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Show HN: Sim – Apache-2.0 n8n alternative

235 points by waleedlatif1

by solarkraft

2 subcomments

This looks really cool for DIYing workflows, especially since you seem to have a very useful selection of tools!
Did you build your own agent engine? Why not LangGraph?
Say I was building a general agentic chat app with LangGraph in the backend (as it seems to provide a lot of infrastructure for highly reliable and interactive agents, all the way up to a protocol usable by UIs, plus a decent ecosystem, making it very easily extensible). Could I integrate with this for DIY workflows in a high quality fashion (high-precision updates and control)?
Is there a case for switching out LangGraph‘s backend with Sim (can you build agents of the same quality and complexity - I’m thinking coding agent)? Could it interact with LangGraph agents in a high quality way so you can tap that ecosystem?
Can I use Sim workflows with my current agent, say, via MCP?

by smarx007

5 subcomments

So here is a case that I wanted to implement in n8n a few years ago and it required quite heavy JS blocks:
- I want to check some input - pick one of your 138 blocks
- I want to extract a list of items from that input
- I want to check which items did I encounter before <- that's the key bit
- Do something for the items that have not been encountered before; bonus point for detecting updated and deleted items
- Rinse and repeat
It could be a row added to a CSV file, a new file dropped into a Nextcloud folder, a list of issues pulled from a repo, or an RSS feed (Yahoo! Pipes, what a sweet memory).
How good is the support for such a case in Sim? And did it get better in n8n?

by santa_boy

1 subcomments

Few qs:
1) Is there something that n8n does that's not possible on Sim? 2) Is there a node to create custom stuff like n8n's code node? Possibly nodejs and python 3) Is it easy to import packages from npm or pip

by Multicomp

1 subcomments

Excited to try this out, I've been looking at LangFlow and similar tools for doing DAG workflows. Sure, I could prompt or try to do an MCP or a claude skill for my utility workflows, but they aren't strongly followed and I want to, where possible, make each AI agent call be smaller, like a function.
This is definitely going to be given a try tomorrow morning. I think first up will be something easy and personal like going through the collection of NPC character sheets in my recent campaign and ensuring all NPCs have the following sections with some content in them, and if not, flagging them for my review.

by popalchemist

1 subcomments

> You can run Sim locally using Docker, with no execution limits or other restrictions.
This is big. Thank you.

by spflueger

1 subcomments

Looks interesting. The 12GB minimum RAM requirements seem quite steep though. Why so much?

by hbarka

1 subcomments

I wonder how the free open-source in this stacks up to the free open-source in n8n.

by malcolmgreaves

3 subcomments

What does “n8n” stand for? I’m assuming it’s a shortening of a longer word, like k8s.

by SCUSKU

1 subcomments

A bit of feedback, the readme gifs are a little too fast, it's hard to tell what exactly is happening.

by pylotlight

0 subcomment

This is the other major project in this space, although there are many, so finding the differences can be challenging.
https://www.activepieces.com | https://github.com/activepieces/activepieces

by saubeidl

2 subcomments

How does this compare to say, Node Red?

by rcarmo

1 subcomments

This looks really cool, but not being able to use my own LLM endpoints for the Copilot is an instant turn-off.

by brene

2 subcomments

How does it deal with loops? I’ve often see workflow builders struggle at that?

by eightnoteight

1 subcomments

for the workflow DAG, what type of backend are you guys using? is it like temporal or self-built durable workflows

by greggh

1 subcomments

Development seems pretty rapid, how often are breaking changes forcing workflow modifications to keep updated with the latest versions?

by vegasbrianc

1 subcomments

Open Sourced until we get rug pulled..

by devangjhabakh

1 subcomments

This is amazing! Thank you all for building this!

by ianacl

0 subcomment

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