How to move a Pipedream schedule trigger to n8n

Use n8n's Schedule Trigger. A Pipedream cron expression goes into a Custom (Cron) rule unchanged, and an "every N minutes, hours or days" schedule becomes the matching interval rule. Two things need care. The first is the time zone: n8n has no per-trigger time zone, so set the workflow's time zone to the one Pipedream used. The second is intervals that n8n can't express in one rule, such as every 90 minutes or every 36 hours. Then publish the workflow, because schedules only fire on published workflows, compare a few runs, and turn off the Pipedream copy so the job doesn't run twice. Pipedream stops running workflows on March 31, 2027.

Pipedream and n8n schedules side by side

	Pipedream Schedule trigger	n8n Schedule Trigger
Modes	Every N days, hours or minutes, or a cron expression	Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, or Custom (Cron), with several rules per node
Time zone	Set on the schedule	One per workflow, or the instance default
Cron format	Five fields	Five fields, or six with a leading seconds field
Manual run	Run Now	Run the workflow from the editor
Run history	Job History in the inspector	The Executions list
Event data	timestamp in epoch seconds, timezone_configured, timezone_utc, interval_seconds, cron	timestamp as an ISO date in the workflow's time zone, plus readable fields such as Day of week, Hour and Timezone

Interval rules have limits: 1 to 59 seconds, 1 to 59 minutes, 1 to 23 hours and 1 to 31 days.

Cron schedules

1. Add a Schedule Trigger and set Trigger Interval to Custom (Cron).
2. Paste the Pipedream expression as it is, for example 0 9 * * 1-5 for 9:00 on weekdays.
3. Open Workflow Settings and set the time zone to the one Pipedream used, such as America/Chicago.
4. Publish. n8n rejects an invalid expression at this point.

Keep the same named time zone rather than converting the times to UTC. A cron expression in America/Chicago follows daylight saving time. A UTC version runs an hour off for part of the year.

Interval schedules

Pipedream's "Every" option stores an interval in seconds. Most intervals map to one n8n rule:

Pipedream	n8n rule
Every 30 seconds	Seconds, 30
Every 15 minutes	Minutes, 15
Every 2 hours	Hours, 2
Every 7 days	Days, 7

Hours rules also have a Trigger at Minute setting, and days rules add Trigger at Hour. Set them to the time you want the runs to land on.

Intervals outside those limits need more than one rule, or a workaround. Workflow Exit handles them this way:

• Whole minutes that divide a day evenly become exact cron rules, one per minute of the hour. Every 90 minutes becomes two rules in the same Schedule Trigger:

0 0,3,6,9,12,15,18,21 * * *
30 1,4,7,10,13,16,19,22 * * *

• Anything else gets the nearest interval n8n can express, plus a note in the migration checklist. Every 36 hours becomes every day, and every 150 seconds becomes every 2 minutes.

If the exact interval matters, run more often and skip the runs that come too early. This Code node, placed right after an hourly Schedule Trigger, lets a run through only when about 36 hours have passed since the last one:

// Run Once for All Items. Static data is saved only on published, triggered runs.
const state = $getWorkflowStaticData('global');
const now = Date.now();
const every = 36 * 60 * 60 * 1000;
const margin = 5 * 60 * 1000; // allow runs that fire a few minutes early
if (state.lastRun && now - state.lastRun < every - margin) {
  return []; // too early: nothing after this node runs
}
state.lastRun = now;
return [{ json: { ranAt: new Date(now).toISOString() } }];

For intervals that don't divide an hour or a day evenly, such as every 45 minutes or every 5 hours, compare the first few run times in the Executions list with Pipedream's Job History after you publish.

Time zones

The Schedule Trigger has no time zone of its own. It uses the workflow's time zone from Workflow Settings, or else the instance's. A self-hosted instance defaults to America/New_York. n8n Cloud tries to detect the owner's time zone at sign-up and falls back to GMT.

Two details catch people out:

• Editor import drops the time zone. Importing a workflow file in the n8n editor ignores the file's settings, the time zone included. Importing through n8n's public API keeps them. Workflow Exit writes the time zone into each converted workflow, and its import-to-n8n.mjs script imports through the API. If you import files in the editor instead, set the time zone again.
• Dates in code. In a Code node, $now and Luxon's DateTime.now() use the workflow's time zone, but plain JavaScript dates and Intl use the server's for local times. Use Luxon for anything that depends on local time.

Workflows with more than one schedule

A Pipedream workflow can have several triggers, including several schedules. An n8n Schedule Trigger can hold several rules, and each rule fires on its own. Two Pipedream schedules in the same time zone can therefore become two rules in one Schedule Trigger, for example 0 9 * * 1-5 for weekday mornings and 0 11 * * 0,6 for weekends. If a later step needs to know which one fired, check the Day of week or Hour field in the trigger's output.

Schedules in different time zones need separate n8n workflows, because the time zone belongs to the workflow. Workflow Exit keeps each Pipedream trigger as its own node, named trigger, trigger_2 and so on, and gives the workflow the first time zone it finds, so split those workflows after converting.

Steps that read the schedule event

Pipedream gave a scheduled run an event with an epoch timestamp and ready-made date strings. n8n's Schedule Trigger outputs an ISO timestamp in the workflow's time zone, plus readable fields. With the trigger node named trigger, the common fields map like this:

Pipedream	n8n expression
steps.trigger.event.timezone_configured.iso8601.timestamp	$('trigger').first().json.timestamp
steps.trigger.event.timezone_utc.iso8601.timestamp	DateTime.fromISO($('trigger').first().json.timestamp).toUTC().toISO()
steps.trigger.event.timezone_configured.iso8601.date	DateTime.fromISO($('trigger').first().json.timestamp).toISODate()
steps.trigger.event.timestamp	Math.floor(DateTime.fromISO($('trigger').first().json.timestamp).toSeconds())
steps.trigger.event.timezone_configured.timezone	DateTime.fromISO($('trigger').first().json.timestamp).zoneName

Workflow Exit rewrites these expressions, and converted code steps get Pipedream's event shape back through the compatibility layer. Code you write by hand that did new Date(event.timestamp * 1000) needs a change, because n8n's timestamp is a date string, not a number.

Test before you turn off Pipedream

1. Run it once by hand from the editor to check every step. Workflow static data isn't saved on manual runs, so counters and cursors look empty here. See saving Pipedream data stores for state that has to carry over.
2. Plan for the overlap. If both copies run, every email, row and message goes out twice. Either point the n8n copy at test destinations for a day, or disable the Pipedream workflow right after the n8n one's first good run.
3. Publish the n8n workflow. The Schedule Trigger only starts firing now.
4. Compare run times. Check the first few runs in the Executions list against Pipedream's Job History.
5. Disable the Pipedream workflow well before March 31, 2027.

Missed runs. If your n8n instance is down when a run is due, the default scheduler skips that run. From n8n 2.36, with the durable scheduler, the Schedule Trigger's settings can run the most recent missed execution instead. That matters for daily and weekly jobs.

Where the schedule settings come from

The official export includes schedule settings in full. A GitHub Sync repository keeps only the trigger's ID, so the cron or interval and the time zone have to come from the Pipedream UI. When the schedule isn't in the input, Workflow Exit sets the Schedule Trigger to every hour and adds a checklist item to enter the real one. The GitHub Sync guide lists what else the YAML leaves out.

The free migration report lists every schedule in your export with its cron expression or interval, and flags workflows whose schedule isn't in the input. It runs in your browser. For the rest of the move, see the Pipedream to n8n guide, or compare plans for the automatic conversion.