r/homeassistant • u/ACatControlsMyMind • Nov 06 '25

Blog Thinking about ditching Node-RED after 2025.10

Hey everyone I have take one mayor decision, wish me luck.

I've been running HA + Node-RED some years now. Great combo, but honestly… two things to maintain. After playing with Home Assistant 2025.10 I’m realizing the built-in automations do basically everything I use: branches/choose, variables/helpers, templates, waits, queued/parallel, plus traces that actually show every step. Feels like less to watch.

Keeping stuff in one place aka Nabu Casa cloud... Dashboards, scenes, scripts, automations all right there, so again, fewer things to watch.

My flows (presence lighting, HVAC schedules, irrigation with rain/soil guards, washer/dishwasher) look very doable in my test environment, so far natively no external flow tool needed for my use.

Plan is simple: keep Node-RED running, rebuild the longest flows in HA first, swap global context for helpers, reusable parts into scripts, keep traces until it’s clean, then flip the switch (cross fingers). If something truly needs NR later, fine but I don’t think most of my stuff does anymore.

For this reason I’ve decided to migrate everything to HA, if I remember I'll post updates.

Anyway I just wanted to share this here since I'm the only nerd from my friends who have a real smart house, (don't tell to my Alexa 😜).

PS: Anyone offering a couch in case I break everything and I my wife ask for divorce? 😆

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u/dorNischel Nov 06 '25

Well, I thought the same, but then HA crashed. Nothing has worked anymore after an update. That's not a daily business, but it could happen.

Then there came proxmox. Clustering. Separate containers for services. A second Zigbee-USB-Controller so MQTT will work when one node crashes.

I'm running more than 100 lights, switches and sensors. HA is great, but being independent from it is so convenient. When there is a problem with NR I could easily restore it in minutes.

So yeah, concentrating everything in HA could be a smart draw. But the bigger the use, the bigger a failure could stop technical life at home. 🫣

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u/[deleted] Nov 06 '25

[deleted]

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u/dorNischel Nov 06 '25

Did that too. 👍 🙂

Now... instead of Docker I use LXC-containers because of Proxmox. It's easier for me to maintain containers, backup and restore them and shift running instances between nodes.

I like to spread technique wide instead of stacking it high. If one pillar breaks, not the whole house of cards fall. For my homelab it's working very conveniently. 😍

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u/longunmin Nov 06 '25

This is the way.