N8n vs. node-red • Hacker News Board

Re: N8n vs. node-red

#31

Post by bojan » Thu, Jul 17, 2025, 1:48 PM UTC

salviati wrote: post #30

bearjaws wrote: post #26

Neither please god. We used Node-Red at a previous job for integrating some third party software, total disaster, from upgrading, using JSON for code reviews, to overall performance. Its a fun toy, leave it at that.

I'd be happy to take your experience into account in case I'll need to vouch this in the future. But unfortunately it's not very clear what shortcomings of Node-Red were a problem for you. Could you rephrase your experience, focusing on what you believe Node-Red does wrong?

I'm also interested in this. My workplace is looking into this, and my intuition says no, but I'd really like to hear other people's experiences, both positive and negative ones.

Re: N8n vs. node-red

#32

Post by DonHopkins » Thu, Jul 17, 2025, 1:54 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: 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.

Obviously it's the nemesis of the heavy metal band Progenic.

https://www.metal-archives.com/bands/Progenic/122279

Re: N8n vs. node-red

#33

Post by aldousd666 » Thu, Jul 17, 2025, 1:56 PM UTC

guhcampos wrote: post #25

I understand nothing of this article. What does it mean by "n8n" lacks a UI? All it has is a UI, what use cases does the UI not handle? The writing is very poor and does not make sense at all.

agreed, I'm running it on my localhost right now and it's got a full WYSIWYG interface. This article is slop

Re: N8n vs. node-red

#34

Post by aldousd666 » Thu, Jul 17, 2025, 1:57 PM UTC

throwaway7783 wrote: post #29

monatron wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Doesn't cost a dime to host n8n? Or is this only for personal use?

It doesn't cost a dime to host n8n. They even have a docker image prebuilt that you can just pull and play.

Re: N8n vs. node-red

#35

Post by barbazoo » Thu, Jul 17, 2025, 1:58 PM UTC

guhcampos wrote: post #25

I understand nothing of this article. What does it mean by "n8n" lacks a UI? All it has is a UI, what use cases does the UI not handle? The writing is very poor and does not make sense at all.

Well not “all” it also has the permanently running workflow engine bit that actually runs the workflows in the background. But yeah same here, very confused about the write up.

Re: N8n vs. node-red

#36

Post by barbazoo » Thu, Jul 17, 2025, 1:58 PM UTC

aldousd666 wrote: post #33

guhcampos wrote: post #25

I understand nothing of this article. What does it mean by "n8n" lacks a UI? All it has is a UI, what use cases does the UI not handle? The writing is very poor and does not make sense at all.

agreed, I'm running it on my localhost right now and it's got a full WYSIWYG interface. This article is slop

How did they write their workflows then, in json?

Re: N8n vs. node-red

#37

Post by aldousd666 » Thu, Jul 17, 2025, 1:59 PM UTC

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #6

lvl155 wrote: 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.

What n8n gives is a nice gui. They’re going after the people who use Zapier, not the people who use Claude code

true. but the whole point of n8n is that it can call other endpoints. you can use claude code to build those endpoints and just have n8n orchestrate calls

Re: N8n vs. node-red

#38

Post by khurs » Thu, Jul 17, 2025, 2:00 PM UTC

qsort wrote: post #9

Do these tools still make sense when you can have an agent-type setup like Claude Code or any of the competitors do that kind of low level work? I know that vibe coding isn't quite there yet, but I wonder if low-code solutions like those are really saving any time at this point. What's the advantage if not velocity?

Haven't used them myself.

But I think it depends on how many built in integrations there are? As if you have a battle tested integration already in place may save writing a script/api.

Also junior devs could be allocated on to it.

Re: N8n vs. node-red

#39

Post by joloooo » Thu, Jul 17, 2025, 2:07 PM UTC

Would this be something that Activepieces or Kestra could also do?

https://github.com/activepieces/activepieces https://github.com/kestra-io/kestra

Re: N8n vs. node-red

#40

Post by daniel-payne » Thu, Jul 17, 2025, 2:19 PM UTC

guhcampos wrote: post #25

I understand nothing of this article. What does it mean by "n8n" lacks a UI? All it has is a UI, what use cases does the UI not handle? The writing is very poor and does not make sense at all.

Thanks for reading my article.

Sorry, I should have made myself clearer, I did not mean the UI that you use to create flows with, both systems are drag and drop flow creators. The issues I come across is visualizing what is going on inside of a system once it is created and up and running. I normally would like to have a dashboard showing me what is going on inside of a system. The node-red comes with Dashboard 2 ( a vue based set of components) for displaying whats going on in a live system. But I could not find a similar tool for n8n.

But then n8n has things I am missing from node-red, especially wrappers around LangGraph. I have to code those manually, in a node-red function node and it's not a simple task :(