What are people actually building with n8n? After analyzing thousands of workflows, we've identified the 10 most impactful automation use cases. Each one can save hours of manual work every week.
1. Lead Capture & CRM Automation
The Problem: Leads come from multiple sources—forms, emails, social media, ads. Manually entering them into your CRM is tedious and leads get lost.
The Solution: Automatically capture leads from any source and sync them to your CRM with enriched data.
Example Workflow
- Form submission triggers workflow
- Enrich lead with company data (Clearbit, Apollo)
- Score lead based on criteria
- Create contact in HubSpot/Salesforce
- Assign to sales rep based on territory
- Send personalized welcome email
- Notify rep on Slack
Time saved: 5-10 hours/week for a busy sales team
Browse CRM automation workflows →
2. Social Media Content Scheduling
The Problem: Maintaining presence across LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook requires constant posting. Manual scheduling is time-consuming.
The Solution: Create content once, distribute everywhere automatically.
Example Workflow
- New blog post published (or scheduled in Notion)
- AI generates platform-specific versions
- Create images with appropriate dimensions
- Schedule posts to each platform
- Track engagement and report weekly
Time saved: 3-5 hours/week for content teams
Browse content automation workflows →
3. Email Processing & Auto-Response
The Problem: Email overload. Sorting, categorizing, and responding to routine emails takes hours daily.
The Solution: AI-powered email triage that categorizes, summarizes, and drafts responses.
Example Workflow
- New email arrives in inbox
- AI analyzes content and intent
- Categorize (support, sales, spam, personal)
- For support: create ticket, send acknowledgment
- For sales: add to CRM, notify sales
- Draft suggested responses for review
Time saved: 1-2 hours/day for anyone with email overload
Browse email automation workflows →
4. Data Sync Between Tools
The Problem: Your data lives in multiple tools—CRM, spreadsheets, databases, project management. Keeping them in sync manually leads to errors.
The Solution: Real-time or scheduled syncing between any tools.
Example Workflow
- New customer in Stripe
- Create/update contact in HubSpot
- Add row to Google Sheets for reporting
- Create project in Asana for onboarding
- Update customer count in dashboard
Time saved: Eliminates manual data entry errors entirely
5. AI-Powered Content Generation
The Problem: Creating blog posts, product descriptions, emails, and social content is time-intensive.
The Solution: Use AI to draft, edit, and format content with human review.
Example Workflow
- Input topic/keywords in Notion or Airtable
- AI researches and outlines article
- Generate draft with GPT-4/Claude
- Create featured image with DALL-E
- Format for WordPress
- Save as draft for human review
- Notify editor on Slack
Time saved: 80% reduction in first draft creation time
6. E-commerce Order Processing
The Problem: Orders trigger multiple downstream tasks—fulfillment, notifications, inventory updates, analytics. Manual handling doesn't scale.
The Solution: End-to-end order automation from purchase to delivery.
Example Workflow
- New Shopify/WooCommerce order
- Update inventory across channels
- Send order to fulfillment (ShipStation, 3PL)
- Create invoice in QuickBooks
- Send personalized thank you email
- Add to post-purchase email sequence
- Update sales dashboard
Time saved: 10+ hours/week for busy e-commerce stores
7. Customer Support Ticket Routing
The Problem: Support tickets need to reach the right person quickly. Manual triage creates bottlenecks and delays.
The Solution: AI-powered ticket classification and automatic routing.
Example Workflow
- New support ticket arrives (Zendesk, Freshdesk, email)
- AI analyzes content, urgency, and sentiment
- Categorize by type (billing, technical, general)
- Check customer tier (VIP, standard)
- Route to appropriate team/agent
- Set priority and SLA
- Send acknowledgment to customer
Time saved: 50% reduction in first response time
8. Reporting & Analytics Automation
The Problem: Building reports requires pulling data from multiple sources, formatting, and distributing. It's repetitive and error-prone.
The Solution: Automated report generation and distribution.
Example Workflow
- Scheduled trigger (daily/weekly/monthly)
- Pull data from Google Analytics, CRM, database
- Calculate KPIs and metrics
- Generate charts and visualizations
- Create PDF or Google Slides report
- Email to stakeholders
- Post summary to Slack
Time saved: Hours spent on manual reporting each week
9. Document Processing & OCR
The Problem: Invoices, receipts, contracts, and forms arrive as PDFs or images. Extracting data manually is slow and tedious.
The Solution: AI-powered document understanding and data extraction.
Example Workflow
- Document uploaded to Google Drive or email
- OCR extracts text from image/PDF
- AI identifies document type
- Extract relevant fields (amounts, dates, names)
- Validate data against rules
- Enter into accounting system
- File document in organized folder
Time saved: 90% reduction in data entry time
10. DevOps & Monitoring Alerts
The Problem: System issues need immediate attention. Monitoring alerts from multiple tools create noise, and critical issues get missed.
The Solution: Intelligent alert aggregation and escalation.
Example Workflow
- Receive alerts from multiple sources (Datadog, AWS, custom)
- Deduplicate and correlate related alerts
- Assess severity based on rules
- For critical: page on-call engineer (PagerDuty)
- For warnings: post to #ops-alerts Slack
- Auto-remediate common issues (restart service, scale up)
- Create incident report
Time saved: Faster incident response, fewer false alarms
Getting Started
The best way to start is to identify your biggest time sink and automate it first. Ask yourself:
- What task do I do repeatedly every day/week?
- What involves copying data between tools?
- Where do things fall through the cracks?
- What would I automate if I had unlimited time?
Start small, prove value, then expand. Most successful automation programs begin with one workflow that saves a few hours per week.
Find Your First Automation
Browse our library of 493+ production-ready workflows. Find one that matches your use case and start automating today.
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