n8n

n8n is a powerful tool that can help you streamline and automate many of your business processes, saving you time and increasing your efficiency.

Giving n8n a shot -> Make to n8n.

I am a user of Make, but I have heard a lot of good things about n8n and I decided to give it a shot. My approach to learn it to clone few scenarios that I have already built in Make and see how easy it is to accomplish the same tasks using n8n.

Before starting the experiment, this was my plan:

  • Get my n8n account setup
  • Create a webhook in n8n
  • Fire the webhook from Airtable (manual button click)
  • Create a workflow in n8n that does the following and replicate what I had built already in Make:

make

-> workflow gets triggered via a request from Airtable (webhook)
-> n8n to get Airtable record details
-> connects with OpenAI API
-> Get data from OpenAI  (pass the prompt from the Airtable record (record.prompt))
-> Send the result back to Airtable (Airtable update record, from step1)

First 10 minutes…

The free account creation still requires you to input your credit card information (I found that a bit odd). While my account was created, I took the 4 minutes to watch their intro video: great video, easy to follow and to the point

Next 20 minutes

Was able to discover how to test the webhooks, connect the nodes and explore their “SET” node module. A bit more tricky at first than using Make, but understand the flexibility it would also provide.

If you compare visually the two flow side by side, you can observe the difference of having the extra SET step.

MAKE versus n8n Airtable Interface

Less than one hour in total

I completed the end to end setup in about 45 minutes

  • First Difference Webhook Test URL and Production URL and this is something that I really like. One thing that I love: Sticky Notes: great way to document or add notes to your workflow

Final product. I can pick and choose and trigger both flows from Airtable.

Airtable Interface

Summary

I was being told by many people on twitter to give it a try! I am looking forward to learn more about n8n, and get into their advanced features! That will be for another day.