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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.
Temporalpg-bossActivepieces
Quick read
- Free with no card: pg-boss.
| Field | Temporaltemporal.io | pg-bossgithub.com | Activepiecesactivepieces.com |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | The heavyweight durable-execution engine: workflows are ordinary code in Go, Java, TypeScript, Python, .NET, PHP or Ruby, and the server replays event history to survive process crashes, deploys and multi-day sleeps. MIT-licensed server, mature SDKs, used for money movement and long-running sagas. | 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 | mixed | free | mixed |
| Pricing | Self-hosted server free under MIT. Cloud gives $1,000 in starting credits; Essentials from $100/mo for 1M actions, Business from $500/mo for 2.5M, Enterprise 10M. Extra actions $50 per million. | 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 | Reach for it when correctness is non-negotiable: payments, provisioning, anything where a dropped job becomes a support ticket. A workflow can sleep for 30 days and wake up with its local variables intact. | 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 | Steep learning curve: determinism constraints, workflow versioning and worker fleets are real engineering work. Self-hosting means running Cassandra or Postgres plus Elasticsearch, and Cloud starts at $100/mo once the credits run out. | 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 | brew install temporal && temporal server start-dev | npm install pg-boss | docker run -p 8080:80 activepieces/activepieces |
| Editor's pick | No | No | No |
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# Tool comparison — Temporal 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. ## Temporal (temporal) - URL: https://temporal.io - Category: Automation & background jobs - Cost: mixed — Self-hosted server free under MIT. Cloud gives $1,000 in starting credits; Essentials from $100/mo for 1M actions, Business from $500/mo for 2.5M, Enterprise 10M. Extra actions $50 per million. - What it is: The heavyweight durable-execution engine: workflows are ordinary code in Go, Java, TypeScript, Python, .NET, PHP or Ruby, and the server replays event history to survive process crashes, deploys and multi-day sleeps. MIT-licensed server, mature SDKs, used for money movement and long-running sagas. - Why builders pick it: Reach for it when correctness is non-negotiable: payments, provisioning, anything where a dropped job becomes a support ticket. A workflow can sleep for 30 days and wake up with its local variables intact. - Trap: Steep learning curve: determinism constraints, workflow versioning and worker fleets are real engineering work. Self-hosting means running Cassandra or Postgres plus Elasticsearch, and Cloud starts at $100/mo once the credits run out. - Wiring: brew install temporal && temporal server start-dev - Full dossier: /api/public/tools/temporal ## 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=temporal,pg-boss,activepieces