Hello, ive been using nodered for a while, and it seems to have many benefits over n8n. Its more feature rich, and is fully free/libre software unlike n8n(which restricts freedom 0, via its "faircode" licence).
I have done workflow automation for my dad for business operations(he is not as technical as me so we needed something easy), we tried nodered, but the fact that there was not nodes for most of the services he uses was a drawback. So we used n8n, which works fine, but of course is not as powerful (at least in my opinion).
I think the only thing nodered is lacking is integrations for services like active campaign, mautic, etc.
Of course i realise there can also be more of a learning curb as well but thats not really as big a deal, as its mostly due to just being different.
If nodered had 200 integrations for these services(like n8n), i think it would grow even further in popularity, and would likely receive more contributions and funding due to corporate interest. Not to say its not already popular.
I realise there is integrations for SQL, Email, MQTT, and most base protocols the internet uses, so you can use them to interact with those APIs, but its not as easy to do that way as with n8n.
I would love for Core devs to get behind this.
What do you think about this?
And how might we achieve this goal?
The problem you have is that, like many open source projects, unless someone contributes or pays, the amount of dev time is always going to be limited.
One of the great things about Node-RED is the ability to really easily create new contributed nodes to get things done. But of course, someone has to write them and then maintain them.
What I think would be a lot more interesting would be if you chose one of the integrations you've mentioned and you raised a separate thread to see if people were interested in a conversation. It is quite possible that Node-RED doesn't need an explicit node in order to be able to talk to some of these services. Just as I showed someone yesterday with Google Calendar access, I took the Google example and showed how it could be used with 3 simple flows, not actually needing a separate contributed node. Not saying that is necessarily the best way, at least not always, but Node-RED excels at integration and different protocols.
n8n is a lot younger, i realise they have a different business model, but seem to put focus on creating integrations, and its gained more attention because of it i think, and contributions.
nodered has a mature ecosystem and good design(arguably better design than n8n).
Even contributed flows instead of nodes would be useful as well, does not just need to be nodes.
For businesses which setup their own db, use SQL instead of using something like Knack, its not much of a limitation, but for small to medium businesses it applies more i think.
I recognise that there is limited resources, but i think more focus on this would probably increase investment in nodered itself, which would improve it overall.
Thats my opinion.
I am thinking in the future on implementing a node for nodered, maybe mautic. But more of this would be good.
As I say, if you were to choose something that you thought important to a business like yours and raise that as a specific thread, maybe someone already has something that they've not yet shared or maybe they would be interested in a collaboration. That might get more conversations rolling.
Once you know how maybe. I don't have the first idea what a new node consists of, nor how to go about it.
Perhaps there is a step by step tutorial somewhere for beginners, assuming no knowledge of github (or whatever else is involved)?
Edit - I have not searched very diligently, just not stumbled over such a tutorial.
Yes, it covers more than what most IOT projects would usually use, and has dashboard for easy web app setup.
I especially like the python function node as i am familear with python, most workflow automation systems don't have that ability. The options for programmers is vast.
But in the area of integrations of services like Knack,Active Campaign,etc which small to medium bussinesses tend to use(or just less technical people). i think that demographic nodered does not cater too very much(in my opinion). and its a big demographic.
Of course, I didn't mean to imply that everyone should learn that, sorry.
Though a good point about a beginners guide. Actually, I imagine one or more of the YouTuber's has probably done that, I haven't checked.
The point I was making is that it is relatively simple to do - it doesn't take a lot of work to do a simple integration. But it does take work. And there needs to be enough interest in order to do it.
There are 10's of thousands of cloud services and even someone as big as Microsoft only have a few thousand listed on their low-code solutions catalogue.
Firstly yea it is chicken and egg, i would say its a snowball affect, its just a flake and slowly building up, and eventually it grows bigger exponentially, but of course it take lot of time initially.
About information sharing,
Perhapse one solutions is to make it easier for people to share their flows, and maybe incentivise it more.
Couple of hundred would probably do, I still dont get how n8n is able to maintain all those integrations as its only been around for a very short time.
nodered's repo was made at 2013-09-05T13:30:47Z
n8n's repo was made at 2019-06-22T09:24:21Z
Its interesting.
Free/Libre software like Mautic might be a good start and be easier to implement most likely.
Just speaking for myself, and apologies for being off-topic, I would like to know how to do it. At the moment I don't have a particular application in mind.
I would start with a trivial operation - a node to increment msg.payload maybe.
n8n is a company with full time developers paid to work on it and to develop the features needed to drive their own business and commercial interests.
Node-RED is an open-source community that is largely reliant on contributions from the community and those companies that chose to adopt Node-RED for their own purposes.
One of the reasons I started FlowForge (https://flowforge.com) was to build a company that is able to more directly invest in the core of Node-RED for the benefit of the wider community. But that doesn't change things overnight and we have lots to do.
Because they charge for services is why. Node-RED has always been developed on a different basis. Though Nick's new venture may change some aspects of development over time.
Sorry, Nick, I missed your post before posting this.
Sorry, didn't mean to be dismissive, it is a good thought. Why don't you start a separate thread and we can get some folk to contribute links or we can realise that something else needs doing
