Node Red tilt to AI?

[alex88]

Hi All,

I've been busy playing with n8n and started to wonder whether nodered might tilt more towards AI.

I love nodered and from using n8n see so many weaknesses in the product that nodered could do better at, but it's focus on AI nodes makes it easier to use to automate many things with LLMs.

[marcus-j-davies]

Hi @alex88

A topic has been in deep discussion already.

Is the way you you are using NR changing in the age of AI

No so much. I use Gemini AI Studio somewhat to write code for using various npm modules in the function node. I cannot say that it is better than looking at the documentation or on stackexchange. It makes simple errors doing basic tasks on hugely popular npm modules like tesseract.js (50K downloads per day). This means I have to read the documentation or paste into VS code so I can use its autosense completion to find and fix the error. Man I really wish Node-RED could do autosense completion. …

[joepavitt]

@alex88

but it's focus on AI nodes makes it easier to use to automate many things with LLMs.

n8n is definitely better suited currently for Agentic AI workflows. The way they construct flows, particular with agents supporting multiple inputs makes it visually very easy to construct unique behaviours for their agents.

With that in mind though, Node-RED does support this too, but there are no "official" nodes in core Node-RED and it depends on community contribution to community nodes, but there are OpenAI and other LLM-based nodes out there.

FlowFuse are also growing their "AI in Node-RED" offering. We already have Blueprints for building LLM & RAG Agents in Node-RED:

• OpenAI (LLM) Chat Agent • FlowFuse
• OpenAI RAG Chat Agent • FlowFuse

We are also about to release some MCP nodes too, which will make building MCP Servers to integrate with anything super-easy (here's a little preview which retrieves data from FlowFuse's Tables offering for work orders):

In the next month or so too, there should be some native Machine Vision models for depth estimation, object detection and image classification coming as well, this is a quick screengrab from a video that @Steve-Mcl shared internally with us last week:

Then, FlowFuse are also improving the in-editor experience for Node-RED with AI too with the FlowFuse Assistant which includes co-pilot within the function/template editors, flow explainers, flow autocomplete and lots more.

[alex88]

Thank you. I will reply on the other thread to keep it all in one place.

[Steve-Mcl]

For continuity: Is the way you you are using NR changing in the age of AI - #7 by alex88