#OpenSourceDiscovery 84: Node-RED
Alternative to Zapier
Today I discovered…
Node-RED
A Node.js app for low-code workflow automation. Browser-based flow editor to integrate various devices, api, and services for use cases such as IOT home automation.
💖 What I like about Node-RED:
Highly extensible with support for fundamental actions that can cover almost all the use cases you can think for an automation platform. I could trigger a system command, get or post data to http api, read/write/watch files, push message to different topics of PubSub message broker (MQTT) which other tools/workflow can subscribe to run specific workflow accordingly, etc.
Great community. Lots of community-contributed workflows.
Supports single-board computers such as Raspberry Pi and BeagleBoard. Good support for home automation use cases.
The most flexible OSS license (Apache 2.0) in this category compared to other similar OSS projects
👎 What I dislike about Node-RED:
Took significant time to setup my first practical workflow, it is not so intuitive and has high learning curve for a low-code tool.
I had to get my hands dirty! It has only lower-level integrations that do not enable any of my use-case out of the box. I was expecting that the writing code will be an exception but it seemed norm to me as I had to invest significant time in thinking about how to create the workflow. Even if I tried to do it somehow via the app while avoiding to code, it only felt like writing code via a graphical UI. I wished it had a higher-level of abstraction ensuring easier maintenance of workflow than the code. Having some standard flows in the app could have achieved this goal but I had to move out of the app and research about pre-built flows.
It is a non-trivial task to find, understand and vet the community-contributed flows.
Not made for non-coders which makes not so suitable for cross-functional collaboration
⭐ Ratings and metrics
Based on my experience, I would rate this project as following
Production readiness: 7/10
Docs rating: 6/10
Time to POC(proof of concept): 2 week
Author: Nick O'Leary @knolleary
Demo | Source
🛡 License: Apache-2.0
Tech Stack: Javascript, Node.js🗣️ What people say about Mode-RED around the web
You can also discuss in response to this post on Substack
If you discovered an interesting Open-Source project and want me to feature it in the newsletter, get in touch via the form above. To support this newsletter and Open-Source authors, follow #OpenSourceDiscovery on LinkedIn and Twitter