For me node-red is more of an addition to homeassistant. There is node-red-contrib-home-assistant-websocket [1] to let node-red speak with homeassistant, you can watch state changes etc. I use ha for like two years now and at the start there was no inbuild automation-backend like it is now so we did everything with node-red.

https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-contrib-home-assista...

I was thinking about getting started with HA, and then I saw the YAML. Dear God. May just be the ugliest scripting language I've ever seen.

It is possible, and a few years ago seemed quite a trend (just going by /r/homeassistant spectating) - https://github.com/hassio-addons/addon-node-red - but I gather HA's own automation scripting has at least visualisation if not GUI programming now.

IME: For simple automations, HA UI is far easier. For complex ones, if you want a GUI, node-red, if you want to handwrite scripts, HA. If you don’t care it really depends, in some cases coding them is easier, in some cases node-red is easier.

But then this is about Node-Red integrated into HA.

I've settled on homebridge to talk to the Home app on my iPhone (which is where all the automation is done, and then executed on an Apple TV) and a little Node-RED for custom flows.

I have zero YAML to maintain, and I'm happier for it.

They are not comparable because node-red is a generic low-code programming tool while HA is home automation software.

If you mean how they compare when you plug in node-red to HA and use it for automations, rather than use HA's "native" automations... I believe the consensus is that node-red is more user-friendly in that way, and because it can plug to other things on its own it can provide more flexibility. On the other hand, HA has recently worked on the UI of their automations, and it is already pretty good for simple flows. In the end both of these approaches are great, each with its own pros and cons.