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N8n vs. node-red

daniel-payne-keldan-systems.medium.com

11–20 of 69 posts

Re: N8n vs. node-red

#12
post #7

What is an “antigenic AI” or “antigenic workflow” in this context? It’s used so consistently that I’m not sure if it’s just careless editing or if it’s something new I don’t know about.

I guess it should be "agentic" but it's used so many times it can't really be a typo...

Re: N8n vs. node-red

#13
post #10

It is worth pointing out that both of them are workflow tools first. The AI agent part is expressed though steps where a model is invoked. This opens the door to a number of issues including vulnerabilities. My personal, and my I say biased, opinion is that these tools do not deliver on the agentic promise. AI agents require a completely different approach.

Beginner here, I sort for agree. I think these tools are good to make a few good demos and quickly sketch something but you hit the ceiling soon where every other thing you do needs more work. There a lot of tutorials online plus the promise of AI automation as the next "get rich quick" thing.

I am curious what is a good tool to build agents these days? I am checking out mastra, someone at the cafe told me about Inngest.. wondering what would you use?

Re: N8n vs. node-red

#14
I’m working on a self-hosted node-red-powered desktop app to connect cloud services to local resources and vice versa. Email me if you’d like to participate in the upcoming beta.

Re: N8n vs. node-red

#15
post #5
post #4

It pains me to see all these “node” based automators charging you an arm and a leg. I can’t wait till people see the obvious and just replace them with a few prompts to Claude Code or similar.

I self-host n8n and get a ton of mileage out of it. Doesn't cost me a dime.

Do you use APIs with n8n? Just curious. If you do, then you might want to factor in the cost of using those as well, including privacy implications.

In my limited testing, I found n8n to be heavily focused on cloud API use, from their onboarding quick tutorial to the collection of provided nodes, I found adapting them to strictly local use something of a chore.

Re: N8n vs. node-red

#16
Also very important for a lot of use-cases: Node-RED is open source, but n8n is not.

https://github.com/node-red/node-red/blob/master/LICENSE

https://docs.n8n.io/sustainable-use-license/

We previously looked into integrating n8n but they wanted $50k for a commercial license, which didn’t make sense for us.

Re: N8n vs. node-red

#17
post #8

Isn’t there something more native to the AI landscape? I know both make for excellent all purpose digital glue but would think that’s last resort

There is Langflow: https://www.langflow.org

AI native but doesn't feel production ready, I've kept encountering random bugs. I still use it over n8n for prototyping LLM pipelines quick

Re: N8n vs. node-red

#18
post #10

It is worth pointing out that both of them are workflow tools first. The AI agent part is expressed though steps where a model is invoked. This opens the door to a number of issues including vulnerabilities. My personal, and my I say biased, opinion is that these tools do not deliver on the agentic promise. AI agents require a completely different approach.

Beginner here, I sort for agree. I think these tools are good to make a few good demos and quickly sketch something but you hit the ceiling soon where every other thing you do needs more work. There a lot of tutorials online plus the promise of AI automation as the next "get rich quick" thing. I am curious what is a good tool to build agents these days? I am checking out mastra, someone at the cafe told me about Inng…

Anthropic recommends not using frameworks and simply writing code against the LLM apis, at least to begin with.

https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-effective-age...

Re: N8n vs. node-red

#19
post #7

What is an “antigenic AI” or “antigenic workflow” in this context? It’s used so consistently that I’m not sure if it’s just careless editing or if it’s something new I don’t know about.

It's clearly a consistent typo and was probably part of the prompt used to generate the article.

Re: N8n vs. node-red

#20

Self-hosted vs cloud is the bigger differentiator here.

They both have cloud and self hosting options, I use self-hosted a lot. I find n8n is more suited to tying into cloud services. I found n8n a bit more difficult to setup when i wanted to host things on my file system.

Forgive me, the actual differentiator I meant was actually open source (not source available). Been a while since looked at it and found n8n unusable for our needs without a very expensive site license.
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