Stop guessing which one. Put them side by side.

The grid says what these tools are. This says what builders did about it — one decision per person, changeable whenever you change your mind.

# Tool comparison — pg-boss vs Activepieces vs BullMQ

Source: Kbaise, a directory of tools that work with Lovable projects.
Pick one and tell me why before writing any integration code.

## 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

## BullMQ (bullmq)
- URL: https://bullmq.io
- Category: Automation & background jobs
- Cost: mixed — Core library free and MIT. BullMQ Pro $139/mo or $1,395/year per deployment for orgs under 100 employees; Enterprise and Embedded custom. You supply and pay for your own Redis.
- What it is: The de facto Node.js queue library, MIT-licensed and built on Redis. Priorities, delayed and repeatable jobs, rate limiting, retries with exponential backoff, parent-child flows and sandboxed processors. Bull Board or Taskforce.sh add a dashboard. Pro adds groups, batches and observables.
- Why builders pick it: Zero vendor lock-in and zero per-execution billing: if you already run Redis, background jobs cost nothing but the code you write. The default pick for a long-lived Node service on a VPS, Fly.io or Railway.
- Trap: You own the operations: Redis persistence, memory limits, stalled-job recovery and worker deployment are all yours. It does not suit serverless, because workers must be long-running processes.
- Wiring: npm install bullmq
- Full dossier: /api/public/tools/bullmq

## 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=pg-boss,activepieces,bullmq