n8n

Operations, IT, security and sales teams that want to wire their tools together, and increasingly to put AI agents into those chains, are the people n8n builds for. The Berlin company was founded in 2019 by Jan Oberhauser, who remains its chief executive, and spells its name in lowercase, pronounced "n eight n".

Workflows that read as their own documentation

The product is a visual builder in which each step of an automation is a node: a trigger such as a form, a webhook or a new message, then lookups, decisions, AI calls and actions in other systems. Users can drop into code where the visual nodes run out. The company's pitch is that the workflow itself is the record of what an automation does, with run history, the option to replay a past run or mock its data, re-running only the step that failed, and version history showing who changed what. Its own examples include onboarding new hires into Slack, Jira and Notion, checking suspicious indicators against several security tools, triaging alerts by severity, and qualifying sales leads.

Agents, models and connections

n8n now presents itself as an AI orchestration platform. Any model can be connected, agents' decisions can be watched live or inspected afterwards, and steps can require human approval. The site lists more than 500 native integrations, any API over HTTP, and connection to agents and coding assistants through the Model Context Protocol.

Self-hosted or cloud, under a fair-code licence

The source is published on GitHub under n8n's Sustainable Use License, which the company calls fair-code: it can be read and self-hosted, with limits on commercial reuse, rather than being open source in the usual sense. Customers can run it on their own servers or with Docker to keep data in their own environment, or use the hosted service. Because many companies run it themselves, its security fixes are worth following; on 28 October 2026 it published 12 advisories at once.

Key facts

Headquarters: Novalisstr. 10, 10115 Berlin, Germany Legal entity: n8n GmbH (Amtsgericht Charlottenburg, HRB 212509 B) Founded: 2019, by Jan Oberhauser (founder and CEO) Funding: $240 million raised by its own account; Series C of $180 million led by Accel in October 2025; strategic investment from SAP in May 2026 at a stated $5.2 billion valuation Licence: Sustainable Use License (fair-code) Website: https://n8n.io