I’m currently using Zapier for automation but I’ve noticed that it automatically pauses workflows when too many requests hit the same automation simultaneously. This is actually helpful for preventing system overload. Now I’m planning to migrate to n8n and I’m wondering if it has similar protection features. My current workflow sometimes gets bombarded with large amounts of data all at once, so I need to know if n8n can handle this gracefully or if it will just try to process everything without any limits. Has anyone experienced this situation with n8n? I want to make sure I won’t run into issues after making the switch from Zapier.
I migrated from Zapier to n8n last year and the throttling works completely differently. n8n doesn’t automatically pause like you mentioned - you have to manually configure queue management and execution limits. The self-hosted version lets you control concurrent executions through maxConcurrentExecutions settings, but you’ll need to tune these based on what your server can handle. I ended up building custom retry logic and delays into my workflows to deal with data bursts. The cloud version has limits too, but they’re tied to your subscription plan rather than dynamic throttling. If you’re getting unpredictable traffic spikes, you’ll probably need to build your own safeguards into the workflows instead of counting on the platform to protect you.
yep, n8n does have some throttling, but it ain’t as seamless as zapier. you gotta configure it on your own - there’s limits and timeouts, but no auto-pause for too much traffic. you might have to adjust stuff yourself to avoid issues.
Running n8n in production taught me that throttling is way more manual than Zapier’s automatic protection. n8n will happily queue hundreds of executions without any smart rate limiting - this caught me off guard at first. I had to build my own workflow controls using Wait nodes and HTTP retry mechanisms to avoid hammering external APIs. The execution queue becomes a bottleneck fast if you’re not watching it. What helped: setting up webhook endpoints with built-in delays and using n8n’s error handling to create backoff strategies. You’ll need to design resilient workflows yourself instead of relying on platform-level protections like Zapier gives you.
This topic was automatically closed 24 hours after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.