Activepieces vs n8n for agencies: what client work actually costs

This question comes up once an agency has more than two or three clients and starts feeling the operational cost of one shared instance. Both tools are automation engines, but the comparison agencies actually need isn't 'which has more integrations' — it's 'which one lets me isolate and bill per client without a five-figure line item.' Here is what each one charges, checked against both pricing pages.

What n8n charges for multi-client work

n8n is self-hostable for free, but that free tier is licensed for internal business use — running automations for your own company, not hosting the tool on behalf of clients. Once you want to run n8n commercially for clients, the nearest legal self-host option is n8n Business at €667/mo, and even at that price you get six projects — not per-client accounts, not client billing, six projects. n8n Cloud's Starter and Pro tiers (€20 and €50/mo) are priced for a single team running its own automations; neither addresses multi-tenancy at all.

n8n also has no real agency channel. Its Expert Partner Program is a closed pilot with a waiting list, not accepting applicants as of this writing. The public Experts directory lists enterprise systems integrators, not agencies our size. The only open door is a 30% cloud-referral affiliate programme — refer someone to n8n Cloud, don't run their automations yourself.

What Activepieces charges

Activepieces prices in four tiers: Free ($0), Plus ($16/mo), Team ($166/mo for 25 users), and Embed (custom, from $36,000/yr minimum). An Ultimate tier at custom pricing sits between Team and Embed.

• Team, $166/mo: unlimited separate projects — real per-client isolation — but no white-label. Clients see Activepieces branding.
• Ultimate, custom pricing: adds white-label branding on top of isolation.
• Embed, from $36,000/yr: full white-label, the tier built for platforms reselling automation as their own product.
• Usage on Team and below runs on a credit meter at roughly $0.007 per run.

That last line is the one agencies miss reading the marketing page. $166/mo buys isolated client projects, but not a client-facing brand, and every run still draws down a credit meter — the same metered-execution model that pushed a lot of this crowd off Zapier and Make in the first place.

The gap that actually decides it

Read the two pricing pages side by side and the real number isn't $166 or €667 — it's $36,000/yr, because that's what it costs to get isolation, white-label, and executions that don't feel metered in one package. n8n doesn't publish an equivalent white-label embed tier at all; Activepieces at least names its number. Team gives you isolation without a brand. Embed gives you a brand at enterprise pricing. Neither vendor has a tier built for a five-to-fifteen-client agency, and n8n has no open partner channel to build one through.

Where Tenvik fits

Disclosure: we're building Tenvik, a control-plane platform for agencies running n8n for multiple clients, so we are not a neutral party here — check the figures above yourself before taking our framing on trust.

Tenvik prices per client dock rather than per credit or per seat: $39/mo for up to three docks — white-label, the credential vault, template propagation with dry-run, and unlimited executions with no compute meter included from the first tier — $99/mo for up to ten (adds client billing, versioning and rollback, and per-dock cost telemetry), $249/mo for up to thirty. Client-count pricing is deliberate: neither Activepieces nor n8n can copy it without cutting into their own credit or licence revenue, which is the actual gap in this category right now, not a feature gap.