I’ve been using home assistant for a while now. Initially the automation options were a little underwhelming so I moved to nodered for automations. While I probably could have done it natively, node-red felt more capable and friendly.
Over the past few releases it feels like the native automations are coming together. The creation of the mode was when I first thought maybe it’s time to re-evaluate if nodered is still the right option.
Has anyone thought the same recently or even tried moving back?
For what it’s worth, my two favourite features of nodered are the subflows and the graphical view of automations. I’m pretty sure I can do anything in nodered with a big enough flow. I absolutely hate having to format content to pass into the next node.
The native automations are absolutely more capable now.
But I have not yet had any use of it. Maybe it’s my lack of imagination.
I use both at the moment and I believe I will always do that.
Some automations are simpler to do in native and some more complex that use looping and/or multiple inputs and outputs are done in node red.
As most others have said, I also use native automations and NodeRed side-by-side. As an experiment when 0.115 came out, I decided to port some of my larger flows over to HA native automations. Needless to say, it didn’t go well. So now, I keep things like HA startup/shutdown and button remote automations in HA and everything else is in NodeRed.
I’ve tried about one month ago.
And I gave up after only 5 or 6 hours. I’ve spent so much time to learn Node Red and optimize all my flows that I think I’m not yet ready to spent 20 ou 30 hours to barely be able to do the same with native HA automotions, and probably 20 more hours to optimize everything.
I’ve decided to stay on Node Red for a few months, let time to HA native automotion to improve, and then I maybe I will have more time to try it again.
NodeRed was one of the major reasons I came to HA last year from my previous French automation system.
NodeRed and its HA integraton are almost perfect. It just has 2 small drawbacks for me : one is the fact that it’s one more ‘external’ plugin adding one more connexion layer/latency/potentiel issue…, and the second one is that entities Id are not automatically updated when you change it from HA.
I think it’s really great to be able to use both, at the sme time or not, taking adavantge of each automation system.
In my opinion, the only reason you should use node red is if you think in flowcharts better than if/then logic. In the end, they all do the same thing, just use what suits you better.
Ha is 100% capable of getting extremely complex. You just have to have the mindset for it. I have appdeamon apps that are no longer needed because native HA can do anything.
In my use case, I use NodeRed for much more than just home automation. It handles all of the log shipping on all of the servers I have, it replaces filebot for my media management, and a bunch of work tasks (AWS EC2 management, continuous integration monitoring, etc).
There’s just so much functionality that NodeRed offers outside of the HA realm, that using it solely for automation tasks seems like a waste to me.
I only use native HA, never felt the need to even try another route.
I’d say my system was a bit bigger than average and my complexity about the same.
I’ve seen some of your (codeinprogress) automations and they are about normal for me.
Like Petro says, there’s not a lot you can’t do with a simple if then else.
The options offered up by choice make it even simpler to do with less supporting scripts.
With just over 1100 entities my system runs pretty light : -
MUTT! I haven’t seen you in ages! Hope you’re doing well sir.
Yeah, I do agree with you and @petro about the fact that native automations can do everything NodeRed can do automation-wise. I think my biggest point of contention about using native automations is the way they are laid out in the UI. When I first started with HA (pre-automation UI), I had over 250 automations and managing them was a PAIN. Debugging is difficult to do in the native system (imho). Organizing automations in the UI is pretty much still non-existant (and I know that the editor is still a WIP and, as a developer myself, I know that these things take time to grow).
I’m not in any way bashing native automations (I hope no one has taken my comments that way), but for my use cases, NodeRed makes things a LOT easier.
Same. I keep my HA instance limited to JUST HA (Core). No addons and no other things running on that server (aside from Glances and Netdata). I’m old-school in that I like having all my systems separate. My NodeRed instances all run on their own hardware.
You’ve been here long enough and said enough stuff so that what you wrote was taken in that spirit.
We are just providing Byron some food for thought… We can all twist his arm so far up his back that it’ll probably come off. - But at the end of the day he’ll probably just do what feels most comfortable to him. And that’s how it should be.
