency and complex business logic to meet the needs of large-scale deployment.
Today, the n8n team has expanded to over 80 members, has grown to over 200,000 users, has over 100 million Docker pulls worldwide, and is ranked among the top 150 projects of all time on the GitHub repository.
According to Sifted, n8n is the 25th fastest growing startup in Europe by 2024. The company has seen a whopping 378% year-over-year growth.
This open source project, which has become famous on GitHub, has received mixed reviews from developers in actual deployment.
On Hacker News, a user who is using the n8n tool said,
"Our team is currently using this tool in some projects. Although our manager has no programming background, he used it to build a fairly complex backend system - integrating the Postgres database and several REST APIs, and also handling scheduled tasks and tasks triggered by Webhooks, which makes me feel very impressive. However, this tool has some obvious shortcomings, such as occasional random errors, and at this stage we can only deal with it through a retry mechanism. Fortunately, I heard that this problem may be fixed in the near future."
Some users also said that although it is not the best choice, they will still use it because of its open source and free attributes.
"We deployed it on our own Kubernetes cluster, which was a no-brainer for me. The free version does have many limitations, such as simple user management and even lack of basic features like OIDC integration. But considering that we strictly control the budget for software procurement, it's better to have it than not."
Some users believe that it is more suitable for technicians with weak basic skills.
"As far as personal preference is concerned, I prefer to use an orthodox programming technology stack. But for people with weak programming foundation (basic knowledge such as SQL, database principles, and HTTP is required), I would still recommend this tool."
As an automation management platform, it is inevitable to be compared with other tools. Many users compared it with Zapier, but found that its performance was not as good as Zapier.
"One of the main issues I find with n8n is that many of the integrations seem half-baked. We tried it as a replacement for Zapier less than a year ago and ran into some notable limitations: the FTP node didn't support TLS encryption (not enough security), the AWS SES node couldn't attach files to emails (missing functionality), the Salesforce node had very few options (not enough integration depth), to name just a few, but these limitations really frustrated us at the time. n8n itself is a great, well-designed piece of software, but some of the integration nodes seem to be there just to make up the numbers (i.e. "supports N integrations") without really polishing up usability. Maybe that's getting better now, but they really need to put more effort into these integrations."
However, some users still think n8n is a good choice after comparing Zapier and n8n. The user said:
“I've been using n8n for over a year now. I prefer the flexibility and self-hosting capabilities it offers over the more popular Zapier. It has some minor issues, but they're usually only discovered after extensive use and reading the community forums. The only thing I wouldn't recommend is their cloud version - it seems to have more bugs and instability (such as frequent timeouts, probably due to shared resource constraints) than my self-hosted instance. I'd still recommend n8n to anyone looking for an affordable open source alternative to Zapier.”
In fact, in addition to internationally renowned similar tools such as Zapier and Make.com, domestic tools similar to n8n such as Coze are also very popular.
Coze is a new automation platform launched by ByteDance in 2023. Its biggest feature is the deep integration of AI capabilities such as large language models. Coze has now switched from being completely free to a professional business charging model.
In terms of technical architecture, Coze emphasizes low-code and natural language interaction, which greatly reduces the threshold for use, making it particularly suitable for quickly building simple automation scenarios such as AI customer service. However, it should be noted that Coze currently only provides cloud services and does not support private deployment.
Some users also compared n8n with ByteDance's Coze. Coze positions itself as "an AI chatbot platform that anyone can use." It provides ready-made templates and a drag-and-drop interface to define the robot's conversation logic. For marketers or customer service staff who don't understand code, Coze allows them to design question-and-answer processes, train chat content, and then try out the effects in real time through integrated testing. This design makes building a chatbot as easy as making a slideshow: choose a template (such as a FAQ robot), modify the questions and answers, configure a little trigger channel, and you can go online.
The user said that in terms of ease of use, Coze and n8n are comparable, and coze has basically reached the level of "fool-proof operation".
“Newbies can usually create a simple chatbot in a short time. It should be noted that since the product is still being improved, some users have reported that Coze’s current interface and experience are insufficient and may require trial and error.”
According to the n8n team, their goal is to make the tool accessible to the public. However, Jan believes that "accessibility" should be a transitional stage, and eventually it will be completely code-free. This is very similar to Bubble - although the entry curve is steep, it can achieve powerful functions.
From n8n's product positioning, we can see that although n8n pursues popularization, the core always retains professional components.
Jan said: "As a programmer, I always design products for 'people of the same ilk' - there is no need to rewrite a lot of repetitive code. We have built-in code modules, and users can fall back to the code layer at any time, which solves the sense of restraint that developers feel when using no-code tools."
Just like Excel is everywhere, n8n's versatility makes it suitable for various scenarios such as chatbots, security automation, e-commerce, etc.
It is undeniable that this kind of deployment flexibility is indeed critical in building modern software. But at the same time, another issue that needs attention is the transparency and observability of the code. In this direction, Jan proposed the concept of "Fair Code".
Jan said that many open source projects are currently in such a dilemma - the traditional open source model is easily arbitraged by large cloud vendors such as Google, who directly use open source code for hosting services to make profits, while the original team has to maintain it for free. Companies such as Elasticsearch are forced to turn to "open core", but this is equivalent to artificially castrating the product.
n8n uses the Apache 2.0+Commons Clause protocol, and the code is completely open, but commercial hosting is prohibited. This protects commercial interests while allowing users to deploy independently. Just like GitLab has a community version/enterprise version, but n8n will not set basic functions such as user management as a paywall.
Partners integrate n8n into their SaaS products through licensing agreements. This model truly aligns technical value and business returns.
Then the question arises again, will this model affect financing?
