Activepieces vs Gumloop
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Editorial assessmentActivepieces compared with Gumloop
Gumloop is AI-first and hosted only, built around LLM-heavy pipelines for go-to-market work with a polished interface and no self-hosting option. Activepieces covers the same AI workflows through agents but is fundamentally an integration platform with AI added, which makes it stronger on deterministic app-to-app plumbing and on data residency. If the workload is mostly model calls over scraped and enriched data, Gumloop is the faster path; if it is mostly moving records between systems with some AI steps, Activepieces is the more durable base.
Choose Activepieces if
Technically comfortable small teams and GTM engineers who have outgrown per-task automation pricing and want either a cheap credit-metered cloud or a self-hosted instance they fully control, with an escape hatch into TypeScript when a native integration does not exist.
Choose Gumloop if
Operations, revenue operations, and growth people who understand a process well enough to encode it but do not want to write and host code: Gumloop gives them agents with real tool access, a shared knowledge base, and per-run cost visibility, with no seat charge as the rest of the team starts using what they built.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Activepieces | Gumloop |
|---|---|---|
| Category | GTM Engineering | GTM Engineering |
| Starting price | Free on cloud (daily credit allowance, one user) or free forever self-hosted; Plus from $16 per month billed yearly (free plan available) | $37 per month (Pro, 20,000 credits included) (14 days trial) |
| Pricing model | Two tracks. The hosted cloud is metered in credits: one credit per flow run regardless of how many steps it contains, one per agentic action, and two to twenty per AI model call unless you bring your own model key. Seats are included up to a per-tier cap and charged beyond it. The self-hosted Community Edition is MIT licensed and free with no credit meter or run cap, but excludes agents, chat, projects, API access, and the team and admin features; paid self-hosted licenses restore those. | Usage-based. Seats are unlimited on every plan and the meter is credits, where one credit is $0.005. Credits are consumed by model chat and reasoning tokens, tool calls (minimum one credit per successful call), compute time at roughly five credits per session-minute, and an 8 percent orchestration fee on top of those. Workflow runs bill the same way. Bring-your-own-key removes token charges but raises the orchestration fee on agent chats. |
| Free plan | Cloud Free: one user, a daily credit allowance that resets each day, with flows, agents, chat, tables, MCPs, and API access included. Self-hosted Community Edition: unlimited runs, no credit meter, but no agents, chat, projects, or API access. | No |
| Free trial | Free plan rather than a time-limited trial; the open-source edition can be run indefinitely | 14 days on Pro |
| Best for | Technically comfortable small teams and GTM engineers who have outgrown per-task automation pricing and want either a cheap credit-metered cloud or a self-hosted instance they fully control, with an escape hatch into TypeScript when a native integration does not exist. | Operations, revenue operations, and growth people who understand a process well enough to encode it but do not want to write and host code: Gumloop gives them agents with real tool access, a shared knowledge base, and per-run cost visibility, with no seat charge as the rest of the team starts using what they built. |
| Setup time | Cloud signup to first working flow is under an hour. Self-hosting is roughly 15 to 30 minutes on a fresh VPS with Docker and Postgres for someone who has deployed a Compose stack before, plus the usual work of a domain, TLS, and SMTP configuration for invitations and alerts. | A first useful agent in an afternoon: connect two or three apps, write instructions, test in the canvas, then invite it into a Slack channel. A production process with triggers, error handling, and evaluations is more like a week of part-time work, most of which is spent discovering the edge cases in your own data. |
| Learning curve | Low for linear flows; the builder is deliberately close to Zapier in feel. The real curve is data mapping across steps and knowing when to stop fighting the visual layer and write a code step. Writing a custom piece assumes working TypeScript and npm familiarity, and the documentation for it is thinner than the task deserves. | Low to start and moderate to do well. The canvas and the agent editor are approachable, but the skills that separate a demo from something dependable are prompt discipline, knowing when to force a step into a deterministic workflow instead of trusting the model, and reading the run log to find which node is consuming the credits. |
| Platforms | Web application (cloud), Self-hosted via Docker Compose, Kubernetes and Helm, One-click deploys on common VPS and PaaS providers | Web application, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Email (per-agent inbox), Hosted agent pages with custom domains, Chrome extension, CLI |
| Compliance | SOC 2 Type II, GDPR | SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, Zero data retention options with model providers |
| Founded | 2022 | 2023 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California | San Francisco, California (founded in Vancouver, Canada) |
| Ownership | Independent, venture-backed (Y Combinator W2023) | Independent, venture-backed (legal entity AgentHub Inc.) |
Strengths and limitations
Activepieces
Strengths
- Genuinely open source under MIT, not source-available, so self-hosting carries no licensing ambiguity for commercial use.
- Credits meter flow runs rather than individual steps, which removes the incentive to keep automations artificially short.
- The TypeScript pieces framework makes writing a custom integration a normal development task rather than a platform hack.
- Flows, AI agents, a built-in table store, and MCP tool serving share one connection layer, so credentials are configured once.
Limitations
- The Community Edition withholds agents, chat, projects, API access, SSO, roles, and audit logs, so self-hosting for free means a materially smaller product than the cloud.
- Piece quality is uneven: the library is broad because it is community-contributed, and depth of action coverage and maintenance vary considerably between popular and obscure integrations.
- Documentation thins out fast beyond the common path; writing custom pieces, complex data mapping, and production scaling are under-documented relative to the effort they take.
- The Node.js execution engine is not competitive on compute-heavy work with scripting platforms built on faster runtimes.
Gumloop
Strengths
- Unlimited seats on every plan, so adoption across a team costs nothing extra and the builder is not rationing access.
- Genuinely non-technical building surface that still reaches real systems, with roughly 300 connectors and first-class MCP support.
- Per-node credit and runtime reporting in the run log, which is better cost instrumentation than most automation platforms offer.
- Company Brain with permission-preserving indexing, which is what makes a shared Slack agent safe rather than a data leak waiting to happen.
Limitations
- The free plan was discontinued; evaluation is now a 14-day trial on a paid plan, which is a real barrier for a cautious small buyer.
- Credit consumption is hard to predict before you build. Users report a workflow going from one or two credits per run to dozens after a small change, and credits do not roll over on Pro.
- The 8 percent orchestration fee sits on top of model and tool costs, and rises on bring-your-own-key agent chats, so BYOK is less of a savings lever than it first appears.
- Pro concurrency is a wall, not a queue: 5 simultaneous workflow runs, then HTTP 429. Queuing is an Enterprise feature, which pushes any genuinely high-volume webhook use case upmarket.
Pricing compared
Activepieces
Two tracks. The hosted cloud is metered in credits: one credit per flow run regardless of how many steps it contains, one per agentic action, and two to twenty per AI model call unless you bring your own model key. Seats are included up to a per-tier cap and charged beyond it. The self-hosted Community Edition is MIT licensed and free with no credit meter or run cap, but excludes agents, chat, projects, API access, and the team and admin features; paid self-hosted licenses restore those.
- Free (cloud)$0
- Plus$16
- Team$166
- UltimateCustom
- Community Edition (self-hosted)$0
Judged per dollar, Activepieces is among the strongest offers in automation, provided you fit one of its two shapes. If you self-host, the marginal cost of an additional flow or an additional million runs is the hardware, which is a fundamentally better curve than any per-task vendor can offer; the bill for a busy small business is a VPS, not a subscription. If you use the cloud, one credit per run rather than per step means complex flows stop being punished, and $16 a month buys a workload that would cost several times that on task-metered competitors. What you give up is polish and breadth: fewer templates, community-maintained pieces of uneven depth, and thinner documentation once you leave the common path. The Team tier at $166 is the least compelling point in the range, since it is a ten-times step for projects, SSO, and roles that many small teams do not need.
Gumloop
Usage-based. Seats are unlimited on every plan and the meter is credits, where one credit is $0.005. Credits are consumed by model chat and reasoning tokens, tool calls (minimum one credit per successful call), compute time at roughly five credits per session-minute, and an 8 percent orchestration fee on top of those. Workflow runs bill the same way. Bring-your-own-key removes token charges but raises the orchestration fee on agent chats.
- ProFrom $37
- EnterpriseCustom
The unlimited-seat model is the genuinely unusual part. A ten-person team pays the same $37 base as one person, which inverts the economics of nearly every competing tool and makes Gumloop cheap for the pattern it is designed around: one builder, many users. The offsetting risk is that the credit meter is opaque until you have run real work through it, and the removal of the free plan means you now discover your actual cost during a 14-day paid trial rather than over a leisurely month on a free tier. For a small business, the honest budgeting approach is to assume the $37 covers exploration and light production only, and to instrument the run log early so you know which agent is eating the month.
Editorial verdict on each
Activepieces
Activepieces is the cleanest answer available to a specific frustration: automation priced per task, running on someone else's server, with no way to write a real integration when one is missing. It is MIT licensed rather than source-available, meters cloud usage per run rather than per step, and self-hosts on a Docker stack that a small business can afford to run indefinitely. The pieces framework turns a missing integration from a dead end into a day of TypeScript. The costs are equally clear. The free self-hosted edition is deliberately smaller than the cloud, holding back agents, projects, and API access, so open source here does not mean feature-complete. Piece quality varies because the library is community-built, documentation thins out exactly where self-hosting teams need it most, and the price step from $16 to $166 leaves no middle ground for a team that wants SSO without 25 seats. Buy it if someone on the team is comfortable with Docker and TypeScript, and the automation volume is high enough that per-task billing has become an engineering problem. Stay on a hosted, task-metered tool if it is not.
Read the full Activepieces profileGumloop
Gumloop is the most credible no-code agent platform for a go-to-market team that has processes worth encoding and nobody free to write code. The unlimited-seat model is the standout commercial decision: one person builds, the whole company uses it, and the base subscription does not move. Company Brain with permission-aware indexing, skills that give the prompt layer a home, and evaluations that grade output are the parts competitors have not matched. The reasons for caution are commercial rather than technical. The free plan is gone, so evaluation now happens inside a 14-day paid trial; credits are hard to forecast, do not roll over, and carry an orchestration fee on top; and the governance features a compliance review will ask about live entirely on Enterprise. Buy it if the work you want automated genuinely needs judgment, budget for usage rather than a flat subscription, and instrument the run log from day one so you find out which agent is expensive before the invoice does.
Read the full Gumloop profileActivepieces profile last reviewed 2026-08-23; Gumloop last reviewed 2026-08-23. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.