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Up to 4 tools, same rows for each: what it is, what it really costs, the trap, and how to wire it up. The URL carries your picks — send it to anyone.
Gumlooppg-bossActivepieces
Quick read
- Free with no card: pg-boss.
| Field | Gumloopgumloop.com | pg-bossgithub.com | Activepiecesactivepieces.com |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | Visual builder designed around AI steps rather than bolted onto a classic automation tool. 300+ connectors, 35+ models including Claude, Gemini and GPT, bring-your-own API keys. Hosts and proxies MCP servers, traces MCP client and server tool calls, and agents self-tune from past runs. | A Node.js job queue that uses Postgres SKIP LOCKED for concurrency instead of Redis. Provides cron-scheduled jobs, deferred and throttled jobs, retries with exponential backoff, job dependencies via completion callbacks, and automatic archiving and pruning of finished jobs. | Open-source Zapier alternative under a true MIT licence. One credit per flow run regardless of how many steps it contains, which makes long workflows cheap. Ships Flows, Agents, Chat, Tables and MCP servers on every tier, and pieces are TypeScript so you can write your own. |
| Category | Automation & background jobs | Automation & background jobs | Automation & background jobs |
| Cost tier | paid | free | mixed |
| Pricing | No free plan, 14-day trial only. Pro $37/mo for 20,000 credits, unlimited seats, unlimited agents, 1 hosted MCP server. Plus an 8% orchestration fee. Enterprise custom. | Free and MIT-licensed, no hosted tier and no per-job billing. Your only cost is whatever your Postgres instance already costs. | Community edition free under MIT with no cap on runs, users or flows. Cloud Free: daily refreshing credits. Plus $16/mo (up to 5 users), Team $166/mo (25 users). Overage $0.007/credit. |
| Why builders pick it | Best fit when the workflow is mostly LLM work such as scraping, extraction, enrichment and summarising, and the API calls are incidental. Unlimited seats on the $37 plan makes it cheap to hand to a whole team. | The zero-new-infrastructure option: if you have Postgres you already have a queue, and jobs can commit in the same transaction as your data, which kills the dual-write bug where the row saves but the job vanishes. | The pick when licence purity matters: MIT lets you embed and resell it, which n8n's fair-code licence forbids. Per-run rather than per-step billing rewards big workflows, and self-hosting has no artificial run cap. |
| Watch out for | An 8% orchestration fee sits on top of model costs even when you bring your own keys, and the old free plan is gone: you now start on a 14-day trial. | Needs a long-running Node process, so it does not work on serverless. Throughput ceiling is your database: fine for thousands of jobs a minute, not hundreds of thousands. | The open-source build excludes Agents, Chat, Projects, API access, SSO and audit logs, so 'MIT licensed' does not mean feature parity with cloud. AI model steps cost 2 to 20 credits unless you bring your own key. |
| How to wire it up | not logged | npm install pg-boss | docker run -p 8080:80 activepieces/activepieces |
| Editor's pick | No | No | No |
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# Tool comparison — Gumloop vs pg-boss vs Activepieces Source: Kbaise, a directory of tools that work with Lovable projects. Pick one and tell me why before writing any integration code. ## Gumloop (gumloop) - URL: https://www.gumloop.com - Category: Automation & background jobs - Cost: paid — No free plan, 14-day trial only. Pro $37/mo for 20,000 credits, unlimited seats, unlimited agents, 1 hosted MCP server. Plus an 8% orchestration fee. Enterprise custom. - What it is: Visual builder designed around AI steps rather than bolted onto a classic automation tool. 300+ connectors, 35+ models including Claude, Gemini and GPT, bring-your-own API keys. Hosts and proxies MCP servers, traces MCP client and server tool calls, and agents self-tune from past runs. - Why builders pick it: Best fit when the workflow is mostly LLM work such as scraping, extraction, enrichment and summarising, and the API calls are incidental. Unlimited seats on the $37 plan makes it cheap to hand to a whole team. - Trap: An 8% orchestration fee sits on top of model costs even when you bring your own keys, and the old free plan is gone: you now start on a 14-day trial. - Full dossier: /api/public/tools/gumloop ## pg-boss (pg-boss) - URL: https://github.com/timgit/pg-boss - Category: Automation & background jobs - Cost: free — Free and MIT-licensed, no hosted tier and no per-job billing. Your only cost is whatever your Postgres instance already costs. - What it is: A Node.js job queue that uses Postgres SKIP LOCKED for concurrency instead of Redis. Provides cron-scheduled jobs, deferred and throttled jobs, retries with exponential backoff, job dependencies via completion callbacks, and automatic archiving and pruning of finished jobs. - Why builders pick it: The zero-new-infrastructure option: if you have Postgres you already have a queue, and jobs can commit in the same transaction as your data, which kills the dual-write bug where the row saves but the job vanishes. - Trap: Needs a long-running Node process, so it does not work on serverless. Throughput ceiling is your database: fine for thousands of jobs a minute, not hundreds of thousands. - Wiring: npm install pg-boss - Full dossier: /api/public/tools/pg-boss ## Activepieces (activepieces) - URL: https://www.activepieces.com - Category: Automation & background jobs - Cost: mixed — Community edition free under MIT with no cap on runs, users or flows. Cloud Free: daily refreshing credits. Plus $16/mo (up to 5 users), Team $166/mo (25 users). Overage $0.007/credit. - What it is: Open-source Zapier alternative under a true MIT licence. One credit per flow run regardless of how many steps it contains, which makes long workflows cheap. Ships Flows, Agents, Chat, Tables and MCP servers on every tier, and pieces are TypeScript so you can write your own. - Why builders pick it: The pick when licence purity matters: MIT lets you embed and resell it, which n8n's fair-code licence forbids. Per-run rather than per-step billing rewards big workflows, and self-hosting has no artificial run cap. - Trap: The open-source build excludes Agents, Chat, Projects, API access, SSO and audit logs, so 'MIT licensed' does not mean feature parity with cloud. AI model steps cost 2 to 20 credits unless you bring your own key. - Wiring: docker run -p 8080:80 activepieces/activepieces - Full dossier: /api/public/tools/activepieces ## Quick read - Free with no card: pg-boss. ## Rules 1. Prefer the free tier when no budget was stated, and say what the ceiling is. 2. Read the full dossier before integrating. 3. Fetch /api/public/models before writing any AI model ID.
Agents can fetch the same thing: GET /api/public/compare?slugs=gumloop,pg-boss,activepieces