Fastest open-source workflow engine built in Rust + Svelte. 300+ Enterprise customers. Profitable with a lean team of 9 engineers.

Looking for new cracked software engineers to join us in Paris.

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/windmill/jobs

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44052636

Points: 10

# Comments: 0

I'm not ashamed to admit than n8n feels more polished. There are a few reasons:

- Our team was and is still much smaller. We were 5 for the first 2 years, we are now 10 (year 3), and are continuing to hire to follow our growth.

- They have been around for longer and mature for longer, more time to iterate. We have reached some level of maturity recently and are now spending more iterations on polishing rather than new features.

- Their surface area is smaller, windmill does A LOT and expose more for the better or worse.

n8n has done a lot of things really well and although we have a different audience, there is a lot to learn from what they did very well and we have the upmost respect for them. We have some overlap, but I think ultimately we strive in different kind of orgs and will cohabit rather than compete.

Founder of Windmill here. This is not too surprising although we are working on it by leveraging AI and just better DX/design. Pleasing devs in the most demanding orgs and the ever-changing expectations is challenging by itself. Pleasing both devs AND non-technical user is a monumental task that we are now giving more attention to by focusing on 2 aspects:

- A better DX/UX that does not sacrifice power-user capabilities but has a less step learning-curve and more intuitiveness to it. That is mostly about good design and hard work. We are taking inspiration from the best and on the intuitiveness, we've learned a lot from n8n and other leaders in the space.

- leveraging AI capabilities in a state-of-the-art way to have the best models generate the code for non-technical users. That is basically just adopting the best practices inspired by cursor such as great auto-completion, great inline code-gen, excellent semantic search.

Congrats, you made what I believe is the best move a software company can do in our space. You will hear a lot of naysayers, and sure the software we build is not as permissive as Apache 2.0 and MIT. Those are all true and valid points. It's also true that VCs have perverse incentives and as a naturally skeptic myself, I understand not wanting to touch it.

Let me bring a little bit of counter-points to those:

- AGPL or Commercial Open-Source Software would probably just not exist at all if there was no path to commercialization at all. So the dichotomy between making it true MIT or AGPL is a false one, it's the choice between proprietary/no software and AGPL and I think we can all agree the latter is better. Software Engineers need to eat and there is a pool of talented engineers for whom glory is not fully sufficient and also need their work to be a reasonable financial paths. This enables more SWE to compete to build more software and make the software landscape more competitive for the benefit of the end-users.

- Taking VC money is not signing a pact with the devil that strips away your entire freedom, especially at @lucasfcosta stage and ours. The real issue is with being fully dependent on that money by having bad financial health and needing to raise in X months. COSS company like ours can stay lean and profitable, taking just the right amount of money from VC to kickstart a long-term journey to become a behemoth of a software company through having advantages over all the proprietary alternatives. Windmill for instance is profitable, and no investors has ever pressured us to go faster or monetize more. 99% of our users are using the free/open-source version but the 1% that is not is made of medium and large enterprises that hugely appreciate running their infra on open-source software that they can easily audit and contribute to. It would have been SO MUCH harder to convince them without being open-source given our size. Another fact that helps is pricing but that is also related to our open-source nature. It's harder to over-price your large customers because at a certain point they can say screw it, they will just build in-house to go above the proprietary features. All that to say that companies do have incentives but also are made of humans which have their own values and goals, and have some agenda to set their own path, especially early on. It's all about balance and I would argue taking a bit of VC money at the seed-stage at a good valuation and then not much more is the optimal path right now.

Windmill.dev is a workflow engine based fully on postgresql. This would be the missing piece to offer a local development workflow that doesn't require spinning a full pg.

Windmill (https://windmill.dev) used to only support webhooks to trigger code and flow jobs. We have just added email support building our own MX server, and wanted to add CDC change. We were gonna do it on Debezium but this will allow us to remove the need for a third-party service and just add this as a crate. Thank you supabase for open-sourcing this.

If we could bundle everything to native that would completely change the game since as good as bun's cold start is, you can't beat running straight native with a small binary.

> Maestro is a general-purpose, horizontally scalable workflow orchestrator designed to manage large-scale workflows such as data pipelines and machine learning model training pipelines. It oversees the entire lifecycle of a workflow, from start to finish, including retries, queuing, task distribution to compute engines, etc.. Users can package their business logic in various formats such as Docker images, notebooks, bash script, SQL, Python, and more. Unlike traditional workflow orchestrators that only support Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs), Maestro supports both acyclic and cyclic workflows and also includes multiple reusable patterns, including foreach loops, subworkflow, and conditional branch, etc.

You could replace Maestro with Windmill here and it would be precisely correct. Their rollup is what we call the openflow state.

Main differences I see:

- Windmill is written in Rust instead of Java.

- Maestro relies on CockroachDB for state and us Postgresql for everything (state but also queue). I can see why they would use CockroachDB, we had to rollout our own sharding algorithms to make Windmill horizontally scale on our very large scale customer instances

- Maestro is Apache 2.0 vs Windmill AGPL which is less friendly

- It's backed by Netflix so infinite money but although we are profitable, we are a much smaller company

- Maestro doesn't have extensive docs about self-hosting on k8s or docker-compose and either there is no UI to build stuff, or the UI is not yet well surfaced in their documentation

But overall, pretty cool stuff to open-source, will keep an eye on it and benchmark it asap

I'm surprised, and so my statement above is wrong as more people in Paris are born outside of it, I would have thought it was more than 50%