Node-RED Community Health

It is often a challenge to measure the health of an open source project, like Node-RED. Individuals can download and use Node-RED without any indication or feedback to their ongoing satisfaction or usage. However, it is still interesting to look at a variety of metrics to understand the size of the Node-RED community.

GitHub Stars

A popular method for demonstrating popularity of an open source project are GitHub stars. Node-RED has over 16K stars and when compared to other low-code platforms on GitHub has a strong showing. FWIW, GitHub stars are open to gaming so it is not a great long-term indicator of community health and engagement.

Node-RED Library

At the core of the Node-RED community is the library of nodes and flows that have been developed by community members. The current library has over 4300 nodes available, some of the more popular nodes are downloaded more than 10K times per week. The large library of community nodes supports a wide range of protocols, data sources, data stores, and much more. This makes Node-RED more relevant and useful to many more potential users.

Node-RED Website Traffic

In the last year, Node-RED has had over 1.9 million unique visitors to the nodered.org website, over 160K on a monthly basis. The most popular pages, after the home page, are the getting started pages. This demonstrates a strong interest in learning more about how to use Node-RED.

NPM Downloads & Docker Pull Requests

Node-RED is installed by lots of people using Docker and NPM. The project averages over 500K/month pull requests from Docker Hub and 100K/month pull requests on NPM.

Node-RED Forums

The Node-RED community forum is the go to place to get community support. It is a very popular community with over 900K page views per month. The amazing thing is that a very large percentage of questions receive replies from other community members. A great sign of a healthy community.

Overall, the Node-RED community is large, healthy and engaged.