Having some experience with both, I think they are quite different. N8n looks quite polished and seems primarily concerned about connecting pre-made blocks. There are custom code blocks (JS and Python only, with limited ability to import libraries), but it’s not something you’d use by default. I thinks it great for less-technical users when compared to windmill.
Windmill OTOH supports a bunch of programming languages for steps (Go, Rust, Python, TS, etc.) and seems to have a much more “code first” approach. Reusable blocks are more like code templates compared to n8n.
Hard to say which is better. I really like the ability in windmill to just write code for each step and it comes across more powerful, but it feels less polished and intuitive when compared to n8n.
I'm not ashamed to admit than n8n feels more polished. There are a few reasons:
- Our team was and is still much smaller. We were 5 for the first 2 years, we are now 10 (year 3), and are continuing to hire to follow our growth.
- They have been around for longer and mature for longer, more time to iterate. We have reached some level of maturity recently and are now spending more iterations on polishing rather than new features.
- Their surface area is smaller, windmill does A LOT and expose more for the better or worse.
n8n has done a lot of things really well and although we have a different audience, there is a lot to learn from what they did very well and we have the upmost respect for them. We have some overlap, but I think ultimately we strive in different kind of orgs and will cohabit rather than compete.
While you're here, may I ask something about Windmill? My impression of n8n is that it's similar to Zapier in the sense that it mainly focuses on linking pre-made integrations, while Windmill is more of a workflow engine like Temporal. But while I see on your landing page that Windmill also boast lots of integrations, clicking on any of them take me to a sort of community script sharing interface, where it's not really clear how fully fleshed out any of the integrations are.
Are these two things being wrongly compared to each other when they're actually meant for different purposes? Or is Windmill indeed a good point of comparison?
Windmill is also not fully open source; there are major sections of it powering central features that are not released as free software.
Also, they require a CLA with copyright assignment so they can reuse your contributions in nonfree software. It’s always shady when companies do this.
The open source parts of Windmill are partially Apache and partially AGPL; there are some of us who additionally regard the AGPL as nonfree (because it’s really a EULA).
> Also, they require a CLA with copyright assignment so they can reuse your contributions in nonfree software. It’s always shady when companies do this.
They sell a version of the software, of course they'd have a CLA. It's not shady, it's a prerequisite to be able to sell - because even if you assume no contributor will decide to retract their contribution later on, many of your customers will ask for guarantees that you fully own, control and can sell the code you're selling them
Yes, that’s why it’s shady. It expects the community to contribute to this free software project, only to use those contributions in nonfree software. It’s trying to leverage community efforts for private gain.
If you believe in the ideology of software freedoms, you don’t release nonfree software. It’s open source cosplay.
Linux is GPL and that hasn’t stopped anyone from adopting it.
> If you believe in the ideology of software freedoms, you don’t release nonfree software. It’s open source cosplay
Or, you believe in open source software, want yours to be available, forkable and even why not get community contributions, but you also want a full time job that allows you to eat? How much of the world's software wouldn't exist if we gatekept open source to a volunteer effort only?
Linux and Python the projects don't make any money. Various orgs that contribute to them and build off them do, but that's irrelevant.
WordPress mostly make money hosting, and are indeed a good example. Redis somewhat, but it wasn't going that well, hence their recent license changes.
> The choice is not “release only free software xor be commercially successful”.
There are vanishingly few companies that manage to pull off a successful (profitable) business off open source software they're developing, and most of them predate the rise of the hyperscalers that can just sell everyone your open source as a service. Can you think of any others?
Just to clarify.
The reason why you aren't saying N8n is open source because of its license right? I haven't read its license but it does seem to me to have quite some restrictions.
Typically when people say open source they mean that the source code can be used , modified and made public for any purpose. There is an organization called OSI that maintains a ratified list of licenses that are compatible with the ideals of the open source movement. Although the OSI has been compromised by the big cloud providers and no longer serves the public interest, the list can still be relied on as a good sign that the license you're looking at is open source.
