13 articles
Workflow automation
n8n, Make and Zapier compared on the things that decide the bill, plus the operational detail nobody writes about: silent failures, retries, replay, version control and scaling.
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Cold email deliverability: what actually decides placement
The 2026 sender rules from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, the thresholds that get a domain blocked, safe volume per mailbox, and why generated volume makes it worse.
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Version controlling n8n workflows
How to get n8n workflows into git so changes are reviewable and revertable, what the JSON export does not carry, and the promotion path between environments.
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When to write a custom n8n node
The threshold where five chained HTTP nodes should become one custom node, what writing one actually involves, and the three cheaper options to exhaust first.
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Running n8n in production: queue mode, workers and scaling
Why the default single-process mode blocks under load, how queue mode with Redis and workers fixes it, and the four limits you hit next.
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Rate limits and API quotas across a workflow
Why adding workers produces 429s, how to budget concurrency across every API a workflow touches, and the backoff that actually works.
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Webhooks that drop: delivery, duplicates and ordering
Why webhook delivery is at-least-once and unordered, what that means for your workflows, and the three defences that make an endpoint reliable.
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Scheduled or event-driven: choosing a trigger
When polling on a schedule is the right answer despite being unfashionable, when webhooks are worth the delivery complexity, and the hybrid that most systems need.
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Migrating from Zapier to n8n: what breaks
What does not carry over when you move automations off Zapier, how long it really takes per workflow, and the migration order that keeps the business running.
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Self-hosted n8n: when data rules force it
When self-hosting n8n is genuinely required rather than preferred, what it actually costs to run, and the four things people forget until the first outage.
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n8n error handling: retries, alerts and dead letters
The default is that a failed workflow is logged and nobody is told. The retry, error-workflow and dead-letter pattern that makes failure visible.
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n8n vs Make: which one, and for what
Where n8n and Make genuinely differ in 2026: self-hosting, credits versus executions, the code escape hatch, version control, with the billing arithmetic shown.
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Zapier, Make or n8n: a decision table
Twelve common automation jobs, and which of the three tools is the right answer for each - organised by what you are trying to do rather than by feature.
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Why automations fail silently
The automation that reports success while doing nothing is the expensive failure. Why status codes miss it, and the three assertions that catch it.
The other folders
- What will this cost, and who should build it? Buying and budgeting AI 10 articles
- How should the system be put together? Building and running it 11 articles
- How do we know it is any good? Measuring whether it works 11 articles
- What do we have to be able to show? Governance and regulation 4 articles
- Why does ChatGPT name a competitor? AI search visibility 4 articles
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