After running n8n self-hosted for over a year, these are the workflows I can’t live without.

1. GitHub PR → Slack Notification with AI Summary

When a PR is opened, n8n grabs the diff, sends it to GPT-4 for a summary, and posts it to Slack. My team reviews PRs 40% faster because they know what they’re looking at before opening the link.

GitHub Trigger → HTTP (get diff) → AI Summary → Slack Message

The AI summary includes: what changed, potential risks, and which files to focus on.

2. Daily Standup Report Generator

Every morning at 9:00, n8n collects:

  • Yesterday’s merged PRs from GitHub
  • Completed Jira tickets
  • Deployment logs from Azure

It compiles everything into a standup summary and posts it to the team channel. No more “what did I do yesterday?” moments.

3. Error Monitoring → Auto-Triage

Application errors from Azure Application Insights trigger a webhook. n8n classifies the error severity using an AI node, creates a Jira ticket with the right priority, and notifies the on-call developer.

Critical errors get an immediate Telegram message. Non-critical ones batch into a daily digest.

4. Content Pipeline

New blog post markdown → n8n picks it up → generates social media variants (Twitter thread, LinkedIn post) → schedules them across platforms. One piece of content, multiple channels, zero manual copy-paste.

5. Infrastructure Health Check

Every 15 minutes, n8n pings critical endpoints, checks SSL certificate expiry, and monitors disk usage via SSH. If anything is off, I get a Telegram alert before my users notice.

Why Self-Hosted?

Running n8n on your own server means:

  • No workflow limits — n8n Cloud has execution caps
  • Full data privacy — sensitive API keys stay on your infra
  • Custom nodes — install community nodes or write your own
  • Cost savings — a €5/month VPS handles thousands of workflows

The setup takes 10 minutes with Docker. Totally worth it.