Count List Items

Count the number of items in a list

What does this node do?

The Count List Items node counts the number of items in a list and returns the total as a single value.

Common uses:

• Check list size before a Loop node
• Validate data completeness (e.g., ensure enough results were fetched)
• Conditional branching based on item count

Quick setup

Configuration

This node has no custom parameters. Only the standard Name and Description fields are available.

Input

Output

A single count value representing the number of items in the list.

{
  "count": "12"
}

Examples

Count articles from a database

graph LR
    A[Notion Database Reader] --> B[Count List Items]
    B --> C[LLM: Summarize results]

Use the count to inform an LLM how many articles were retrieved, so it can adapt its summary accordingly.

Branch based on count

graph LR
    A[API Connector] --> B[Count List Items]
    B --> C{Conditional}
    C -->|count > 0| D[Process results]
    C -->|count = 0| E[Fail: No results]

Check whether the API returned any results before processing them.

Best practices

• Validate before looping. Use Count List Items before a Loop node to check that the list is not empty, avoiding unnecessary iterations.
• Combine with Conditional. Route your workflow based on the count value to handle empty lists, single-item lists, or large lists differently.

Common issues

Input is not recognized as a list

The list input must be a valid JSON array (e.g., ["a", "b", "c"]). If you pass a plain string or an object, the node may not count correctly. Make sure the upstream node outputs a proper list format.

Count is 0 when I expect items

Check that the upstream node actually produced output. Connect a Merge or LLM node to inspect the raw data. An empty array [] or a failed upstream node will both result in a count of 0.

Related nodes