Modernization survey results now available

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Earlier this year we ran a community survey focussed on modernizing the overall Node-RED user experience.

I shared some of the results in my Node-RED Con talk last month, but we've now made the full results available to the community.

The write-up of the results is live on the project blog here:

You'll find a link from there to the full results that you can explore for yourself.

We'll have more news later this week on how we're turning these results into a roadmap for Node-RED 5.0.

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We can see that version control appears again as the #1 blocker with 40% for production-users versus only 16% for hobbyists.

There is a tool that I created which allows - visual comparison - of deployed flow and editor flow --> flowcompare. Basically it solves the "blue dot" & "red deploy button" - what did I change situation.

A more extensive visual control solution are the flowhub nodes which manage flow storage to github. The workflow FlowHub supports is storing individual flows to a github repository and being able to compare those flows - visually inside NR - before pushing updates to github. It also allows for multiple repositories so that - for example - I can store flows to private repositories and others to a public repositories.

I recently demonstrated how I use this by creating a VDA 5050 simulation flow combining Erlang-Red and Node-RED. In that example, I also demonstrated how I can share flows between the two NR instances using FlowHub - thus I can share flows across multiple instances of NR or Erlang-Red or Erlang-Red and Node-RED.

Debugging flows is the top frustration for hobbyists at 27%, while production-users seem more comfortable here at 20%,

I would suggest trying clamp mode to see message flows in live without deploying or adding debug nodes. This is part of the introspection package.

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FYI the survey results website: The State of Node-RED's User Experience 2025 - Survey Results has been updated as well to link back to the survey results blogpost!