I use HomeAssistant automations for all my home stuff, it has an official easy to add Node Red integration available. I played with it a little in the past but didn’t really see any value for me at the time. Now I’m looking to set up a new automation tool that’s not necessarily hardware/home type stuff, moreso the kind of thing you might use IFTTT for, but I want to self host. so for example scraping a webpage, extracting the content of an article, sending to an AI API for summary, then outputting as RSS. I was thinking about setting up n8n, but I wanted to see if maybe the HA Node Red would be just as good (I think it’s a fork right?). That way I don’t need to set up a new VM or anything plus it’ll be already integrated into my backups and proxy etc as part of HA.
So has anyone used both and could compare?
The HA Nodered add-on works very well, make sure you install the Nodered companion from HACS if you want full functionality though, especially if you use the HA dashboard, it makes adding custom buttons and sensors that are backed with Nodered super easy.
I use it to manually implement controls and feedback for devices that have no official integration, or have poor integrations. You can do a lot with the simple modules and visual coding, but the real power comes with the function nodes where you can write your own code and make it as complex as you need.