Make and Zapier charge by the task, which means a successful automation becomes a growing bill. Activepieces is the open-source equivalent you host yourself: the same visual builder, 200+ ready integrations, and a cost that does not move when your workflows get busy.
What you get
- A visual builder with 200+ integrations, from Slack and GitHub to Stripe and OpenAI
- A piece SDK, so you can write your own integration when none fits
- Triggers on a schedule, a webhook or on demand
- No per-task billing, and your data stays on your server
Get it running
Give it 2 GB to work with
Activepieces wants around 2 GB of memory and two cores. Pick an offshore VPS with that headroom rather than the smallest plan.
Install it in one click
Install it from the catalog with a hostname such as flows.example.com. That hostname is what upstream services register their webhook callbacks against, so choose one you will keep.
Save the encryption key before anything else
The install generates an encryption key and a session signing secret. Put the encryption key in your password manager immediately: it is what decrypts every credential the platform stores.
Build your first flow
Connect the services you use, pick a trigger, and test with sample data before pointing it at anything that matters.
That key decrypts the stored credentials for every connected service. Change it or lose it and the existing connections become unreadable, which means reconnecting every integration by hand. It also means a backup is only restorable if you kept the key: back it up separately from the server, and treat it as the most important secret in the deployment.
It holds tokens for every service it touches, so it deserves the same care as a password manager: keep it patched, restrict who can reach the builder, and never paste production credentials into a flow you are only experimenting with.
Both are self-hosted, both are free of per-execution pricing, and both run comfortably here. Activepieces leans towards a cleaner low-code builder for business users; n8n leans towards developer flexibility and a larger integration count. Pick by who will maintain the flows.
Upstream services keep calling the URL they registered. Changing the hostname later breaks those registrations, so decide the domain before you connect integrations.
Start now
Spin up an offshore VPS and install Activepieces from the catalog, or read the documentation.