← Full library

n8n

The free alternative toZapier,Make

🟡 Intermediate⏱️ ~20 min to installYou save €26/mo

n8n is your business's engine room. You draw a chain of steps on a canvas (when a form is submitted, create the CRM record, ping Slack, send the welcome email) and it runs without you, day and night. Over 400 services are already wired in, and when none fits, you call any API. The difference with Zapier and Make: you can run it on your own machine. Where Zapier counts your tasks and bills every trigger, your server counts nothing. And for automations calling Claude, you plug in your own key instead of buying their AI credits.

n8n — aperçu
204.8kView on GitHub ↗

Versus Zapier / Make: the match

  • Price

    n8n

    €0, you just pay your server

    Zapier / Make

    €9 to €26/mo, then more

  • Volume

    n8n

    Unlimited, it is your machine

    Zapier / Make

    750 tasks/month on Zapier Pro

  • Your data

    n8n

    Never leaves your server

    Zapier / Make

    Passes through them at every step

Zapier / Make ↗

How to install it (even from zero)

Two ways in: on your machine to try it, or on a server so your automations keep running when your computer is off. Start with the first.

  1. 1

    Install Docker Desktop

    Download it from docker.com, install, open it once. It is the engine that will run n8n on your machine.

  2. 2

    Paste this prompt into Claude (Code or Desktop)

    It installs n8n from the official repository, starts it and checks the interface responds:

    Installe n8n sur ma machine (l'outil open source d'automatisation de workflows, repo GitHub n8n-io/n8n) avec Docker, en suivant la documentation officielle docs.n8n.io. Crée le dossier de travail, écris le docker-compose.yml avec un volume qui conserve mes workflows entre deux redémarrages, lance-le, et vérifie que l'interface répond sur http://localhost:5678. Explique-moi ensuite comment créer mon premier workflow. Explique chaque étape simplement, je débute.

Review the GitHub repository and check whether it is safe to install given my machine and my infrastructure. Ask me as many questions as possible, using widgets, to clarify my request and be as precise as you can.
  3. 3

    Build your first chain

    Open http://localhost:5678, create your account, and start from a simple, useful case: a submitted form that triggers an email. Once that works, the rest follows on its own.

  4. 4

    When it gets serious, move it to a server

    On your machine, your automations stop when you close your laptop. Ask Claude to deploy it to a server or hosting platform, with a real domain, the day you actually depend on it.

What you actually do with it

The repetitive task you do by hand

Copying a form into a spreadsheet, chasing an unanswered quote, filing attachments: you build it once, it runs forever. That is where the time comes back.

Claude wired into your real tools

An email arrives, Claude reads it, sorts it, drafts the reply and saves it. n8n is the pipe connecting the intelligence to your everyday tools, with your own API key.

The deliverable you set up for a client

You install n8n at their place, build their automations, and their team can read and maintain them because it is visual. You bill the work, not a running subscription.

Project health, at a glance

Before installing an open-source tool, one question matters: is the project alive? These scores are computed from public GitHub data. They are not made up.

100/100

Excellent

Very active, well-maintained project: go ahead with confidence.

Activity
100

Is the code moving? (commits in the last 30 days)

Maintenance
100

How fresh is the latest update? Fresher is better.

Community
100

Stars and contributors: people around means help and fixes.

Maturity
100

Project age. Old enough to be solid, still alive.

Momentum
100

Current pace versus its usual pace: speeding up or dozing off?

The repo in numbers

GitHub stars
204.8k
Forks
60.7k
Contributors
428
Commits
24.4k
Project age
7.2 yrs
Last commit
today
Size
604.7 MB
License
Other

Built with

  • TypeScript 92.2%
  • Vue 6.3%
  • JavaScript 0.7%

Scores computed automatically from the GitHub API (last-30-days activity, update freshness, community size, project age). Refreshed daily.

Loucash’s take

9/10

This is my favourite building block whenever something needs orchestrating. I sell it as a service, I teach it to my students, and it is almost always the missing piece when I audit a company: they have the tools, but nothing connecting them. One point of honesty, since this is a library of free tools: n8n is not open source in the strict sense, it is fair-code. Its licence lets you self-host it for your own business, for personal use, and deploy it for a client's internal needs. What it forbids is reselling it white-labelled as a hosted service, competing with their cloud offering. For the use you will make of it, you will never hit that limit. Two hard-earned reservations. When a chain grows long, debugging is painful: build in small pieces and test each step. And n8n does not replace real code at high volume; past a certain level, a script does it better and faster. But to go from doing it by hand to it running on its own, nothing is quicker.

It’s for you if: You repeat the same steps between two tools every week, or you sell automation and need the building block to set up for your clients.

Also worth a look in the library

One email a week that saves you money

Every Tuesday: the open source alternatives that just entered the library, what they replace and what they save you. One email, nothing more.

Free. One email on Tuesdays. Unsubscribe in one click.

Join the Tuesday readers