What’s happening with n8n in 2025?

n8n is gearing up for a game-changing 2025, with major improvements in scalability, AI, and production readiness. If you’re using (or considering) n8n, here’s what you need to know from their latest community livestream

Yesterday, Bart Veldhuizen, Senior Community Manager at n8n, ran an excellent and well attended (700 registrations, about 450 online 👏) community livestream to layout exciting plans for EVERYONE who has n8n in their portfolio.

Bart was ably supported by product manager, Niklas “Nik” Hatje, Group Product Manager, who took us through the detail.

This particularly interested me because I’m building a business that helps champions to mobilize their business with AI and workflow automation. So, n8n’s strategy is perfectly aligned. 2025 could be a great year!

If you prefer words over video (hey, everyone’s different!), I thought I’d share my notes to help out.

Huge credit to Bart and Nik for making this session so valuable. I’m more excited than ever to build my new business, create champions, and mobilize my clients with n8n and AI.

Summary of n8n plans for 2025

Bart and Nik did a great job of taking us through there plans — though they alluded these will happen soon / in 2005Q1 in many cases (fingers crossed!).

1. Community focus: New partnerships, expert programs, and creator training.
2. AI-first automation: More AI-powered workflows, better guardrails.
3. Enterprise readiness: Improved observability, team collaboration, and security.
4. Scaling and performance: Enhanced handling of large datasets.

n8n community plans for 2025

Big focus on Youtube and content creators. There’s a booming amount of creator videos that get hundreds of thousands of views in a few days, so how can n8n help?

• Monthly hangouts and product updates.
• Free creator training on SEO, editing, and all the creator thingz.
• A private Discord for creators.
• Goodie bags of giveaways, mentorships, partner opportunities.

This is a great move from Bart and team. Enabling a thriving partner community will be the key to n8n’s growth. Many of the biggest growth tech companies are partner-led, I’ve seen this personally in my career at VMware, Cisco, Microsoft, and beyond.

But partners are not just creators…

Expert program

This is great news, because this kind of expert network is how n8n creates a triangle between them, n8n customers, and partners. And it’s not just agencies, it’s for smaller partners too.

• Create the triangle between n8n, clients, partners.
• Be self-service (crucial!) via a partner portal.
• Pilot launch in 2025Q1.
• Email community@n8n.io.

If, like me, you are building a business “with” n8n, then this is fabulous news.

n8n job updates for 2025

Bart is looking for an American version of him 😂 to double the size of the n8n community team. Check out the n8n USA Community Manager role.

n8n are also looking for an internal Workflow Automation Engineer because they need more hands! It’s interesting just reading the job spec for this role to see what n8n think a WAE should do.

What does an n8n Workflow Automation Engineer do?

A quick peek at the n8n Workflow Automation Engineer job spec — this is like the backbone of anyone who applies n8n in business. Great list!

• Requirements Gathering and Prioritization.
• Workflow Design and Implementation.
• Internal n8n Expertise.
• n8n and Technical Expertise.
• Business Acumen <- I like this one, because n8n connects tech and business.
• Execution-Driven and Pragmatic Approach <- aka “Get Shit Done” 🤣
• Passion for Automation and Innovation.
• Experience: 2–4 years in process automation roles or similar positions, or in building solutions as a freelancer or entrepreneur.
• UX-Centric and iterative Approach.
• IT Ops / Business Systems Analyst Experience.
• Active n8n Community Member.
• Willingness and interest to participate in n8n’s marketing initiatives.

n8n 2025Q1 Product Roadmap

At about 18 minutes into the livestream, Nik the Group PM took over the livestream at this point and made it clear that n8n are careful not to plan too far ahead, and prefer to talk to concrete plans for the immediate quarter. Like it!

• Productionize n8n more
• AI-ize n8n more
• Best building experience
• Go large or go home — making n8n easier for bigger team (enterprise!)

Productionize n8n more

“n8n’s just for prototyping, right?” Wrong! 😉

But what are n8n focusing on to make n8n even better in a production setting?

Organizing workflows and dependencies.

fixing messy collections of workflows with things like folders. People have been asking for a while! 😂

Everyone gets unlimited folders and unlimited nested folders, with drag’n’drop UI. Nik says “This is just the beginning!” Think:

✅ Favourites

✅ Custom views

✅ Dependencies.

Better organization reduces some stress, but what about the stress of making changes in n8n and worrying about if things still work?

More confidence in changes and deployments

You’ve got a workflow in production. It’s live. You change something to optimize it. Then you feel the fear: did I break it? Is it still working?

AI workflows are sensitive to this and are changed iteratively. AI is probabilistic not deterministic.

So, n8n are bringing in evaluations for things like AI workflows. You can run tests to see if it performs the same as before the change.

It’s not just for AI — that’s the first thing — but this will lead to things like unit testing for code. “For input X this node should output Y.” Maybe a future review system… imagine diffs between node versions? What about CI/CD?

Nik, Group PM

Exciting stuff for us stuffy production folks — this should help us talk to the ITSM and DevOps people!

n8n scaling and performance

I guess this is a never-ending project… but one of the audience questions talked to ETL/ELT at scale and this is on the radar…

Better observability

Reports, metrics, and dashboard improvements.

• “How many failures did I have?”
• “How much time have I saved so I can show the boss?”

Basic version on all plans, but likely to be a super-duper version on paid plans.

AI-ize n8n more

Lots of competition, but n8n think they have a differentiator and can be the best.

n8n want to be on the cutting edge of AI — which is moving fast! Like adding DeepSeek… and whatever comes next week!

“The speed of n8n development is a differentiator compared to our competitors”

Bart.

More AI integrations which means tapping into the AI ecosystem using things like tools for AI agents.

Super important as more non-AI folks are exposed to AI: AI guardrails! These kinds of safety mechanisms are essential for applying AI in business. You should have to be an AI expert to avoid foot-gunning yourself. Think “human in the loop”.

Building automations with a prompt using text-to-workflow. Hard to do well. Not all workflows are three linear nodes. But this kind of “co-pilot” is becoming pervasive (I recently found it in the Warp terminal editor on Mac — it’s amazeballs!).

Best building experience

Iterative builds, debugging, schema views… just more and better. Iterative is how you go from a “core workflow” to edge cases. As you add more, you need to make sure you don’t break things, obviously.

And what about community nodes? Self-hosted and cloud, this would make a marketplace and partner network really interesting.

Module building of sub-workflows, including reusing them, would give a real architectural feel to n8n. You could have a library of sub-workflows…

n8n easier in bigger teams

I think of this as making n8n more “enterprisey”, if you know what I mean…

• Advanced reporting and insights to answer the “What’s going on?” question. Whether you’re a freelancer, and agency, or internal — we all have to explain ourselves (and n8n!) at some point.
• Finer user provisioning and more granular permissions are essential in an enterprise. Especially when you consider the universal problem with joiner, mover, leaver processes.
• Sharing workflows and collaborating on them with colleagues is importance, but as important as helping to get things done, we also need governance to make sure the wrong things aren’t being done.

Livestream questions

Will folders be available on self-hosted?

Yes.

Any plans for a “master account” (like in AWS) or “agency model” to manage multiple client accounts?

No direct plans yet.

Related to scalability, do you plan to improve processing huge numbers of rows like ETL/ELT solutions?

Yes… will get there!

Considered a paid tier for self-hosted to unlock cloud features?

Have tried this in the past but wasn’t picked up much… it’s not excluded but no firm plans.

Will you support autonomous multi-agent workflows?

This is what n8n mean with “AI cutting edge”, and AI agents are definitely cutting edge and on the radar.