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Comment by knolleary | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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)

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