Post by David Poole

If you're building AI workflows, you've almost certainly run into n8n. It's become the de facto standard for process automation: it’s powerful, boasts a huge library of integrations, and its flow builder makes complex pipelines surprisingly manageable. But if you're evaluating it for team use, the licensing is worth understanding carefully. n8n's Community Edition is free to self-host, but it's not open source in the OSI sense—it uses a Sustainable Use License, and collaboration features like shared projects, Git version control, SSO, and environments are all gated behind paid plans. And if you want to self-host, run multiple projects, or need log streaming for compliance, it gets pricey fast. That's what got us looking at Activepieces. Activepieces has a genuine MIT-licensed open source core, which is a meaningful distinction if you care about what you can do with the code. For self-hosted deployments, the free Standard tier includes unlimited runs and 10 active flows, with additional flows at $5/month each — considerably more accessible than n8n's paid tiers. That said, the picture isn't entirely simple. Activepieces only allows for one trigger per workflow, and although multiple users can run workflows, only one person has creation and editing permissions. Their self-hosted enterprise edition allows for multiple editors, but requires a separate license not covered by the MIT terms. So neither tool gives you everything for free at scale. We've now deployed Activepieces at Safe Swiss Cloud and are putting it through its paces. Early impressions are good—we’ve installed it on cloud, but it’s also on-prem deployable for our customers, running inside their own network and under their operational control. n8n is still the industry standard in many cases, but Activepieces is proving to be a compelling alternative. Do you have experiences with Activepieces, and if so, how have you found it so far?