[knolleary]

Node-RED project lead here :wave:

As ever, I think each has its strengths and weaknesses, but I know which one I prefer...

In terms of 'out of the box' experience, I do agree there is space for some improved Node-RED nodes to support some of these workflows. There certainly are nodes in the community to help, but there's space for more. And that's an area I think gives Node-RED an advantage; the open source nature that allows anyone to build in the gaps of what's already there. Node-RED provides plenty of low-level building blocks to connect with pretty much anything - but having higher level abstraction nodes is needed to make it more accessible.

It's also an area we're looking at in my day job (FlowFuse CTO) where we provide a commercial platform built around Node-RED.

[daniel-payne]

Here i was trying to show the strengths of both, unfortunately Agentic AI is graph based and node-red is flow based. Apples and Oranges.

As a hack, I have got LangGraph working inside of a node-red flow. I will write it up as a medium article in the next few days, as it might be of help to others. It's very codey.

I think production engineers will have to master the Langchain ecosystem, when we creating mission critical AI based systems. I think node-red has good nodes in place to record decisions and data as part of an AI ethics program.

Flowise have a good set of nodes around langchain, but I bet it was a massive and expensive undertaking to build.

Also Dashboard 2 is something n8n is sorely missing and is needed to monotor live systems.

[rcarmo]

You can navigate a graph just fine if you set up flows to iterate through it, just like state machines (there are a few patterns to do that in Node-RED with branching and iteration). It’s perfectly possible.

However, there is something you mention that I think is important - dashboard 2 is still missing critical functionality—for instance, I cannot set it up as the “/“ (homepage) URL in an instance (there’s a lingering bug for that for around a year now) and it is still far from being as well integrated as the original.

[rcarmo]

Hey Nick! (See my other comment someplace, which is very closely aligned to your point)

The bit I want to surface in this thread is that there is actually a lot that can be done with sub-flows and custom functions alone (even without added third-party modules) - I built my own library of AI/“agentic” subflows with raw HTTP request nodes and a simple convention for passing LLM context in payloads so I’m a bit biased here, but overall I find Node-RED superior in the amount of control I have over how data is handled.

(Also, I am running Node-RED in bun rather than NodeJS and it is way more efficient, although that means I can’t rely on some third-party nodes, but that is another story)