n8n is an automation platform: you draw pipelines like “when this email arrives, transform it, call this API, write to this database, post to Slack”. Self-hostable, open-source, similar in concept to Zapier or Make. The browser editor is great for designing flows; for everything else — listing workflows, managing credentials, kicking off runs, migrating between dev and prod instances — the terminal is faster.

Same architectural choice as baserow-cli: rather than hand-writing the client, the CLI is generated from n8n’s OpenAPI spec. Every endpoint the platform documents becomes a typed CLI command with structured output, and when n8n ships a new version, the spec updates and the generator runs.

The trade-off is the same in both directions. The CLI inherits whatever shape n8n’s API has — sometimes that’s verbose where I’d have been terser — but maintenance is essentially free, and the surface area is always exactly what the platform supports.

Lives in the same family as baserow-cli, and exists for the same reason: programmatic access to a self-hosted n8n instance inside homelab-infra. Requires Python 3.13+.