Migrating from Make to n8n | Interview with Chris | Software Developer

foreign and welcome my name is ardid a community engineer at Anita and today with me here is Chris Bates works as a developer at Key Tech Solutions and we want to take some notes from him on why he migrated from May to anytime so Chris if you could give a quick introduction to yourself and then we can start with a couple of questions so I'm a developer

at K-Tech Solutions I've been working there for about seven or eight months and um we feel like that we've sort of expanded a lot very quickly and na10 seemed like the right solution for us um especially after trying make and both zapier beforehand awesome so if I may

ask what was the reason that uh you want to make in the first place originally we started with zapier and we had some sort of simple Integrations um but they didn't give us the full functionality that we wanted so um we then went to make uh or integromat at the time and um we found that it allowed us to group everything together a lot easier so we had scenarios where um because we do a lot of stuff with schools if a new teacher started we'd need to create a um an account for them across multiple systems and it was something we were doing manually so we then looked at these sorts of things and found that we could do that um automatically um which sort of made our life a lot easier we didn't have to be sitting

creating all these new accounts and everything so what was it missing in make that kind of made you realize that okay I think we need to change our platform and use another one so initially it was cost um the price increase from when they changed from integromat to make um was quite drastic um but also we after doing a lot of research into anytime we realized it had a lot of additional functionality that make just didn't have being able to create your own nodes and um it was more in my opinion it's more of a programming mindset to create a scenario for na10 whereas Integra map I just couldn't get my head around so I was struggling to make scenarios there whereas nh10 I found it a hell of a lot easier awesome

so when you first started using anytime what was your impression of it did you find it hard to use it or easy to use or like just like your General in First Impressions after you downloaded the product our first impression was done through we hired somebody to sort of talk us through nhn um because we knew that the change was going to be massive um and he did a lot of research or he's been doing for ages um and he we had a three-hour sit down and he showed us each node how it would be used and how we could then start creating scenarios using these things and I think that's quite a powerful way of being introduced to n8n um because it made everything make so much more sense um I could see that if you just sort of sat down things may be confusing if you haven't got that programming mindset of how to do different statements and things but um having that one person who knows it all already is definitely helpful but as soon as he showed us like one or two notes I instantly saw how this is going to completely change our company um and how it's going to be we just need to move everything over to na10 um it's obvious apparently are you self-hosting anything or are you using the cloud version we are self-hosting um so we contracted Ram uh to set up and manage our server so he has set us up with work environments and he's got everything all set up for us so he created us logins all we had to do was then log in and just start working which is yeah it was really good nice let's say we were to compare the time that it took to create a workflow in make and compare it to anytime in your experience with anytime until now does it take more time to build a workflow in anytime rather

than in make integral map no personally I felt Integrity longer um the main difference was that like learning that you don't in integromat or make you don't Loop through every single um response from the node instantly you have to put in an iterator for it to do that and that's not how I was thinking which then meant I had to sort of go okay no I need to add in this to be able to do that and then filters were in between stuff and na10 I don't know it clicked it was just it's super easy for me to be able to make a scenario awesome yeah so now not comparing to make but just anytime only let's say you have a scenario you want to build after you figure out all the logic and everything would you be able for example to create that kind of workflow within a day or how long would it take to create a workload let's say it's not too complex let's say it's like a medium complexity workflow and you have all the logic figured out what you want to do but would that take a lot of time to build in any time no I think it's taken me about actually a day to do one scenario I'd say it's pretty quick to be honest but um I am currently struggling with one of them with my most recent scenario that I'm making um so that one has taken me a little bit longer but I think that's due to um not planning fully before starting the scenario so that's really good to hear like a workload per day that's in I mean in my own personal opinion that's quite quick to create a workflow so if you could share this information with us do you how many active Workforce do you have like are you using lots of workflow at the moment currently we only have three um within nh10 um but we do have still because we're still in the process of migrating I think we have about 17 or 20 odds that are still in make that we're looking to migrate over so if you let's say

hypothetically we're in a meeting someone that's actually using make and they are a developer as well like would you suggest anything for them to make this transition from make to anytime as a platform for Automation and if so what would be your reasons for them to make this change I definitely recommend it there is if they're a developer then yes I definitely recommend it there's so much more you can do with nh10 than you can with integromat if something because integromat and make there were certain nodes that didn't exist you'd have to sit and put in a customer support saying hey I'd really like this node to exist and then you'd have to wait for them to exist if you've got the capabilities you can make it yourself you don't have to wait and then you can share it with the community and then if there's other na10 developers that are also in that same position then they can use your node and then it becomes a full community effort and you're not sitting out waiting on make um but also if it's something simple I had lots of issues with um particular statements within uh make and having the function node Within na10 it just opens up the possibilities to do anything you want you could write a whole scenario in a function node if you wanted to but um at that point you're just programming and you might as well do it somewhere else but the capability is there if there's something you want to do you can do it it's the way that we see it so far we haven't hit any walls we haven't any issues so far so yeah it is just incredibly powerful what do you find

easier to do in anything so we have a lot of situations where we need to compare um a variable to multiple things um so say we have a an ID of like a project or something um and we need to compare it to multiple actions that could be within that project we would need to we get the project ID and then we retrieve all of the actions that might not even be for that project and you'd need to then compare the project ID to all those actions and select the certain ones that you'd want it sounds like a simple thing to do in JavaScript and make an integromat it was a struggle or I found because you would need an iterator then you'd need a filter and then you'd need an aggregator and there's three things just to do one task um whereas within A10 I've done it in one function node and it does the job that I needed to do there might even be a node that I haven't seen already built into n810 if there's what would say you're like so far is what's your favorite node at any time that you kind of use the most or you wanna every time you see that you're gonna use this they're like oh yes I love this now this is the ones that we that Bram has made for us is the ones that we use the most um yeah so Bram has made us two nodes um because they didn't exist within na10 I believe he shared them with the community as well so they should be accessible for everybody um but they are so we use knack for a lot of our databases and there wasn't a knack note within a810 um so Bram has made that for us and now we can use that to retrieve data from our NAC databases he's made another one that I haven't used yet um but I think the capability to make your own is also very powerful but I have used the split into batches that seems quite powerful and being able to set with the set node um a global variable for the whole of the scenario I think I've used that in all of my snows now they think about it so far that you've used anything what

are your main likes and dislikes about the product itself so the forums in the community feel that you get from na10 are um you can feel it straight away you know that if you have an issue the support is going to be there like if you have a question you know that you can post it in the Forum and somebody will reply um whereas I've had posts and forums sit for multiple months and not had a reply and I've had to find something out myself so I think that is really good um being able to add the notes the sticky notes and the comments onto your um your workflow incredible um I've come back from holiday a couple weeks ago and I had a scenario that I'd written and I had to look at it and go now I know exactly what's going on there because I left good enough notes that I didn't have to sit and go okay how does this work um so yeah it was that's very good yeah I haven't got any dislikes really yet um I haven't really played with it enough I don't think I hope you don't have any me too because yeah I'm really enjoying no I yeah I really hope I don't have dislikes because I've been really enjoying using it and I can one more question about this like documentation wise for example if you let's say you importing you know that you have not used yet like you want to know more about this like you have this option to go to the documentation of it do you find that documentation helpful for I think it is useful to have the option to instantly click to it so as

a last question uh I would like to ask like to what kind of people or companies that are looking to automate stuff would you present anytime would you like recommending it and too right now I think I'd recommend it to somebody with some programming knowledge um just because of the expressions and how a scenario can be laid out um even if you have no programming knowledge I think you could still use na10 it is that powerful um it just may be quite daunting at first because it will look like quite a steep learning curve in particular I know that there's a lot of people who use Knack that um I have posted a lot of questions in The Knack forums of I've been looking at na10 is it worth it um or I've been using make or integromat and it's not doing this is there any other solution to them I'd say definitely give na10 a try if you haven't already um I feel like it would solve most of your problems and if you are struggling with Integra and make na10 I think is your solution because if you are using it as much as we were then you'll definitely see the benefit I'm going to keep going back to it if you had the Expression Builder I'd recommend it to everybody Under the Sun um that wants to do some sort of automation within your business it's that powerful that I think it could change your business would you ever consider going into the cloud version or would you like to stick to this outposting one I think we'd always want to stay with the self-hosting um because it um it gives us more control and I feel like that was something that we all felt like we were missing that with make sometimes the servers would slow or um we kept getting um messages saying that our scenarios stopped working um and we wouldn't know why so I think having the self hosting option and knowing everything that we know currently it gives us more control thank you very much Chris I really enjoyed this interview thank you for your time and I really hope you have lots of fun with anything and I hope you do not find anything that you dislike me too yeah um I think we're going to be quite active on the forums so you might see our names pop up quite quickly yeah we would love to address any of the issues if you have at your company so yeah awesome thank you