ActivePieces - nocode alternative to Zapier, Make, n8n etc

[Dave Swift]

@marcusquinn hey I know that guy! Thanks for sharing.

[marcusquinn]

@Dave-Swift Great work! Just spotted your Cloudron vid, will give that a watch, too...

[Dave Swift]

@marcusquinn I was just learning about Cloudron when I made this video, and really didn't highlight some of its best features.

I will revisit sometime in 2024 with a better video.

[marcusquinn]

@Dave-Swift Good stuff.

You can trust the auto-DNS stuff, it's been rock-solid for me.

Also, I recommend idrive.com for your offsite backups using the tarball option on the config.

[Dave Swift]

Thank you.

Yes, I'm using auto-dns now and it's great!

I'm using B2 for backups. I will look into idrive though.

[shrey]

Does anyone here have any links to a good comparison between Activepieces and n8n?
Or any insights from first-hand experience of both?

[Dave Swift]

@shrey fundamentally n8n is positioned as "Workflow automation for technical people" and Activepieces more like Zapier, although not as deep at this point.

Activepieces can get "technical". Just throw in a code piece, but overall it's not as daunting for average users.

n8n has been around longer and has more integrations (750+ vs ~150).

[canadaduane]

Cloudron support mentioned here (but not implemented at time of writing):

https://github.com/activepieces/activepieces/issues/1277

[micmc]

@canadaduane One can run it from Easypanel

[canadaduane]

We have an ActivePieces cloudron package working here:

github.com/canadaduane/activepieces-cloudron
https://github.com/halecraft/activepieces-cloudron

As far as I can tell, there is no OIDC setup for the community version of ActivePieces, so no direct integration possibility with Cloudron users.

[marcusquinn]

@canadaduane Nice work! How does it compare to n8n?

[canadaduane]

@marcusquinn So far I've been unimpressed I really wanted to like it because the UI is remarkable. However, they've put a lot of effort into making most of the useful things a "Talk to sales" option--from secrets storage to grouping workflows.

I might also be unfairly evaluating the overall software because my primary use case for ActivePieces was to use OpenRouter, and the OpenRouter node has a bug which prevented me from using it in a workflow.

[marcusquinn]

@canadaduane Oh, yeah, not really in the spirit of open-source.

Interestingly, Hugging Face seems to be making a killing from all they give away for free, all from the enterprise support gigs, so it's definitely possible to be profitable with a give-away model, but you do have to have a path for Enterprise to pay more.

[micmc]

@marcusquinn said in ActivePieces - nocode alternative to Zapier, Make, n8n etc:

@canadaduane Oh, yeah, not really in the spirit of open-source.

Interestingly, Hugging Face seems to be making a killing from all they give away for free, all from the enterprise support gigs, so it's definitely possible to be profitable with a give-away model, but you do have to have a path for Enterprise to pay more.

The FOSS market has changed so much in the last 10 years, newer developers are more in a hurry to make cash, and so they market crippled versions of their software and call it "free open source". Yeah, right...

That's not free open source software, that's called "shareware" an OLD software model of the 1990s and I do not know if any of those shareware whom have become successful with this model, there might be a few exceptions though. On the other many of the real FOSS developers have become pretty much successful and RICH as well.

Too bad, these younger dogs will lose it or have very hard time getting above with this 'attitude' especially has the software industry is becoming extremely and savagely more competitive than ever, and especially as AI has made it easier than never to build software solutions. Agents and GPTs now can replace many of these supposed to be FOSS... some will close soon...

[Grienauer]

As there is already a prepared dockerfile/cloudronmanifest etc … can we haz it in cloudron app store @girish?
n8n is not open source and this may be a really good alternative for some people!

[shrey]

@Grienauer said in ActivePieces - nocode alternative to Zapier, Make, n8n etc:

n8n is not open source and this may be a really good alternative for some people

Although, i'm not really aware about ActivePieces, it's license model appears to be Open Core, and not "Open Source", not much unlike n8n.

Do correct me if i'm wrong or missing anything!

[JOduMonT]

@marcusquinn compare to n8n?

as a long time user and believer of n8n
I recently rediscover ActivePieces
few months, if not years; I tried ActivePieces; and I thought it was just a pale fork/copy of n8n with a limited team that was focusing on Marketing Automation.

I would say now; they definitely differentiate themselves
In ActivePieces: it is easier to do workflow, AI Agent, Authentification, ...
In n8n you can do more and more in-depth; you can connect with more services; transform more datas, ...

At the end I use both;
Start with ActivePieces for simplicity
And when it is not enough I use n8n.