It originated in that space, but the ecosystem has taken it in very different directions. It has lower-level abstractions than n8n (which focuses on automating third-party SaaS), but can arguably do the same.

I've used it for an insane amount of things, starting with home automation and telemetry but also fairly sophisticated uses, including:

- Sniffing for multicast streams on a LAN and exposing IPTV set top boxes as HomeKit devices

- Automating image conversion and video transcoding

- Building an RSS aggregation and transformation pipeline that does translations, scraping, etc.

- Building a simple GUI for managing backup snapshots and batch file copies

- Monitoring Azure deployments (and exposing the data as simple dashboards).

- Doing App store price checks and sending Pushover notifications when an interesting app goes on sale (backed by SQLite).

- An embarrassing number of Slack and Telegram bots for various user groups/events/etc.

As a general rule of thumb, Node-RED can do pretty much any kind of automation you can get a REST API for, and quite often someone out there has already built a module for it.

I think of n8n more along the lines of a graphical workflow/BPM tool for SaaS, but with much less flexibility/ability to go "low level".

Node-RED is free software, n8n is not.