What n8n is: workflows, cloud or self-hosted

Imagine every new website signup should be added to your mailing list, checked against your customer database, and announced in your team chat. n8n (say "n-eight-n") lets you build that as a workflow: a chain of steps that runs automatically.

Each step is a node, a box on a canvas that does one job: "Gmail: send email", "Google Sheets: add row", "If: check a condition". You draw lines between nodes, and data flows along the lines from left to right.

The first node is a trigger: the event that starts the workflow, such as a schedule or a new form entry. Every node after it reacts to the data it receives.

What makes n8n different from tools like Zapier:

• It shows the actual data at every step, so you can see exactly what each node received and produced.
• It has strong building blocks for logic (conditions, loops, merging data) and lets you add small pieces of code when needed.
• It is fair-code: the source code is public and you may run it yourself, under a license that limits reselling it as a service.

You can use it in two main ways:

• n8n Cloud: n8n runs it for you. Easiest start.
• Self-hosted: you run n8n on your own server or computer (usually with Docker, covered later). The free community edition has almost all features; paid licences add team and enterprise features.

This course uses n8n 2.x. Many older tutorials show 1.x screens, which differ in places such as how workflows go live.