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?
n8n has really strange licensing AFAIK which is why I avoided it.
Maybe have a look at: https://github.com/huginn/huginn
Oh sorry I misread your message. Indeed it is an odd one. https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n/blob/master/LICENSE.md
Isn’t it just plain old MIT or have I missed anything?I was initially thinking Huginn, but it doesn’t seem to have as much activity around it. You like it, plenty of flexibility?
I haven’t actually used it (I considered setting it up but I don’t really need it personally).
But it seems sufficiently flexible that it should be possible to easy make your own agents without depending on other people’s contributions? The code-base itself looks actively maintained.
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.
I havent used both, but if you can use python or Js at all, you can put whole code blocks into node red, I have used cgpt to make filters and json parsers for me before. It is quite easy to use in general and handles all my backend piping / logic for HA. I have devices from like 20 different vendors all playing perfect in node red, then HA just shows the nice dashboard essentially.
ActivePieces is MIT licensed, contrary to the restrictive n8n license.
It’s not as mature, but it’s doing it right, it deserves support from the community.
Should someone make a HA integration, it would be awesome.
