Describe your automation in plain English. AI builds it. From simple tasks to AI agents.
Meet n8n – an automation platform that connects your apps and makes them work together. But what does that actually mean? Let’s dive in.
What Can You Automate with n8n?
Business
Sales & Leads
- 1000 resumes in a day → AI filters by skills → top-20 candidates to HR in 10 minutes
- Leads from website getting lost → auto to CRM + enriched via LinkedIn + manager notified in 30 seconds
- LinkedIn manual search takes 2 hours → company parsing + contact export + personalized cold emails = 100 leads per day
- Upwork applications manually → auto-search matching projects + AI generates proposals + sends = 50 applications per day
- Abandoned shopping carts → email in 1 hour + SMS with promo in 3 hours + WhatsApp in 24 hours = 30% recovery
- Meeting prep takes 20 minutes → auto-collect client info from LinkedIn and Crunchbase + summary to WhatsApp before call
Marketing & Content
- Content calendar eats a week → AI generates 30 Instagram posts based on trends + images + hashtags
- Reposting to 5 social networks manually → one post in Notion → auto-adapted and published everywhere
- Brand mention monitoring → parsing Twitter, Reddit, forums → AI sentiment analysis → Slack alert on negative
- Static LinkedIn banner → updates daily with current metrics: followers count and latest post
Customer Service
- Support tickets drowning → auto-classification by category → prioritization → assigned to specialist
- FAQs taking 50% of time → chatbot with knowledge base → answers 24/7 → escalates complex issues to humans
- Customer reviews scattered everywhere → collected from Google, Trustpilot, social media → AI analysis → dashboard in Notion
- Customer surveys manually → auto-send after purchase → feedback categorization → insights table
Operations & Data
- Syncing Airtable and Notion manually → real-time updates both ways
- Invoices in PDF → manual data entry → OCR scan + parsing → auto-record in accounting + Google Sheets
- Daily report from 5 sources → auto-collect at 6 AM → formatting → send to Slack
- Database backups forgotten → auto-backup MySQL every night → upload to Google Drive → success notification
- Inventory in 3 systems out of sync → change in one → auto-update everywhere
- New employee = 15 accounts manually → one HR form → all accounts created + access granted + welcome email = 5 minutes
- Expense tracking chaos → photo of receipt in Telegram → OCR → recorded in spreadsheet with category
Personal
Productivity
- Important emails getting lost → Gmail filter by keywords and senders → duplicate to Telegram instantly
- Forget about meetings → morning summary in Telegram: calendar + tasks + weather = one glance
- Tasks in 3 apps → sync Notion, Todoist, and Google Tasks in real-time
- Weekly review takes an hour → auto-collect completed tasks + meetings + achievements → beautiful report in Notion
Content & Learning
- Save articles but never read → Pocket or Instapaper → AI summary → to Notion with tags
- YouTube videos interesting but too long → save → transcript → AI summary → to knowledge base
- Reddit posts getting lost → saved posts → parsing → export to Obsidian with categories
- Podcasts piling up → new episode → AI summary + key moments → to Notion
- Scientific papers from HuggingFace → new papers by topic → AI summary → Notion for study
Finance & Home
- Don’t know where money goes → bank notifications → parsing → Google Sheets with categories → monthly report
- Forgotten subscriptions → tracking all subscriptions → reminder week before charge + analysis of unused ones
- Photos scattered everywhere → Telegram and WhatsApp attachments → auto to Google Photos with date and location
- Important documents in email → Gmail attachments of specific type → Google Drive in proper folders + renamed
- Smart home chaos → Zigbee sensors → n8n logic → control everything from one place
- Home Assistant disconnected → n8n connects Home Assistant + Telegram + weather + calendar → unified smart home
And this is just scratching the surface. 400+ ready integrations. Or build your own custom ones.
What Makes n8n Different?
Zapier and Make are cloud-only platforms. You pay per automation. Your data goes through their servers.
n8n gives you choice:
Local – run it free on your computer to test and learn. Perfect for experimentation.
Self-hosted – deploy on your own server. Unlimited automations, no monthly costs, your data stays with you. Pay only for your server.
Cloud – want convenience? Use n8n’s cloud version for quick start without setup.
Your choice. Your control.
(We’ll publish a detailed comparison of n8n vs Zapier vs Make with real cost calculations soon. Subscribe to not miss it.)
AI Workflow Builder: The Game-Changer
n8n just launched AI Workflow Builder – their newest feature that changes everything.
Instead of manually building workflows, you simply describe what you need:
“When I get an email with ‘urgent’ in the subject, send it to Slack and create a task in Notion.”
AI builds the entire workflow for you. All the nodes, connections, data mapping, logic — done in seconds.
The catch? It’s only available in the cloud version.
But here’s the thing — we built our own AI Workflow Builder for self-hosted n8n. And it turned out to be easier than you’d think.
Subscribe to our blog — we’ll publish a detailed guide showing exactly how we did it, what technologies we used, and how you can build your own. Step by step, with code and architecture.
So What Exactly Is n8n?
Let’s look at two examples:
Simple automation: New email arrives → copy to Google Sheets → send Slack notification. Three steps, done.
Complex automation: Here’s where n8n shows its real power.
Build a workflow that automatically spins up a cloud instance via API, deploys your own local LLM on it, processes your sensitive documents through that model, extracts the results, and shuts down the instance, all without human intervention.
The result? Your sensitive data never leaves your infrastructure. Processing costs drop from dollars to pennies per request. And you control everything, end to end.
That’s the power of n8n. From simple copy-paste automations to complex AI-powered systems that handle your most sensitive data securely.
Ready to Start?
n8n opens up a world where automation isn’t limited by pre-built templates or monthly costs. Whether you need simple task automation or complex multi-step workflows with AI, n8n gives you the tools and control to build it.
Subscribe to our blog for:
- Step-by-step guides on building specific automations
- How to create your own AI Workflow Builder for self-hosted n8n
- Detailed comparisons with competitors and real cost analysis
- Real-world use cases from business and personal automation