An honest starting point
n8n is a genuinely good tool. It is flexible, has a large node library, self-hosts cleanly, and lets a small team automate a lot quickly. If you are wiring together internal integrations, this comparison is not for you — use n8n. This is about a narrower question: what happens when those same workflows operate in a regulated environment, where you may have to prove to an auditor exactly what an automation did months ago.
Where general-purpose automation stops
n8n executes workflows and stores execution data, and for debugging that is fine. But its execution history is operational state: it can be pruned, edited at the database level, and is not designed to be tamper-evident. That is a reasonable default for an automation tool — most users want to save storage, not build a legal record. In a regulated setting it becomes a liability, because "we have logs" and "we have logs an auditor will trust" are different claims.
The properties a regulated workflow needs
Three properties separate an automation platform from an evidence platform. First, an append-only, hash-linked event log, so history cannot be rewritten without detection. Second, deterministic replay, so any past run can be reconstructed exactly rather than approximately. Third, policy gates with recorded human oversight, so consequential steps are approved by an identifiable person and that approval is part of the record. Trazium is built around these three; a general-purpose tool treats them as out of scope.
What this actually buys you
The payoff shows up at the worst moment: an incident, an audit, a customer dispute. With an evidence-first platform you answer "what happened?" by replaying the exact run and pointing at the tamper-evident log. With a general-purpose tool you assemble a best-effort reconstruction from operational logs and hope it is complete and unaltered. One is evidence; the other is a story.
Choosing honestly
Use the right tool for the risk. For low-stakes internal automation, n8n's flexibility is the correct trade and Trazium would be overkill. For workflows that make decisions you might have to defend — under the EU AI Act or to a customer — the governance properties are not a nice-to-have you can add later, they are the point. The honest answer is that these are different tools for different risk levels, and pretending one covers both is how teams end up unable to answer the only question that matters.