[rcarmo]

I have been using both for a number of years. n8n has had a resurgence recently because of its (quite clever) AI integrations (and it has higher level abstractions for doing workflows), but since I want more control I actually do my stuff (including an AÍ news summarizer and a few “agents”) in Node-RED because once you’ve sorted out your own library for things like API calls, memory, storage, etc. (which I did using just sub flows and custom JS inside them) it can be a lot simpler and more straightforward.

I see n8n as more of “citizen developer” tool (less flexibility, more built-in integrations) and Node-RED as an engineering scratchpad where you can literally build anything you want (for instance, it’s been part of my home automation setup for ages, way before Home Assistant became a thing).

I wouldn’t run _any_ of them as part of an enterprise solution, though. Security, IAM/RBAC, auditability and even general reliability would keep me up at night (even considering that Node-RED runs a surprising amount of small scale on-premises industrial automation, that’s typically in isolated networks, so I’m not factoring those in).