i believe it stands for “nodemation”

naaathaaan

I've been pronouncing it as "nanites" in my head since the first time I've seen it. Dunno why and now I feel just a tiny silly, though I still prefer my pronunciation.

Needless to say I never had to actually say "n8n".

and specifically nested loops. if you're spinning up full runtime copies for each loop, you're gonna have a hard time

for loops we use two sentinel nodes with a backwards edge, and before each iteration, we check the condition and update loop variables.

  sentinel -> body -> sentinel (condition with backwards edge to first sentinel)

in the UI, this is just represented as another block, and depending on the varying types of loops you can either define a collection or the number of iterations

thanks for the feedback, I was actually thinking this the other day. we'll slow them down.

n8n uses a "Sustainable Use License"—source available, but not OSI-approved open source. This means you can only use it for internal business purposes or non-commercial use. Sim is Apache 2.0.

its a conservative estimate, but primarily because there's a socket server that runs alongside the main container, so you never have to manually save because changes are debounced, broadcasted to any other users on the canvas, and sent to the socket server which persists it to the DB

But does that require AI agents? Well, maybe the extraction step, if it's not CSV but a general-case web page.

this is actually a perfect use case, mostly deterministic workflows that need LLMs to fill in the gaps or do the knowledge work. As you mentioned, you can either add it as a row in a CSV file (sheets), use the baked-in memory block and treat it as simple storage, store the row in supabase, or use the knowledgebase. Basically, there are a ton of ways that this can be done that don't require you to maintain the memory solution yourself. you can even detect the updated and deleted items by keeping some sort of version-controlled snapshot of each row in the csv and updating it as you go.

I can't tell you whether it got better in n8n, but I can definitively say that this sounds like a great candidate workflow to build in sim :)

N8n can definitely do this.

They recently added native tables, albeit still just a few data types, you can store stuff in and use in workflows.

I really like windmill.dev which should support your scenario just fine

Hey - could be a good use case for https://github.com/autokitteh/autokitteh - which gives you durable workflows over python. Since your logic is deterministic it's a simple python script that stores the history in memory, and autokitteh will take care of the persistancy aspect.

Their deployment stuff has been turning me off lately; everyone is rushing to monetize - which I understand and support - but I feel like Langsmith is creeping further and further into Langchain|graph and it makes me hesitant to invest. It’s giving AWS-like gentle but firm lock-in vibes, I wonder if they have any PMs from there.

I do like the way they’ve been able to leverage Langgraph workflows to build agents - it seems like the right abstraction to me - and I also feel their middleware approach is very Django-y which I also like. Are you enjoying their stack?

1. we wanted to have full control over the agent orchestration and the execution since we didn't like the abstractions that many of the existing frameworks had built, and didn't want to have dependencies in places we didn't need them. so, we built the orchestration and execution engine from scratch, allowing us to do neat things like human in the loop, settings that run the same block 10 times concurrently, etc.

2. this would kind of serve as a drop-in replacement for langgraph. you could build a workflow with an agent and some tools, perhaps some form of memory. then, just deploy that as an API, call it from your frontend, and consume the streamed response on your chat client and without the need to maintain any infra at all.

3. we have a generic code block and an api block used to call APIs for integrations that we may not have, and you can use those to plug (langgraph) agents into the Sim ecosystem.

4. we are adding in the ability to deploy your workflow as an MCP server in the next week, stay tuned :) in the meantime, you can deploy the workflow as an API and have the agent call it as a tool. moreover, you can use the workflow block in sim to call other agents/worklows as well, so its easy to encapsulate a lot of complexity in a `parent` workflow that you call that dynamically routes and uses different tools based on the task at hand

Node-RED is great for IoT/edge/data flows. Sim is built specifically for AI agents—native LLM support, tool-use control, structured outputs, token-level observability, etc.

Node-Red is the original.

N8n and its clones are attempts to copy and commercialize it with a closed-source license.

sounds super cool! let me know how it goes

We keep all workflows running on Sim cloud backwards compatible always. The idea is that you build, deploy, and never have to make modifications again unless you want to.

If we release a breaking change that requires a migration for existing local workflows, we release notice at least a few weeks ahead of time/bake it into the db migrations.

Incase there are significant changes made, everything is versioned so you opt-in to upgrading.

hope you enjoy :)

You actually can, if you self-host there are environment variables to control what models are available to the copilot but it’s tuned to Azure for the time being. We can work on generalizing it further and documenting it better

Everything that’s available today in our repo will be Apache 2.0 forever, so you don’t have to worry about that :)

we built an execution engine ourselves https://github.com/simstudioai/sim/tree/main/apps/sim/execut... and for the infra for background jobs, we use https://trigger.dev/

thank you! hope you enjoy

1) functionally, not that I'm aware of. the only thing right now is running from a specific block onwards, something that we are rolling out this week. you'll be able to run the workflow in debug mode and get really granular information about each node, the inputs and outputs, and resume from any point in the workflow with mock data

2) there is, we also have a code node that uses E2B to run code in isolated sandboxes. it supports python and ts/js

3) yes, in the code node you can use frameworks/libs since we do RCE