Quick Dive: How to Use Split & Aggregate Nodes in n8n
When it comes to building workflows in n8n, there are a few nodes that don’t get the spotlight they deserve — but once you master them, you’ll find yourself using them almost everywhere.
The workflow is here
Two of my most used
Split 🪓 → break down arrays or results into individual, loopable items.
Aggregate 📦 → combine multiple items into a single payload you can send forward.
In my latest video, I walk through some practical, real-world use cases for both nodes. Consider this article a quick reference guide to go along with the tutorial — and yes, I’ll link to the actual workflow templates at the bottom so you can explore them hands-on.
🧩 Why Split & Aggregate Matter
n8n is powerful, but working with multiple items can get messy:
You don’t want to call an say ChatGPT 5 times when you could aggregate the data and send it once into the LLM with all the data. “Summary all the task items for me”
You don’t want a single structured array from AI output; you want to split it into usable pieces for loops. “Split the content.results”
At the end of a workflow, you don’t always want 20 “done” messages — sometimes a single aggregated “done” trigger is exactly enough.
The Split and Aggregate nodes handle these scenarios beautifully.
📌 Example Use Cases
AI Summarization – Use Aggregate to pull multiple rows from a database into one payload, and send it into an LLM in a single query. No wasted tokens, no repeated calls.
Loop Closures – At the end of a multi-step loop, apply Aggregate so you trigger one clean email or update instead of spamming your system five times.
Structured AI Output – Split arrays from LLM responses into individual items that can be processed one by one (tweet them, send them in Slack, etc).
APIs at Scale – After hitting an API that returns large nested data, use Split to isolate the exact objects you need, and loop over them for further work.
Combination Workflow – Sometimes, you’ll Split to process results and then Aggregate to return a single concise record (e.g. returning one “quote” from multiple options).
🎥 Watch the Full Walkthrough
This Substack outline is meant as a supplement. To really see these nodes in action with live demos, check out the full video: 👉
✅ Final Thoughts
Don’t sleep on Split and Aggregate — they’re foundational building blocks for making your workflows smarter, cleaner, and scalable. Once you know how to use them, you’ll start noticing places where they can save you time and simplify your automation.
🔥 Then your Substack readers can click through to workflows, and when people watch your YouTube video you can comment, “Hey, I broke this down in an article + linked the workflows here 👉 here