n8n isn't dead, just less viral than Cloud Code. Search interest and YouTube views have shifted, but n8n remains better for beginners: clearer interface, instant publishing, native webhooks. Use the 10-minute rule: if a workflow takes ten minutes or less, build it in n8n for speed.
Is n8n dead? This has been the biggest question that I've been getting over the past couple weeks. Almost 24 hours ago, I made this post in my Plus community just basically talking about, are you ready to switch from n8n to Cloud Code? And I go on about the way that I think about these two different tools, and really I think that they're just fundamentally different. This post got some really good engagement, so I went ahead and I read through what everyone's saying, and I wanted to just address this on YouTube and make a really quick video about it. So a little over a year ago when I started making YouTube videos about n8n, It was in hypergrowth mode and it was blowing up and videos were going viral left and right about Anydn AI agents. And over the past couple months, myself and tons of other Anydn creators have noticed that the Anydn video views have been going down. And there is this weird association online with views and value. And they're not, you know, one-to-one. And what you can see right here is over the past 3 months, when you compare Claude and Anydn on Google Trends, they had been relatively the same. And Claude Code came out about a year ago. Anydn came out obviously a long time ago, but in the past really year is when it's blown up, but they've been kind kind of hand in hand, and all of a sudden lately, Cloud Code has been kind of surpassing N8N when it comes to search interest and YouTube views and stuff like that. But is N8N dead? No, I don't think that N8N will ever fundamentally be dead. They've carved out a really nice corner in the AI automation market, and I think that they've built a really good community, and their tool is really, you know, solid. The other question I'm getting is, I'm a beginner, I'm getting into AI, which one do I go for? I still think that as a beginner, you wanna start with N8N. It's a lot clearer. It's a lot more simple. It's a lot more visual. And even myself, a couple months ago when I first started using Cloud Code, I was pretty confused, but I would consider myself someone who's pretty N8N savvy and pretty technically savvy, but I was pretty confused jumping into Cloud Code and trying to understand, okay, I've got these Python scripts now, how do they actually work on a schedule or on a webhook? So my conclusion is N8N will always be a relevant tool. It will always be a leader when it comes to workflow automation. And it's going to be highly adopted because of how low the barrier to entry is in order to go build your first workflow or your first AI agent. But the days of NNN videos on YouTube or on X going viral, those days are over, I think. And as I've been dropping more content, expanding my toolset a little bit, that's caused a little bit of panic in my communities is what I've seen. As far as like, should I not be learning NNN anymore? Like, what should I be doing? And so basically my promise to you guys is that I don't know where the AI space is going. No one does. Even the experts are scared. They don't know how to keep up. There's so much going on. But my promise is I'm gonna try to stay as close to it as possible and bring you guys what I think is relevant. So don't think of this as me switching from NN to Cloud Code. They're different. Think of this as me expanding my toolset and hopefully expanding your guys' skills and knowledge onto different tools as well. The real friction point for me, and that I'm seeing with a lot of people, is deploying. It's super easy to get into Cloud Code, brainstorm with it, have it do things for you, have it spin up Python scripts. But then when you actually go to deploy it and maintain it over time, that's where it gets a little bit more ambiguous. It's a little bit harder to look at the execution data and figure out exactly what's going wrong. It's a little bit harder to maintain all this kind of stuff, at least where I'm at right now with my understanding compared to n8n where it's so easy to, you know, instantly just hit publish on a workflow when you're done and you have all these native webhooks coming in and you have all these native triggers and you can see the execution logs and you can store everything in a Google Sheet super, super easily. It's way more visual versus the code-based mental models, which sometimes for me, it's harder to contextualize like what's really going on here. And what I've been doing is using Cloud Code as a teacher. So not every time I'm in Cloud Code am I building things. Sometimes I'm just setting up these projects where I've got files and it understands me and my business, and I'm just using it to help me understand concepts at a deeper level. I love that because I can see what it's doing. I can see what it's thinking about, and I can read its trail. And if there's anything it's doing that I'm confused about, I just ask it, what did you just do there? What happens if you didn't do that? But right now I still have a lot of automations running right there in n8n, and I probably just won't switch those over because I can pay, you know, $10 a month or whatever it is for my VPS and just have those automations running. And I know they work and I know exactly how they work. Just like how a lot of people that have been using Zapier for years, when n8n comes out, they've been, you know, using n8n still, but they still have tons of Zaps and they still have those and they're just gonna leave 'em there. Now I'm not really saying like that's right or that's wrong, but I'm saying like n8n is not dying. So my 10-minute rule is basically if I have a use case and I could build it in 10 minutes or less and end it in, I'm just going to do it there because I can do it super quickly. I don't have to think as much because at this point it's like muscle memory. And then when I'm done, I just publish it and I'm good. I've already got my Aira workflow set up. I've already got tracking set up. I'm good. So anyways, I didn't want to make this one too long. I just felt like I had to get this off my chest because I know that a lot of you guys are thinking about this kind of stuff. So anyways, Enjoyed the video, you learned something new, please give it a like. Definitely helps me out a ton. And as always, I appreciate you guys making it to the end of the video. I'll see you in the next one. Thanks, guys.
