# Node-RED

13 Hacker News commenters recommended Node-RED and 3 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 9 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** People recommend Node-RED as a visual flow-based tool for IoT, home automation and data flows, with many integrations, though critics say it lacks visibility into what happened.

## Why people recommend it

- Home automation and IoT integrations (5 comments): "I've been using NodeRED + zigbee2mqtt/zwavejs for my locally controlled home automation to great effect." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50227136)) "the nodered on pi controlling a squadron of esp32 workers over wifi/mqtt was really nice" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47759434)) "there are actually a ton of unique IoT integrations that node-red has" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46245821))
- Visual flow-based programming (4 comments): "I recently have gotten into the "drag and drop" forms of programming like Node-RED and n8n." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45870148)) "Node-RED is a good example of visual programming based on flow based programming paradigm" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48669779)) "What revived me was doing visual coding using Node-RED" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49598321))
- Version 5 editor improvements (2 comments): "Node-RED is also a good alternative, especially the new version 5 (for those who might have tried it before and didn’t like the editor)." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48927797)) "I'm using it as my daily driver and I have to say - huge improvements all around!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48547423))
- Handles complicated flows well (2 comments): "Great little architecture and having it highly automated allowed me to focus on the parts that were less easily controlled for." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47753397)) "Nodered is handy for when things get complicated" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47082609))

## What people warn about

- Edge cases and nondeterministic behavior (2 comments): "Node Red scripts that he's spent about a year fiddling with and still keeps finding edge cases where things go wrong" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46941777)) "why would you put controller logic into a non-deterministic environment like node-red?" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49108967))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Sim](https://hackerapproved.com/p/sim.md): 7 recommend
- [Graph Compose](https://hackerapproved.com/p/graph-compose.md): 7 recommend
- [Pipedream](https://hackerapproved.com/p/pipedream.md): 5 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Node-RED", https://hackerapproved.com/p/node-red/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).