n8n is a source-available and free workflow automation tool that allows teams to improve their processes. They use Strapi to power up their corporate website and enable marketing teams to deliver and update content effortlessly. We asked Hilary, Head of Growth at n8n, to share more about their Strapi adventure.
n8n is a workflow automation tool, it’s source-available and free like Strapi. We help developers and low coders speed up their processes and improve marketing, sales, and customer interaction automation. The tool lets you connect anything to everything via its open, fair-code model.
When I joined the company, we decided to redesign the corporate website, and we needed to choose a CMS that would facilitate content management, boost automated SEO and help us scale.
We checked many CMSs with a visual WYSIWYG editor that allows users to design pages from scratch. But for me, it’s not a selling point - I don’t want my marketing team to redesign pages - that’s what designers are for. I want them to update content and build pages using the existing components that go well with each other.
That’s why we didn’t choose these kinds of CMS. Also, most products we considered could get expensive with time, so I checked other options.
At that time, we were already using Strapi for one of our backend products, and the team was happy with it. I suggested using it for the corporate website - the team knows it well, it has all the necessary features, and it's open-source. With Strapi, my team can build pages using components and easily update the copy without redesigning pages in their way.
Strapi also allows us to set up the SEO system (URLs, metadata, redirects), has localization, matches our tech stack (Vue.js and Nuxt.js), and can be customized at any time.
We absolutely did! We wanted to showcase workflows and integrations - the features n8n has - on the website. We have two Strapi projects - one for our product and another for the website, and we're using endpoints to pull the data in and generate pages on the website. We build out our integration and workflow template pages that are in the product automatically.
This way our marketing team isn't adding content manually anytime a new integration or workflow template comes out. Soon we are planning to add our workflow template collections automatically to showcase on the website as well.
We're planning to enable the roles and permissions since we will give guest writers access to the CMS. We're already using this feature internally but plan to expand it and add more custom roles with granular permissions.
We're also planning to move the blog to Strapi (currently, it's based on another CMS), and add more cross-integration pages and automated pages for SEO.
Finally, we're building our own preview system allowing content editors to see the page before publishing it. With Strapi, we can do our setup and customize it how we want.
Before I had to say "no" to many initiatives- everything took too much time and effort. Now, we can instantly create and update content and experiment more without messing up the design. Strapi saves us a ton of time, allows us to deploy campaigns 1000x faster, and its SEO potential is huge.