n8n is the automation tool Tandem uses most. More than 20 engagements have run through it, in small and mid-sized companies, and some of those flows have been live for over two years.
My verdict fits in three sentences. n8n remains the best place to run business logic that has to survive without supervision. It becomes a trap when a team asks it to replace a real product, a document base or an autonomous agent. And the painful invoice stays the maintenance, well ahead of the subscription.
What n8n does better than other automation tools
The real strength of n8n shows the day an automation falls over. You open the failed execution, you see the node that broke, the data it received and the data it returned. You replay it. That visual reading saves hours of investigation, and it explains why we keep n8n even when part of the processing lives elsewhere.
The catalogue has also grown a lot. The vendor's integrations page lists 2,366 integrations in October 2026. Many articles still quote a few hundred connectors, which gives a false picture of what the tool covers today.
One last point that matters inside companies, credentials stay in the platform. A team can build a flow without ever handling a plain-text API key. If you need the basics first, our guide on what n8n is starts from scratch, and our comparison against Make and Zapier covers the choice between the three.
Why a workflow that works in a demo breaks in production
This is the gap I see most often. A flow built in one afternoon runs perfectly in front of the client. Three weeks later it has stopped, and nobody noticed. The cause almost never sits in the business logic.
The vendor documentation on error handling states that the error workflow is set in each individual workflow's settings. In other words, a new workflow ships with no alerting until somebody attaches one. On an instance hosting thirty flows, a single oversight is enough to lose visibility on a whole chain.
The most frequent technical failure on our projects remains memory. One large file loaded whole into a code step, and the instance goes down.
The vendor documents this plainly. Its page on memory errors states that n8n does not restrict the amount of data each node can fetch and process, and that the Code node significantly increases memory consumption. The remedy fits in one sentence. Split the work into sub-workflows that return only the result the parent flow needs.
What the entry plan does not put forward
The n8n pricing page, checked in October 2026, lists the Starter plan at 20 euros a month billed annually. The headline figure is the execution count. The limits that actually make or break a project sit elsewhere in the table.
The Pro plan raises the maximum duration to 40 minutes and history to five days. That is the first tier genuinely usable by a company that depends on its flows. The Business plan is announced as self-hosted only.
The subscription is the small line, though. What really costs is the build time, then the maintenance hours when an API changes format. We broke that split down in our article on the real cost of an n8n project, and our free versus paid comparison covers the self-hosting question.
The first project I would not rebuild inside n8n
An internal document base queried by artificial intelligence, built node by node inside n8n. We did it. We would not do it that way again.
I explained why in a LinkedIn post from January 2026. Three traps come back every time. Document chunking, which flattens headings and tables. Syncing, because a knowledge base never stops moving. And permissions, because a colleague can end up reading a document they have no right to see.
As a learning exercise this build is excellent. For production, a dedicated product ships faster and handles permissions better. My review of Dust covers that French alternative. n8n then keeps a valuable role, it triggers, it monitors and it retries.
The second, the autonomous agent started too early
The other mistake happens before any tool is chosen. I detailed it in my newsletter edition on the four levels of optimisation. A company spots repetitive tasks and asks for an agent. In the vast majority of cases, a deterministic flow with one model call in the right place delivers the same service. For a fraction of the cost and the fragility.
n8n can do both, and that is exactly what makes the trap easy to fall into. The agent node drops in with two clicks. Supervision, guardrails and error recovery have to be built by hand.
If you are weighing an assistant, a simple automation, a flow with a model call and a full agent, our article on the four levels of optimisation lays out the decision grid. And our tutorial on building an agent in n8n shows the build when an agent genuinely earns its place.
Does Claude Code replace n8n?
The question comes up in every workshop now that dev agents have landed inside companies. My answer is no, and the nuance deserves to be spelled out.
I wrote it up in a LinkedIn post from February 2026. A dev agent reproduces the logic of an n8n flow very quickly, data aggregation, business rules, API calls. The result is real, and it lands in two days rather than two weeks. The trap comes afterwards.
The two tools complement each other very well. The dev agent writes the hard business brick. n8n orchestrates it, watches it and retries it. That is how we work on most recent engagements.
The n8n licence, the point almost nobody reads
n8n is not open source in the classic sense. The licence file in the official repository places the code under the Sustainable Use License. Its central clause lets you use or modify the software « only for your own internal business purposes or for non-commercial or personal use ».
In practice, a company automating its own processes has nothing to worry about. A vendor wanting to resell a product with n8n embedded must sign a commercial agreement. The line sits on what you bill a third party.
A second subtlety, the same file states that source files whose names contain « .ee. » fall outside that licence and require an Enterprise licence. The repository you self-host therefore contains code you cannot freely exploit.
What we would do again, what we would avoid
| Need | Our pick | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Orchestrating and monitoring business flows | n8n | Visual logs, retries and alerts without writing code |
| Writing complex business logic | A dev agent, called from n8n | Fast to write, with supervision handed back to the platform |
| Querying an internal document base | A dedicated product | Chunking, syncing and permissions handled natively |
| Processing a large batch of documents | Self-hosted n8n, split into sub-workflows | The entry plan cuts off at 5 minutes per execution |
Should you choose n8n to automate your company?
Yes, in the large majority of cases, and that is a verdict more than 20 engagements have confirmed. No other tool gives this much control over business logic for such a modest subscription, while staying readable by someone who does not code.
The reservation is about the team. n8n needs someone who watches it, updates it and fixes it when an API moves. A company without that skill in-house must either hire it, outsource it, or stick to a handful of simple flows.
If you are still choosing your first projects, our AI audit exists for exactly that, mapping the tasks and sizing the impact before anything gets built. And if you are looking for a team to build and maintain your flows, that is what our n8n agency does. To see what a first end-to-end flow looks like, our tutorial on a small-business case walks through it step by step.
