Node-RED: Low-code programming for event-driven applications

I use nodered daily in my home automations, has been absolutely rock solid for my use case.

But who ordered the Node-RED???

It does (everything is saved as json), but it's a bit of a hassle. Scripts are saved to a single line, so you really need a plugin that breaks them up. It's really pretty silly that isn't the default.

The other huge PITA is that touching a node in the UI causes the json to update even if you didn't do anything, and changes will often cause nodes in the json to reorder. That makes git commits very cluttered.

Merging is also very hit-or-miss and duplicate nodes are common. You can mostly fix this with another plugin that saves flows to individual files instead of one big file (default). As long as you split your flows and subflows up enough, team members will usually not step on each others toes.

I used this at work. Not a fan. If you only touched the system once every 4 months I can see the usefulness- It's easier to see the overall structure than wading through code, particularly if you're a visual person. It makes it relatively easy to pick something up that you have mostly forgotten.

It is a huge PITA if you are trying to build API features quickly with a team. Especially if there's nobody to tell you to use the plugins.

It does. The projects feature has a visual diff editor that makes it very easy to see what is going on, and uses git as a back-end.

It originated in that space, but the ecosystem has taken it in very different directions. It has lower-level abstractions than n8n (which focuses on automating third-party SaaS), but can arguably do the same.

I've used it for an insane amount of things, starting with home automation and telemetry but also fairly sophisticated uses, including:

- Sniffing for multicast streams on a LAN and exposing IPTV set top boxes as HomeKit devices

- Automating image conversion and video transcoding

- Building an RSS aggregation and transformation pipeline that does translations, scraping, etc.

- Building a simple GUI for managing backup snapshots and batch file copies

- Monitoring Azure deployments (and exposing the data as simple dashboards).

- Doing App store price checks and sending Pushover notifications when an interesting app goes on sale (backed by SQLite).

- An embarrassing number of Slack and Telegram bots for various user groups/events/etc.

As a general rule of thumb, Node-RED can do pretty much any kind of automation you can get a REST API for, and quite often someone out there has already built a module for it.

I think of n8n more along the lines of a graphical workflow/BPM tool for SaaS, but with much less flexibility/ability to go "low level".