PubNub is now on N8N: Bringing real-time workflow automation to over 1 billion connected devices

What This Means for You

PubNub customers now have access to the full N8N ecosystem starting today. You will be able to leverage your PubNub channels directly inside N8N workflows. It even works with your private N8N deployments! This works for all customer use cases including multiplayer games, collaborative applications, and Internet of Things (IoT) connected devices. If you have an IoT device at home, it's very likely already connected to PubNub. Now, we can seamlessly bring those real-time events over to the N8N ecosystem.

With our dedicated PubNub trigger nodes and action nodes on N8N, you can:

• Human-in-the-loop notifications: Get notified when you need to take action
• Start a workflow from anywhere: Even if you're using private N8N hosting
• Receive notifications when workflows fail or finish successfully
• Log workflow activity and fetch history from storage and playback
• Change Channel Groups within a workflow
• Real-time fleet and asset geofencing
• Add an interactive Chatbot within your workflow
• Connect multiple workflows together: With a chain or fork pattern

For example, if you have an app with support chat powered by PubNub and you want to add an AI agent to answer questions, you can have PubNub stream every customer message into an N8N workflow as it happens. This workflow can call an LLM, enrich the request with data from your CRM, and decide whether to auto‑respond, escalate to a human, or trigger a follow-up workflow. The response is then published back through PubNub to the right user and device instantly, giving you a human‑in‑the‑loop, AI‑augmented support experience without building any of the plumbing yourself.

Features Supported

Publish

Send messages from your N8N workflow to any connected device or application. Trigger alerts, push notifications, update dashboards, or kick off actions on remote systems. Your workflow completes a task? Publish a message and every connected client knows instantly.

Subscribe

This is your trigger node. Listen for incoming messages on any channel and start your workflow the moment something happens. An IoT sensor detects motion? A user sends a chat message? A game event fires? Your N8N workflow picks it up and runs. This is how you bring real-time events into your automations.

History

Fetch previous messages from any channel. Perfect for logging workflow activity, auditing what happened, or replaying events. Maybe your workflow was offline. Maybe you need to backfill data. History lets you grab what you missed and process it.

Presence

Know who's online right now. Track which users or devices are connected to a channel. Build workflows that respond to users joining or leaving. Great for monitoring fleet status, tracking active users, or triggering actions when specific devices come online or go offline.

Channel Groups

Manage collections of channels dynamically within your workflow. Add channels, remove channels, list what's in a group. This is powerful for organizing large-scale deployments. You've got thousands of IoT devices? Group them logically. Manage subscriptions at scale without hardcoding channel names.

Getting Started

Getting started is straightforward. Create new credentials for the PubNub API. Your customers can bring in their own existing API keys for the N8N node. Set your user ID and you're ready to go.

Then create a new workflow using the PubNub trigger node. Set up your channel, add filters if you need them, and you're listening for messages. Add an action node to send messages back. Execute the step and it succeeds happily.

Perfect. We've done it.

Watch the Demo

Want to see it in action? Check out the full walkthrough: