Pick by who runs it and how you are billed. Choose a hosted tool (Zapier, Make) if you want the most app connectors and no servers. Choose a self-hostable one (n8n, Activepieces, Kestra) if you want to run it on your own machine, pay for usage rather than per task, or keep data in-house. Within that group, n8n and Activepieces are visual builders, and Kestra is the one to pick for data pipelines and code-first, YAML-defined flows. Read the licence before you commit: only some of these are open source in the strict sense. Prices below were read from vendor pages and GitHub on 2026-11-07.
Zapier: Free plan with 100 tasks a month. Pro starts at $19.99 a month on annual billing ($29.99 billed monthly) for 750 tasks; Team starts at 2,000 tasks for $69 a month on annual billing. Hosted only.
Make: Free plan with 1,000 credits a month. Paid plans are Core, Pro, Teams and Enterprise; we could not read their prices from the pricing page, so check make.com/en/pricing. Hosted only.
n8n: Cloud plans on annual billing are Starter 20 euros a month (2,500 executions), Pro 50 euros (10,000) and Business 667 euros (40,000); the monthly-billing prices did not load. A self-hosted version is on GitHub (209,774 stars) under the Sustainable Use License, which allows internal business use but is not an OSI open source licence.
Activepieces: Free at $0 with 1,000 credits, Plus $20 a month for 10,000 credits, Team $200 a month for 50,000, all with unlimited flows. Code is MIT outside its enterprise directories (25,420 stars). A run costs one credit regardless of step count, and AI steps cost more.
Kestra: Open source edition is free under Apache-2.0 (30,168 stars). Enterprise is an annual per-instance subscription and Kestra Cloud has no published rate; both go through sales.
Related reading: our open source alternatives guide prices Zapier against self-hosted n8n at every task tier and names the licence conditions that decide if you can switch, and best open source AI tools to self-host shows the licence and latest release of the agent and automation projects. Feeding the index from live websites? See the web scraping tools we score, led by Firecrawl.
42 tools, each scored against our published methodologyThere are 42 Automation tools here. 54.8% have a free tier, and the median score is 4.5. Freemium is the most common pricing model at 50.0%.
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