Let’s say you’re building a software product. When something happens in your product (maybe somebody buys something, or shares a link, or creates an image, etc.), some of your customers want something to happen in response. Maybe they want the user to receive an email, maybe they want something to be posted to social media, etc.

Normally you would have to integrate with each of those third-party services directly. With n8n, Zapier, etc., you can write one integration and let your customers decide what to plug it into. So you get thousands of integrations “for free” by integrating one service.

The same goes in reverse – maybe something happens in a third-party service and your customers want something to happen in your product as a result. Instead of requiring all those third-party services to integrate with you, they can just integrate with n8n, Zapier, etc.

Because services like n8n and Zapier provide a common interface between very different services, it sidesteps a combinatorial explosion of integrations needed to wire everything up to everything else explicitly.

For instance “when somebody buys something from our Shopify store, I want to add them to a private Slack channel”. Shopify aren’t going to spend time building an integration like that, Slack aren’t going to spend time building an integration like that, and a customer isn’t going to want to commission bespoke software to wire it all up. But if they both integrate with n8n or Zapier, then customers can do it themselves.

I'm pretty sure OP was asking about the end user use cases. But I appreciate your reply because I'm developing a product and this made something click for me about letting users integrate with other things with minimal effort.

My company has "apps" on n8n, Zapier, and Make. I've used them all and they're fairly similar: they make integration of supported platforms easy and support simple automation workflows.

E.g. if x happens on y platform, get relevant data, process it, send me a text message if it's during the day or email me if it's at night/weekend.

It's frequently faster than building out the integrations yourself, and is more accessible to inexperienced programmers/ less technical folks.

In terms of ease of use, I'd rank it: Zapier (top), Make, n8n. Same ranking for available apps. Complexity of workflows I'd rank those in reverse though. You can do more with n8n.

I use it for some webhook stuff to put together an RSS feed for a website that doesn't provide one. I didn't want to have to code up a web app just for it.

N8N comes with a webhook listener, and it was easy enough to cobble something together with the built-in nodes and coding custom ones with javascript (they just released a python node that I haven't tried yet).