n8n RSS Feed Change Monitor with Apify Feed Contract Monitor

Monitor RSS/Atom/JSON feed changes every hour—without reprocessing everything

This n8n workflow uses the Apify Feed Contract Monitor to continuously check your RSS/Atom/JSON feed, store a persistent baseline state, and output only new or changed feed items for downstream automation.

What this workflow does

• Runs hourly using an n8n schedule trigger to keep feed monitoring up to date.
• Configures feed settings (feed URL, state namespace, first-run mode, and a per-run item limit) via a set step.
• Fetches and compares feed content by calling the Apify Feed Contract Monitor actor through the community node n8n-nodes-feed-contract-monitor.
• Maintains a persistent baseline so the workflow can detect changes over time.
• Filters results to keep only records that represent new or changed feed items, discarding unchanged entries.

Use cases

• SaaS operators tracking product updates or changelogs from an RSS feed and triggering alerts only when something actually changes.
• Automation engineers building reliable pipelines that react to new announcements, without wasting processing time on repeated items.
• n8n users integrating feed monitoring into broader workflows such as indexing, moderation, or notifications based on detected changes.

Technical details

• Node types used: set, code, sticky note, schedule trigger, and n8n-nodes-feed-contract-monitor (Apify Feed Contract Monitor).
• Apify integration: configure an Apify API credential for the Feed Contract Monitor node.
• First run setup: set first-run mode to baseline_only to establish the initial baseline before enabling the hourly schedule.
• Outputs both feed-health records and changed-item records, then filters to retain only new/changed items.