[kristopherleads]

Full disclosure, I'm incredibly biased here as I'm a DevRel at FlowFuse, but there's a reason I joined them instead of n8n. On the surface they're comparable, but I think Node-RED (and FlowFuse) is a better solution for a lot of reasons:

First off, Node-RED handles real-time event data much, much better in my experience. Because of where Node-RED came from, there's much better support for IoT, MQTT, Modbus, OPC UA, edge protocols, etc. n8n is much more limited in this regard, and the fact that the Node-RED and FlowFuse community has literally thousands of custom nodes makes the calculus pretty clear.

I also think that FlowFuse/Node-RED has better integration of AI workloads. In theory n8n is designed around AI, but it treats it the same way OpenAI's AgentKit does - as sort of opaque connections. FlowFuse/Node-RED instead treats it as an actual message payload (both in terms of how you connect to the APIs and how you interact with what's generated), so instead of throwing your request into the void and hoping for the best, you can control every minute part of the flow.

That also makes for much more transparent debugging and visual data flow - the whole idea of these low-code environments is to give you the same control as high-code without the headache. Abstracting that away too much gives you less control, which is sort of the antithesis of this approach.

Like I said though, SUPER biased here.

[cap11235]

I'm not legally biased similarly (work in finance), and I prefer NodeRED. To me, the black box thing is very significant in the feel of using the tool. When I work on a N8N workflow, it feels like I'm chaining gmail filters. Where as NodeRED, I can mentally map that better to what is actually being run, and so feels more like using ComfyUI's custom node capability. I feel like N8N wants to be no-code, where as NodeRED is very much low-code and embraces that, which I find to be the right balance for me for control vs convenience.

[kristopherleads]

Yeah, exactly! What's so funny to me is that people who think they want no-code really don't want no-code. Because no-code is built for that - but even novices in coding will really quickly outstrip a no-code native environment, whereas low-code will scale with your learning,

No-code: "I don't need code, this is so easy!" 2 weeks later "I wish I had access to literally any code system to make this work."

Low-code: "I don't need code, this is so easy!" 2 weeks later "Oh awesome I can actually use code here!"