Having some experience with both, I think they are quite different. N8n looks quite polished and seems primarily concerned about connecting pre-made blocks. There are custom code blocks (JS and Python only, with limited ability to import libraries), but it’s not something you’d use by default. I thinks it great for less-technical users when compared to windmill.

Windmill OTOH supports a bunch of programming languages for steps (Go, Rust, Python, TS, etc.) and seems to have a much more “code first” approach. Reusable blocks are more like code templates compared to n8n.

Hard to say which is better. I really like the ability in windmill to just write code for each step and it comes across more powerful, but it feels less polished and intuitive when compared to n8n.

For those curious, it looks like n8n is "fair-code" source available.

I hadn't seen this term before but it looks interesting:

https://faircode.io/

Just to clarify. The reason why you aren't saying N8n is open source because of its license right? I haven't read its license but it does seem to me to have quite some restrictions.

And whereas Windmill seems to be agpl + apache.

So that is what you are mentioning, right?

Windmill is also not fully open source; there are major sections of it powering central features that are not released as free software.

Also, they require a CLA with copyright assignment so they can reuse your contributions in nonfree software. It’s always shady when companies do this.

The open source parts of Windmill are partially Apache and partially AGPL; there are some of us who additionally regard the AGPL as nonfree (because it’s really a EULA).

Indeed! Big fan..