n8n made workflow automation approachable for engineers - a visual canvas where API calls, conditionals, and lately AI steps connect into the kind of integration you would otherwise hand-code and babysit. It is a real tool, not a toy. The friction is the license: n8n's source is available but governed by terms that restrict how you can offer it to others and what the company reserves for its paid tiers, so what looks open has commercial strings the moment you build a product on top of it.
The fully open source alternatives below cover the same ground - node-based orchestration of services and data, with branching logic and AI steps - under licenses with no such reservations. You can run them, modify them, and embed them in your own offering without checking whether your use case crossed a line, and the automations live entirely on infrastructure you operate.
Dify is an open-source platform for building LLM applications from prototype to production. A single visual interface combines AI workflows, RAG pipelines, agent capabilities, and model management, so teams can design, test, and ship AI apps without stitching together separate tools.
Flowise is an open source platform for building AI agents and LLM workflows visually. Instead of writing every step in code, you assemble agents, retrieval, and orchestration logic by dragging and connecting nodes on a canvas, then run them as live applications.
Node-RED is a low-code programming tool for event-driven applications. It uses a browser-based flow editor to wire together devices, APIs, and online services, making it useful for building automation and data-handling flows without writing everything from scratch.
Windmill is an open-source developer platform for internal code: APIs, background jobs, workflows, and UIs. It turns scripts into shareable internal apps, webhooks, scheduled jobs, and flows, giving teams a code-first way to run automation and internal software from one platform.
Trigger.dev is an open source platform for building AI workflows in TypeScript. It is built for long-running tasks that need retries, queues, observability, and elastic scaling without the limits of short-lived serverless jobs.
StackStorm is an integration and automation platform for services and tools. It takes actions in response to events so DevOps and SRE teams can automate troubleshooting, auto-remediation, incident response, and deployment steps across existing systems.
Inngest provides durable functions for reliable background jobs, workflows, and AI agents without extra infrastructure. It replaces queues, state management, and scheduling so developers can build step functions and background logic that can run on serverless infrastructure, servers, or the edge.
