Meet Nod: a standalone personal agent from n8n Labs that runs on your computer

Today we're releasing Nod as a research preview from n8n Labs, a new team within n8n that experiments with ideas outside our core product. Nod is a standalone app, separate from n8n, that runs on your computer. It's a personal agent with its own computer and browser: you tell it what you need, and it works in your apps and on websites until the job is finished. It's open source, and it uses the AI provider you choose.

You can download Nod for Mac and Windows. The code is on GitHub under an open-source licence.

Why we built it

n8n has always been about helping people automate work. That was true before AI and it's true now. AI lets software take on more kinds of work, but the goal is the same.

A lot of what people build in n8n is multiplayer: processes that a team or a business shares and runs on a shared n8n instance. Nod is for a single player. It's built for one person, connects to that person's accounts, and gets their jobs done, whether the job is for their business or their household.

Nod also lives outside n8n. It's a separate app from n8n and from the agents you can build inside n8n, and you don't need an n8n account to use it. You install it on your computer, connect your accounts and ask for something. There's no server or cloud service to set up first.

When we sat down with early testers, many of them placed Nod in the same spot on their own: their chat assistant is where they think and write, n8n runs their shared processes, and Nod takes the ongoing jobs that are theirs alone.

Nod is a n8n Labs experiment, and it doesn't change the direction of n8n. Work on n8n and the n8n agent continues as planned. Building and using Nod has taught us a lot about how AI can take on more of the work people do, and we're releasing it as a research preview so more people can use it and show us where it should go next.

What Nod does

Because Nod has its own computer (a sandbox that runs locally) and browser, it can finish jobs that a chat tool would hand back to you as a to-do list. It works in the apps you connect, such as Gmail, Calendar, Drive and Slack, and on websites that have no integration at all.

Some of the jobs people hand it:

• Cancel a subscription, turn down the retention offers and ask for your refund
• Watch a price and tell you when it drops
• Find a hotel that fits your trip and book it once you say go
• Sign in to your supplier portals each month, download the invoices, and file them for your accountant
• Pull last week's numbers from a dashboard that has no way to export the data and put them in your weekly report

Nod also works ahead of you: it reads your connected apps and offers the jobs it could take off your plate. You talk to it in one conversation, in the app or on Telegram or WhatsApp, while it runs several jobs in parallel in the background. Jobs that repeat, like a morning brief or a price check, can run on a schedule.

It gets to know you

Nod remembers months of conversation, so you don't have to keep reminding it what you want. On LongMemEval, a public benchmark for long-term memory, it scored 93.2%, among the best published memory systems.

It learns your preferences as you go, and when you connect Gmail it checks how you write so its drafts sound like you. It also writes down how it got a task done, uses those notes the next time, and fixes them when a site changes. You can see, edit or delete anything Nod keeps about you.

Who it's for

Nod is for anyone who wants to hand the mundane parts of their week to AI: the forms, the follow-ups, the logins and the reminders. Solo operators and freelancers use it for their business, and plenty of people use it for errands at home.

For now you connect your own AI provider, with an API key or your ChatGPT plan, so Nod suits people who are comfortable with that kind of setup. If you use n8n, you can connect your instance so Nod can work with your workflows.

Built to be trustworthy

An agent that can send email and pay with your card has to earn your trust. We designed Nod so you can check how it behaves.

It's yours

Nod is open source under Apache 2.0, and every rule it follows is in the code. It runs on your Mac, your Windows PC or your own server, with the model provider you choose.

It works in its own sandbox

Nod works inside a private virtual machine on your computer, with its own browser. Its data, memory and saved logins stay on the machine running it; your AI provider gets what each task needs.

Only you give it permission

Before Nod sends, pays, posts or deletes anything you didn't ask for, a separate check confirms you asked for it. A web page or an email can't give Nod orders.

The AI never sees your passwords

Your saved logins and cards are encrypted on your machine, and Nod enters them through private forms the model can't read.

Everything is on record

Nod logs every sign-in, card use and action in your apps, along with what each task cost.

The permission check is itself a model and can make mistakes, which is why Nod asks when your words don't cover an action.

What it costs

Nod is open source and free. You pay your model provider for the AI you use, or you can connect an open-source model running on your own computer. Some early testers found tasks cost more than they expected, so cost has been a focus of our recent releases, and the latest one brought it down substantially.

Nod also has guardrails so costs don't run away:

• Every task shows what it cost, and a finished task ends with a receipt
• You can set a monthly spending limit
• Nod checks in with you once a task passes $5, and you can change that amount
• Each schedule shows its estimated monthly cost

What it doesn't do, yet

• When Nod is running on your laptop, it stops when the laptop sleeps. Some testers keep it on an always-on Mac mini or run it on their own server, and a hosted version is on our roadmap.
• Each installation has one owner.
• It can't make phone calls.

Try it

Download Nod for Mac or Windows, or read the code on GitHub. Then hand it one job from your list. Tell us how it went in the n8n Labs category on the community forum, or with Send feedback in the app.

More info:

https://github.com/n8n-io/nod - Github repo

https://nod.n8n.io/docs/ - Nod Docs

Download and install Nod:

https://nod.n8n.io