What's the Difference Between Node-RED and FlowFuse

FlowFuse is an industrial data platform built on Node-RED. Many Fortune 500 manufacturers and Industrial IoT companies use it to run mission-critical operations where downtime is not an option.

If you're hearing about FlowFuse for the first time, you might wonder: "If it's built on Node-RED, what makes it different?"

This article answers that question. You'll learn what FlowFuse adds to Node-RED, whether it competes with Node-RED, and how to decide which platform is right for you.

Where Node-RED Came From

To understand what FlowFuse adds, it helps to first look at Node-RED itself.

In 2013, Nick O'Leary (CTO and Founder of FlowFuse) and Dave Conway-Jones at IBM identified a problem: connecting devices, APIs, and services required hundreds of lines of code for tasks that should be straightforward. Their solution was to make programming visual. Drag nodes, draw connections, deploy your logic.

Engineers who understood systems but couldn't code could suddenly build applications. Tasks that took weeks were completed in hours. Node-RED runs on laptops, Raspberry Pis, factory floor gateways, and enterprise servers. The community has built thousands of nodes for most scenarios you'll encounter.

For small projects, prototypes, and learning, Node-RED provides what you need without overhead.

When Limitations Surface

Your Node-RED flow works. It monitors equipment, processes data, and displays dashboards. Then the question arises: 'Can we deploy this across all 50 of our factories efficiently, without wasting time or money?

That question exposes the limitations of standalone Node-RED:

You need to deploy to 50 sites across three continents without manual setup at each location. Five engineers need to work on improvements without conflicts. You need alerts when any instance goes down because downtime stops production and costs money. Your security team requires SSO integration, role-based access control, and audit trails. You need to push updates to all sites at once, not travel to each location over weeks. When someone deploys a breaking change on Friday afternoon, you need to roll it back in seconds.

This is where Node-RED ends and FlowFuse begins.

Node-RED gives you the tools to build. FlowFuse provides the infrastructure to deploy, manage, and scale what you've built.

What FlowFuse Adds

FlowFuse doesn't replace Node-RED. You use the same visual editor, nodes, and flows. FlowFuse adds the operational layer that transforms Node-RED from a development tool into a production platform.

Security and Compliance

Standard Node-RED leaves authentication to you—typically basic auth or custom middleware. For personal projects, this suffices. Production environments controlling industrial systems need more.

FlowFuse provides role-based access control (RBAC) to define who edits flows versus who views them. Single Sign-On via SAML, LDAP, and OIDC integrates with your existing identity systems. Audit logs capture every deployment with details on who made changes and when. Database credentials and API tokens are managed through encrypted secrets storage, keeping them out of flow exports and version control.

For supply chain security, FlowFuse generates a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) listing every node and dependency across your instances. Security teams can scan for vulnerabilities and track what needs updating.

Team Collaboration and Version Control

Node-RED was built for individual developers. When two people edit the same instance, the last save wins. No version history exists. No way to review changes before deployment. No rollback option.

FlowFuse enables multi-user teams working on shared projects with proper permissions. Every deployment creates a snapshot—a complete record of your flows at that point in time. Compare snapshots to track changes or restore previous versions when deployments break production.

Remote Device Management

Node-RED instances running on edge devices in remote factories, warehouses, or hard-to-reach locations create operational challenges. Troubleshooting means traveling on-site or configuring complex VPN access.

FlowFuse provides centralized management through its Device Agent—a lightweight service installed on remote devices that establishes secure connections back to your FlowFuse instance. From one dashboard, you see and control your entire fleet. Open any device's editor or view its logs through secure tunnels without exposing ports or setting up VPNs. Push updates over-the-air to individual devices or groups.

Deployment Pipelines and Scalability

Standalone Node-RED moves code from development to production through manual export and import. This doesn't scale and introduces errors with each manual step. Managing one instance is simple. Managing hundreds requires standardization.

FlowFuse builds structured deployment into the platform. Create Development, Staging, and Production environments for each project. Promote snapshots between stages with single clicks. Organize devices into groups by location or function, then target updates to specific groups. Deploy to all North American packaging lines while leaving European facilities on their current version. The platform organizes work through teams and projects, giving each group isolated resources while maintaining central oversight.

Observability and Monitoring

Standalone Node-RED displays logs from a single instance. When you're running multiple instances across different locations, you need centralized visibility. Building this yourself means integrating Prometheus, configuring exporters, creating Grafana dashboards, and setting up alerting—weeks of specialized work.

FlowFuse provides centralized observability. View logs from any instance, check audit logs for specific deployments, monitor real-time status showing when each instance was last seen, and track CPU and memory usage across your entire fleet—all from one interface.

Managed Infrastructure

Running Node-RED means managing servers or edge devices, handling installations, planning updates, configuring backups, and preparing disaster recovery. At scale, this becomes a full-time responsibility.

FlowFuse Cloud is fully managed—they handle infrastructure, you build applications. FlowFuse Self-Hosted runs on your infrastructure but manages orchestration, updates, and monitoring. Both options deliver over-the-air updates for Node-RED versions, security patches, and configuration changes without downtime.

Certified Nodes

The Node-RED community has built thousands of nodes covering most use cases. Production environments need assurance about maintenance, security vulnerabilities, and long-term support.

FlowFuse's Certified Nodes program vets community contributions for quality, security, and maintenance. FlowFuse takes ongoing responsibility for certified nodes and accepts certification requests for nodes you need.

Development Acceleration

Node-RED's visual programming is fast, but real-world development has friction points. Complex function nodes and UI templates require time and coding skill. Understanding teammates' flows isn't always straightforward. Building the same patterns across projects becomes repetitive.

FlowFuse's AI Assistant tackles these challenges directly in the editor. Describe your need in plain language—it generates function nodes or UI templates, explains existing flows, writes SQL queries, suggests relevant nodes, and creates documentation. This speeds up experienced developers while making Node-RED accessible to those still learning.

The Blueprint Library provides tested and proven templates for common industrial scenarios—OEE dashboards, Andon systems, operator terminals. Instead of building from scratch, start with working solutions and customize them for your needs.

Team Library enables reusability within your organization. Export a flow to your Team Library once, and it's available across all team instances. Your team maintains consistent patterns without recreating the same work.

Commercial Support

Node-RED's community provides excellent support for learning and troubleshooting through forums and discussions. Production outages costing money per minute require faster resolution and guaranteed response times.

FlowFuse offers commercial support with Service Level Agreements. Work directly with engineers who understand Node-RED internals, have encountered your problems before, and can architect solutions that scale.

Are Node-RED and FlowFuse Competitors?

No. Node-RED and FlowFuse are not competitors—they’re complementary. FlowFuse is built directly on top of Node-RED, and the two projects share deep roots. In fact, FlowFuse employees, including Node-RED’s co-creator Nick O’Leary, are among the most active contributors to Node-RED itself. They review pull requests, write code, run Node-RED Con, and maintain long-term support for the community.

When Node-RED improves, FlowFuse improves too. This is the same dynamic seen in other open-source ecosystems: Linux thrives alongside Red Hat, Kubernetes powers enterprise platforms, and PostgreSQL continues to evolve while vendors provide enterprise features. The open-source project remains free and independent, while the commercial platform adds operational value on top.

FlowFuse also invests back into the ecosystem. A good example is the FlowFuse Dashboard (often called Node-RED Dashboard 2.0), which replaced the deprecated original Node-RED Dashboard. By sponsoring and maintaining this project, FlowFuse ensures the community continues to have a modern, supported visualization tool.

And importantly, your flows remain portable. Anything you build in FlowFuse works in plain Node-RED. There is no vendor lock-in. FlowFuse exists to extend Node-RED, not replace it.

Conclusion

Node-RED is a development tool. FlowFuse is a production platform.

Node-RED lets you build flows. FlowFuse lets you deploy them securely, collaborate, manage them centrally, and scale them across your organization.

FlowFuse takes what you’ve built in Node-RED and makes it production-ready.

Want to See FlowFuse in Action?

This article highlighted the key differences between Node-RED and FlowFuse, but many advanced features and real-world use cases remain to be explored.

Book a demo with our team to see a complete live demo and discover how FlowFuse extends Node-RED for enterprise operations, or start a free trial to experience it yourself.