I dabbled with home assistant and openhab for a while at home, originally I had planned to monitor some thermometers(not the usual light switches which seemed to be common). I ended up throwing openhab and hass away and is now running nodered together with mqtt. The thermometers are built with arduinos and different temp sensors and posting data to mqtt over wifi. Then nodered catches any writes to the mqtt topics and passes them on to store in tsdb over its rest api. This way, I don't need to mess with the rest api on the thermometers which is very nice.

Since then I added a lot of other things to nodered, I added the coming bus departures, and data from oue heating pump.

Not sure I would use nodered in a business, but if zapier was the option I would perhaps try it. It saves a lot of pipeline for deployment and such which code would need(or at least I would require).

Also, the node red dashboard makes the above even better, I have an android tablet mounted in a frame in the kitchen to show some of the data above.

Well worth a try, I'd say.

I moved all my automation from HA to Node Red about 8 months ago and can't imagine switching back. I had a few advanced automation scripts written in yaml and Jinja2, which were really difficult to get right in the first place, and then annoying to maintain and worse to debug.

Node-Red isn't perfect, but it's far better, in my opinion. Also it's great to be able to watch the automation step through in the UI while debugging and tweaking things.

HA is an excellent hub for getting everything to talk to everything else and their recent updates to the z-wave integration, especially allowing me to name entities in the UI makes it really powerful for me. Their list of hardware and API integrations is mind-blowing to me. I just _really_ don't enjoy the way they went about scripting automation.

Yes. Running in a docker container alongside my HomeAssistant container. Works great and a much improved upgrade over homeassistant’s native YAML. If I knew python, I would probably just use appdaemon instead of nodered tho. Nodered with HomeAssistant has been rock solid for me. HomeAssistant is pretty much now just a state engine and all my automations are in nodered.

I have an instance running on a BeagleBone Black that’s tied into HomeAssistant (which is also set up with HomeKit support, so I can easily surface virtual “accessories” or “sensors” on the Home.app or on the Apple Watch and configure them with visual Node-RED flows.

It’s really quite pleasant to work with.

Yeah It's super easy to install and setup when using hass.io.