Not sure why these not issues with state machines...
With RSM you often need to keep the history as well, just in a different form, that is the message/event log that your state machine processed.
With RSM you need your code to be deterministic to rebuild the materialized state during failover, unless you snapshot and replicate the state on each processed event/message.
I'm not ashamed to admit than n8n feels more polished. There are a few reasons:
- Our team was and is still much smaller. We were 5 for the first 2 years, we are now 10 (year 3), and are continuing to hire to follow our growth.
- They have been around for longer and mature for longer, more time to iterate. We have reached some level of maturity recently and are now spending more iterations on polishing rather than new features.
- Their surface area is smaller, windmill does A LOT and expose more for the better or worse.
n8n has done a lot of things really well and although we have a different audience, there is a lot to learn from what they did very well and we have the upmost respect for them. We have some overlap, but I think ultimately we strive in different kind of orgs and will cohabit rather than compete.
While you're here, may I ask something about Windmill? My impression of n8n is that it's similar to Zapier in the sense that it mainly focuses on linking pre-made integrations, while Windmill is more of a workflow engine like Temporal. But while I see on your landing page that Windmill also boast lots of integrations, clicking on any of them take me to a sort of community script sharing interface, where it's not really clear how fully fleshed out any of the integrations are.
Are these two things being wrongly compared to each other when they're actually meant for different purposes? Or is Windmill indeed a good point of comparison?
> That said, we tried Windmill first and while it was cool for the devs who were able to see the vision, the non-technical users hated it
Founder of Windmill here. This is not too surprising although we are working on it by leveraging AI and just better DX/design. Pleasing devs in the most demanding orgs and the ever-changing expectations is challenging by itself. Pleasing both devs AND non-technical user is a monumental task that we are now giving more attention to by focusing on 2 aspects:
- A better DX/UX that does not sacrifice power-user capabilities but has a less step learning-curve and more intuitiveness to it. That is mostly about good design and hard work. We are taking inspiration from the best and on the intuitiveness, we've learned a lot from n8n and other leaders in the space.
- leveraging AI capabilities in a state-of-the-art way to have the best models generate the code for non-technical users. That is basically just adopting the best practices inspired by cursor such as great auto-completion, great inline code-gen, excellent semantic search.
I feel dumb but how do you actually add Zapier or Confluence or custom MCP on the web version of claude? I only see it for Drive/Gmail/Github. Is it zoned/slow release?
We are customers at windmill.dev and we are really happy with it. It also motivates us to write ever better docs as it means more answers can be an answered completely by the bot.
Anyone downvoting this should know that other YC companies endorsing a product launch is a certified HN classic, and by downvoting it, you're violating a long and rich tradition.
Ola from windmill.dev, another open-source VC-backed company using AGPL. We actually spoke before your pivot and we now have a bit overlap on the dashboard builder but our audience is fairly separate.
Congrats, you made what I believe is the best move a software company can do in our space. You will hear a lot of naysayers, and sure the software we build is not as permissive as Apache 2.0 and MIT. Those are all true and valid points. It's also true that VCs have perverse incentives and as a naturally skeptic myself, I understand not wanting to touch it.
Let me bring a little bit of counter-points to those:
- AGPL or Commercial Open-Source Software would probably just not exist at all if there was no path to commercialization at all. So the dichotomy between making it true MIT or AGPL is a false one, it's the choice between proprietary/no software and AGPL and I think we can all agree the latter is better. Software Engineers need to eat and there is a pool of talented engineers for whom glory is not fully sufficient and also need their work to be a reasonable financial paths. This enables more SWE to compete to build more software and make the software landscape more competitive for the benefit of the end-users.
- Taking VC money is not signing a pact with the devil that strips away your entire freedom, especially at @lucasfcosta stage and ours. The real issue is with being fully dependent on that money by having bad financial health and needing to raise in X months. COSS company like ours can stay lean and profitable, taking just the right amount of money from VC to kickstart a long-term journey to become a behemoth of a software company through having advantages over all the proprietary alternatives. Windmill for instance is profitable, and no investors has ever pressured us to go faster or monetize more. 99% of our users are using the free/open-source version but the 1% that is not is made of medium and large enterprises that hugely appreciate running their infra on open-source software that they can easily audit and contribute to. It would have been SO MUCH harder to convince them without being open-source given our size. Another fact that helps is pricing but that is also related to our open-source nature. It's harder to over-price your large customers because at a certain point they can say screw it, they will just build in-house to go above the proprietary features. All that to say that companies do have incentives but also are made of humans which have their own values and goals, and have some agenda to set their own path, especially early on. It's all about balance and I would argue taking a bit of VC money at the seed-stage at a good valuation and then not much more is the optimal path right now.
You just can’t win with some folks and I honestly don’t think it’s worth the effort to try. You remain proprietary, they’ll complain. You open-source what you can with a reasonable enough license that protects you and allows you maintain a business atop your product, they’ll complain. You build it with zero venture backing and you’ll be begging for support and donations to keep building the product.
I appreciate that folks like y’all take the risk to build dope products and still do your part to open-source what you can. In an ideal world, everything would be open-source (by purist standards) with ultra-permissive licenses, but that’s, unfortunately, not the world we currently live in.
If you can make it work with Rust, and compatible with wasm targets as well, it opens a huge field of possibilities.
Windmill.dev is a workflow engine based fully on postgresql. This would be the missing piece to offer a local development workflow that doesn't require spinning a full pg.
