I've just poked at them, but my impression was that Node Red much more capable.
IIRC one of my issues with n8n was the lack of streaming ability, which kills it for large datasets.
n8n is made so that you can set it up and give your staff access and they can manage their own workflows (like "when a customer opens a support ticket, update their Salesforce record to increment the number of tickets they have opened").
It's clearly aimed at non technical users being able to develop their own solutions to problems (for better or for worse), more so than Windmill which is made for developers to solve their own problems or develop solutions that non-technical people can use. Node Red if I remember correctly is more heavily weighted toward real time events for dev (especially hardware/IoT dev) use than "let the support team manage their own workflows for routing customer complaints"
The library just uses the streaming API[3] of NodeJS - effectively converting lines of CSV (for example) into individual messages that flow through NodeRED.
NodeRED isn't great for handling large messages but perfect for directing many small messages.
[1] https://flows.nodered.org/node/@gregoriusrippenstein/node-re...
[2] https://flowhub.org/f/c520d9da20ad7f1d
[3] https://nodejs.org/dist/latest-v18.x/docs/api/stream.html
n8n is far more high level with google sheet nodes communicating with postgres database nodes. There is far less ability to do manipulate the data being passed around - as many said Zapier-like.
NodeRED is used for home automation and talking to devices that are connected to the network and providing nice dashboards of things happening. Another big use case is IIoT. So it less focussed on integration of SaaS services and more on devices integration and inter-communication between devices.
Plus NodeRED has a great collection[1] of third party nodes that can help in connecting to new devices. Installing nodes is based on npm but is completely automated.
You can go a _long_ way with the split/join nodes and a little ingenuity to work around any issues with streaming.
And their Launch HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34723989
Custom apps aside, how do Zapier and n8n compare in your experience?
Founder of Windmill here. This is not too surprising although we are working on it by leveraging AI and just better DX/design. Pleasing devs in the most demanding orgs and the ever-changing expectations is challenging by itself. Pleasing both devs AND non-technical user is a monumental task that we are now giving more attention to by focusing on 2 aspects:
- A better DX/UX that does not sacrifice power-user capabilities but has a less step learning-curve and more intuitiveness to it. That is mostly about good design and hard work. We are taking inspiration from the best and on the intuitiveness, we've learned a lot from n8n and other leaders in the space.
- leveraging AI capabilities in a state-of-the-art way to have the best models generate the code for non-technical users. That is basically just adopting the best practices inspired by cursor such as great auto-completion, great inline code-gen, excellent semantic search.
We can't even have the "be notified on workflow error" feature without being a paid customer, at this stage, it's just a joke to call it open-source
The one frustration we have with n8n is trying to create custom "apps" (triggers or destinations for workflows). It's clear that the custom apps are an afterthought and have gone through multiple iterations of "here's the best way to do it", and you end up having to just keep trying until you get it to do what you want. Annoyingly, there's no way to manage custom apps in the interface itself - you have to create a Javascript module and then inject it into a .npm directory somewhere inside of the applications Docker container, which just doesn't feel very "professional".
If n8n would add some kind of admin interface for managing custom apps - especially just supporting basic use cases like specifying a REST API as a reusable custom app - it would be great, but still has a ways to go in terms of features (like better user permissions management as part of the lackluster SSO) before it's truly going to be an enterprise grade solution.
That said, we tried Windmill first and while it was cool for the devs who were able to see the vision, the non-technical users hated it and have heavily praised n8n once we created a custom app to let them integrate with our system.
Overall I would say n8n is worth trying if you need something like this, but expect to do some tinkering if you go beyond what it does out of the box.