I’m a software engineer and I’ve been building these back-end automation and AI systems for the last three or four years.
We’re going to pick the right tool for you and how to approach the technical part of it, which is not that hard and is largely able to be done with just a laptop and your AI agent of choice.
Not everything on your list will be a great candidate. So if you only have the capacity to maybe build one or two really solid automations, you want to know which ones are going to be the most important to your business.
Zapier, n8n and Make do the same basic job
There’s many tools out there for automation and AI for that matter.
You might have heard options like Zapier, n8n, Make.com. These are all programs that are doing the same thing. They’re doing basic automations. And a lot of the functionality of these tools is the same.
Why I recommend n8n
What I recommend that people look into is n8n. They’re open source and that just means that all their code is visible to us engineers or to anyone really.
Going in and actually looking at their code, it’s pretty good, pretty safe and reliable. And I think that their plans are some of the best available as far as value for your money.
They have a new AI feature baked into n8n. So if you make an n8n account, you can go ahead and use that AI feature and it will help you through this process.
Use your AI assistant for the technical part
You’re going to want to have your main AI assistant like Claude. And you want to ask it, how do I get started?
If you use Claude Code, there is a skill called superpowers. It has a built-in brainstorming function. It makes sure that the AI has all the context required before it starts getting into this planning phase and it does this by asking you a series of questions. That’s a really good start.
Pick the one that gives you the most value
So I would just pick the one you get the most value out of, and I think that’s n8n.