n8n FREE Zapier & Make.com Alternative! How To Install & Self Host n8n In 3 Minutes 🤖

What is going on everybody in today's video I'm going to show you a nobs guide to quickly get n8n set up so you can self-host it on your own home server and you can start using its unlimited features um for you know executions and it can be a make.com alternative as well as a zapier alternative so you can save money as well as have more freedom with your no code automations let's dive right into it [Music] all right so if you're

Not familiar with n8n uh I'm fairly newer to it as well so um I will be doing more and more videos on this but essentially it's similar to something like zapier or make um you know these no code tools that allow us to connect apis but um you know some people say it's a bit more advanced or something like this it's it's really not from what I've seen I mean yes it has more advanced capabilities but as long as you can

Like if as long as you're pretty uh you know as long as you're not super super new and I yeah if you're super new I would maybe suggest going with make or zapier to start but um as long as you can like read and somewhat understand Json and a few different things this should be good for you and we go to their pricing here uh um you can see here they have these different plans so they have the starter at 20

Pound a month uh 20% off this is annual so it's about 24 pounds uh a month um so 2.5 it's limited you know five active workflows it's actually a lot more it seems a lot more limited than make.com and this is for their uh own hosted n8n instance or servers um for self-hosting now there's really two ways yes you can sell I'm going to show you how to self-host it on your Home Server just so you can get that going right

Away um I'll probably do another video showing you how to actually set it up on your own VPS server or your own server in the cloud um but for now I'm just going to show you how to get it set up right away you can start using it on your own network all right and the great thing about n n8n is it's uh open source it's you can do it it's absolutely free so for example things like make.com and I love

Make I've done a bunch of videos on make but you can see here the pricing and uh it's pretty fair some to some degree like um it's somewhat decent I mean it could definitely you know like anything it could be cheaper but um yeah pretty good pricing it's a lot cheaper than zapier if we go to zapier here and check out the pricing real quick yeah uh 20 bucks for you know limited features here of only yeah it's how many tasks

You need a month 100 um okay so I don't yeah it's like 2,000 tasks for 68 bucks super pricey um so anyways let's dive into n8n um so there's two main ways to really install it one is through um npm and the other is through Docker um and then of course you can install it in your servers right here those are different options um I'll probably be doing a video uh sometime this week I would assume on installing it in a

Server so if you're interested in that stay on the lookout for that but uh to get started so you can get started playing around with an8m and seeing how it works and using it maybe building out a few ex uh scenarios um what you can do is you're going to want to start off by installing node dot or nodejs so if you don't already have that installed you're definitely going to want to install that and you can just download it for

Free here um nodejs.org and then once you're done that you're going to want to go to your um if you're on Windows you're going to go to your Powershell or your terminal we're going to run this as administrator so make sure you're running it as administrator and then you're simply just going to run the command um right here which is npm install or space install dasg for Global and then n8n all right I'm not going to run it cuz I've already

Ran it um once you run that it's probably going to take a minute two just to run that fully and then once you're done that you're going to and now I'm only going to be showing you the N keym um method in the node method in this video maybe I'll do another one on the dark Docker method later but um once you actually run that you're going to want to start and it ends so you could start it without the tunnel

Like I'm showing you here I would just suggest to start it with the tunnel and I'll show you I'll tell you why for example if I go to the na docs right here um and yeah all this is available on their website you just go to docs so like if you're here you go to documentation and it will walk you through every single thing every command I'm doing here but you can see here you can test it here you can run

It globally here um Etc updating generating Etc but um if you just start it normally without the tunnel which I'm going to do right here I start it so it's uh user settings loading from Etc initializing na process checking the port so it's hosted on 5678 port and you're going to get a tunnel URL now the reason you do it with a tunnel URL is because it's going to give you this URL right here now this URL is what you can

Use well once we actually load it up for web hooks all right because um it's going to say press o to open and browser I'm going to press o and I'm going to show you o here we go it's loading the Local Host if you don't run it through a tunnel when you actually go into the NN uh interface it's going and you try to create a web hook it's going to give you a local um local like a local address

Local Host address for the web hook and that's not going to be you're not going to able to send anything from like any external app to that web hook URL all right so that's very important um but yeah this is the actual interface here so you can see here I'll give you a quick overview of it for those of you that are new here this is the template section so explore 800 plus templates submitted by the community you can check some

Of these out easily import them into your n8n um instance over there there's a bunch of Integrations I'm not going to go like this is not a full in-depth tutorial on n8n but you there's like 3,000 oh no that's the company using NN but there's a bunch of Integrations air table um open AI uh you know click up go high level web hooks of course HTTP requests telegram Gmail Etc and um let's just go back to our instance here computers a

Little bit yeah there we go so we have variables so this is available on the Enterprise plan variables can be used to store a uh store and access data across workflows reference them in the N uh n8n using pref uh prefix variables Etc so you need the Enterprise plan for that executions shows there settings so you'll see your usage and plan which of course since we're self hosting we've used zero of unlimited right so that's pretty awesome we have our information

Here users n API all that good stuff but I'm going to show you right here if we go to home we check out our workflows you'll have your workflows and credentials here but let me just show you this workflow for example go click on this this is what the Builder looks like nice interface here if I go to web hook and click on this now you'll see we have that tunnel URL so if I use this tunnel URL for example let

Me just pull up something over here go here I'm going to show you guys this as a test so let's see um n8n right here um and then see here this has the Local Host web hook this obviously doesn't work but if I put in the tunnel web hook address let's see I don't know if I have something to test the test thing so let me see listen for test event um okay let me it may have to send that again

Okay so a few things I wanted to note here I was having some issues so you got to make sure you are on the tunnel uh URL when you're doing this all right you can't be on the Local Host go without saying um but yeah I was making that mistake and then also to you let's see so we're what we did here was we did a get and when you're testing things out you're going to need to use the test URL

Um and and then yeah and then you can um so for example like here's what I did I pasted in the test URL right here for web hook and let me just listen for event so we're listening for events here we're going to test and there we go so we got the information right here the web hook um the record ID and base URL that's all we really passed through all right so you could go ahead continue building this out um

And yeah this will give you a good start in terms of actually just getting n8n set up there's a lot more you can do there's a lot more I did not cover all right guys so that's it for this video now you know how to host n locally on your computer uh in a future video like I said I'm going to show you how to actually host it on a your own server like a PS so you actually can increase the

Limits and if you're running a lot of executions and scenarios it's going to be a lot better that way plus you can have it hosted basically in the cloud on your own server and all you'll be paying for is just a server cost which is very minimal comparative to things like make.com all right one of the reasons that funny enough I actually did this V uh actually started really looking into um make uh n8n was because I love make right but

As you can see here if I go to my organizations I've been you know really using a lot of operations lately so I've had to in like buy extra operations this month like I had the 40,000 plan I'm at almost 12,000 so yeah increasingly uh using more operations as well as data transfer and you know not only just to save money and to have a alternative but also to because I've heard a lot of good things about n and you also

Have a lot more freedom is what I've heard but I'll be diving into it more um this week and doing future videos like I said showing you how to set things up as well as do workflows leverage AI automations all that good stuff if you're new to this channel make sure to subscribe to stay up to date for all that and if you haven't already joined our stride Community it's a free group we have about 700 members in our Discord and

Facebook uh group right now link for that will be in the description and then also too guys you can check out my book client acquisition code link for that will be in the description as well anyways guys if you're new here we upload a video every single day and I will see you in tomorrow's video keep hustling keep grinding and of course guys accelerate your stride take care