How is this different from node-red?
Loosely speaking Node-RED has a superset of the functionality this project has, sacrificing customization/generality for simplicity.
Zapier and n8n interface with the user via a catalog model.
Without needing to know what is going on behind the scenes or seeing any code, a person can follow a recipe and bolt together (certain) APIs to achieve business requirements.
The “certain” is an important to note because you will never achieve 100% coverage for your “API glue” for a mid size to large organization “out of the box” with any tool.
That being said, if using a tool like any of the above mentioned as a custom workflow engine (knowing you will be writing software from the onset) or as a solution and not a limiting factor or “silver bullet”, they can be very useful!
Other tools that can achieve similar results (using Directed Acyclic Graphs, where the nodes represent the execution of your code for a desired pre-programmed task) are Airflow, Flink, NiFi, Dagster, Dagobah, Celery, and many more.
You can already see it in the way it describes itself "Flow-based programming for the Internet of Things". So it is "programming" what n8n does not try to be. In Node-Red they give you as a guideline that you should not write high-level nodes if you can write lower-level ones instead (which could build the higher-level one when combined). Which is totally right for programming but not really to allow none coders to automate things. That is also the reason why there are no Asana, Pipedrive, ... nodes in Node-Red. It is simply not what it is made for. It is perfect for IOT applications but not for higher-level automation tasks.
n8n, on the other hand, is probably not the best choice for your IOT application.
So it is simply about using the right tool for the task at hand.