Telegram Chatbot with n8n

Experimenting with n8n to create a simple Telegram chat bot

Aug 25 - Aug 25

Description

Took a weekend to explore n8n workflow and connected up some services to have a working LLM chatbot in Telegram.

Technologies

n8n
Telegram
Gemini API

Project Overview

Over the weekend, I decided to take a look at a no-code workflow automation tool called n8n and see how quickly I could spin up a simple Telegram chatbot using it.

Implementations

Hosting

As n8n has a self-hosted version, I decided to host it on the very generous Oracle ‘Always Free’ tier VM. Highly recommend everyone to check out Oracle Cloud’s free tier if you are looking for a free VM to host your projects.

Once everything was set up and running in my domain (using Nginx and Cloudflare), I was ready to start playing around with n8n.

Creating the Chatbot

For those that have not used n8n before, it is a no-code automation tool that allows anybody to create workflows with various services and APIs like Telegram, many of the LLM providers, Reddit, Databases and more.

Overall, I was able to very quickly create a simple Telegram LLM chatbot with agent capabilities!

Here are some of its features:

Search the web with Gemini Grounding Search
Search Reddit to get latest updates and dive into subreddits if requested
Get the latest news from CNA various RSS feeds
Analyse images that is sent through Telegram
Remembers previous messages
And of course, reply to any text messages sent to the bot via Telegram.

Above we can see what happens when I send a message to the bot.

To power the bot, I used the Gemini 2.5 Flash to handle the text messages and the image analysis. The reason Gemini 2.5 Flash is chosen is due to its multimodal capabilities, built-in grounding search, and it is the best free state-of-the-art LLM available currently.

And here is an example of the response in Telegram:

Conclusion

Overall, this was a fun weekend experiment and I was able to learn quite a bit about n8n and how it can be used for quick prototyping especially for agentic applications. Sometimes, you really do not need to code from scratch, using a no-code tool can help you to prototype first so that you can do a sanity check on the idea. It also allows you to quickly iterate on the idea and see if it is worth pursuing further.