Through a tutorial posted on Hacker News, I just came across another alternative to IFTTT and especially Zapier. IFTTT costs money now (at least pretty quickly when you get into the subject matter) and Zapier is not that cheap either. n8n is a good open source solution when it comes to workflow automation and is probably a lot more powerful compared to IFTTT too.

n8n is pretty easy to try out, I just started it once to try it out using a Docker command:

docker run -it --rm --name n8n -p 5678:5678 -v ~/.n8n:/home/node/.n8n n8nio/n8n

It was pretty easy to click together a workflow that sends you a test message via Telegram, and a look at the list of integrations gives the impression that there’s a lot more possible. There are built in integrations with quite a few services and in addition it is also possible to create functions with your own code. The community seems to be quite active as well.

The project seems to be financed by a hosted version, but the source code is open source and under a “fair use” license (you aren’t allowed to sell it).

I don’t have a specific need for this tool right now, but by sharing it here, I know where to look when I need something to automate. ☺️