Resources

Short, practical guides for choosing and switching to free tools, plus links to good documentation elsewhere.

Switching guides

How to switch from Zapier to ActivepiecesList your Zaps, recreate each as an Activepieces flow with the same trigger and actions, then dual-run before you disable the Zap.

Stars: how many people have bookmarked the project on GitHub or GitLab. It is a rough signal of popularity, not of quality, and projects hosted on SourceForge, Savannah or Bitbucket have no star count at all.
Last commit: when code was last pushed to the project's repository. A recent date means someone is actively working on it. An old date isn't always bad: some mature tools change slowly.
Licence: the terms you get the software under. Copyleft licences (GPL, AGPL, LGPL, MPL) keep the code open when it's shared; permissive licences (MIT, BSD, Apache) allow almost any use. "Free, proprietary" tools cost nothing but you can't see or change the code, and some limit commercial use.
Not open source: shown when a tool has no public source code, so there is nothing to count.

Start from the job: list the handful of things you actually do in the paid tool every week, and test those first.
Check files in and out: make sure the free tool can open your existing files and export what your colleagues, supervisor or supplier needs.
Check where it runs: Windows, macOS, Linux or the browser, and whether your organisation lets you install it.
Look at activity: the last-commit date and recent releases tell you whether bugs get fixed.
Read the licence: especially for business use: some free proprietary plans are for non-commercial use only.
Trial it on real work: run one real but low-stakes project in both tools and compare the results before switching fully.
Find the help: official documentation, forums and community chat matter more than a feature list when you get stuck.

OSI open source (MIT, Apache, GPL, AGPL): Usually fine to self-host; AGPL/GPL affect distribution of modified versions.
n8n Sustainable Use: Source-available: self-host for internal use is common; embedding as a competing cloud product is restricted.
Fair-code / Commons Clause variants: Read the exact file on GitHub before you build a product on the code.
Managed clouds: n8n Cloud, Prefect Cloud, Temporal Cloud sell convenience — compare task pricing to self-host cost.

Inventory Zaps/scenarios: Export or list every Zap: trigger, steps, volume.
Credentials: Plan how OAuth apps move to the new platform's credential store.
Rebuild high-volume first: The Zaps that burn the most tasks pay back the migration first.
Keep a week of dual-run: Log outputs from old and new paths before cutting over.

n8n Sustainable Use License ↗Official fair-code explanation from n8n.
Activepieces docs ↗Self-hosting and piece development.
Temporal docs ↗Durable execution concepts.
Awesome self-hosted: Automation ↗Community list of self-hosted automation software.

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