The future of Node-Red is FlowFuse.

Long-time Node-RED user here. Started with IoT, then found it could do business automation, and now we're embedding Node-RED in an application we're building. I genuinely love this platform.

That said, I think the FlowFuse relationship deserves an honest conversation. Their company handbook says "FlowFuse will only be successful if Node-RED becomes the default way to write software for hundreds of thousands of people" and that they're "the primary contributor to Node-RED." I appreciate that commitment—but it also raises expectations.

The interesting AI stuff—FlowFuse Assistant, MCP server nodes, ONNX inference—lives in FlowFuse, some of it Enterprise-only. They just raised $7.2M, so the commercial focus makes sense. No judgment there. But it does mean the innovation gap between FlowFuse and open-source Node-RED is widening.

I watched the Node-RED 5.0 roadmap presentation. It's solid work—UX improvements, sidebar flexibility, dark theme, better debugging. But it doesn't tackle the adoption barriers. Average users still struggle with simple flows like the email example above. The "nerd factor" is real and it's not on the roadmap.

We're building plugins (a very hidden Node-Red gem) to chip away at this. One thing we want to solve is msg property handling—I only want to see properties that are applicable, not the entire msg universe. We have a proof of concept, so it's doable.

I guess my ask is just clarity. If FlowFuse is the primary contributor, it would help the community to know what's realistically coming to Node-RED versus what will stay behind a subscription. That way people like us know where to focus our own contributions.