Activepieces vs n8n

When to pick Activepieces

• Your workflows fire constantly: per-active-flow billing means run volume never touches the invoice, so a flow triggering ten thousand times a month costs the same $5 as one triggering once — the opposite of n8n’s metered executions.
• You need a permissive licence: the Activepieces core is MIT, so you can modify it, ship it inside your own product, and redistribute it without negotiating a commercial agreement the way n8n’s fair-code licence requires.
• You want a managed plan without a subscription floor: the cloud gives 10 active flows free before charging anything, whereas n8n’s cheapest cloud plan starts at €20/month regardless of how little you run.

When to pick n8n

• Your logic outgrows a visual canvas — n8n ships native JavaScript and Python code nodes inline, with step-by-step execution tracing, replay, and mock data for debugging, rather than pushing custom logic into separately built pieces.
• You need the wider connector catalogue: 500+ pre-built nodes cover more long-tail SaaS tools, and the gap matters most for the obscure app that would otherwise cost you a custom integration.
• You want to know the enterprise bill before you call sales: n8n publishes €667/month for Business, while Activepieces quotes its Ultimate tier privately on an annual contract with no public figure.

Bottom line

Run the billing-unit maths first, because it decides more of these evaluations than feature lists do. Activepieces charges per active flow with unlimited runs, so it gets structurally cheaper as trigger volume rises, and its free tier — 10 cloud flows, or an uncapped self-hosted Community Edition — makes the entry cost genuinely zero. n8n meters executions, which suits lower-volume workflows that are individually complex, and it pays for that with real depth: inline JavaScript and Python, execution replay, a CLI, and a larger node catalogue. The licence is the other fork in the road. Activepieces’ MIT core lets you embed it in a commercial product; n8n’s fair-code licence explicitly does not without a separate agreement, which rules it out for anyone building automation into a product they sell. Both self-host free, so the honest test is to model your own trigger volume against $5-per-flow versus €20-for-2,500-executions before committing.