Activepieces Hosting on Your Own VPS, Pre-Installed

Activepieces is an open-source automation tool: you build flows from a trigger (a webhook, a schedule, a new row, a new email) and a chain of steps, with branches, loops, code and AI steps, using a library of ready-made integrations it calls pieces. Choose it with a plan, pay, and we build the VPS (KVM, NVMe, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS) and install it in about five minutes after boot. You get:

• Activepieces 0.92.3, Community Edition, with PostgreSQL 17 (with the pgvector extension) and Redis for the job queue. Redis writes its queue to disk, so scheduled and paused runs survive a restart.
• An HTTPS address like yourname-x7k2.devoster.app with a Let's Encrypt certificate, so webhook triggers work from the first minute.
• Your owner account already created with your Devoster account email and a generated password you can reveal in the dashboard. Public sign-up is closed after that: anyone else needs an invitation from you, so the sign-up screen can't be claimed by a stranger.
• A dashboard panel for the app: open it, reveal or reset the owner password, restart, stop or start it, read its logs, run an update and connect your own domain.

Activepieces is free to run this way; you pay only the VPS plan, monthly or yearly at 10% off. It is the same server you would get without the app: full root over SSH, free nightly backups kept for 3 days plus one snapshot, a dedicated IPv4, 1 Gbps with unlimited bandwidth and DDoS protection. Every app that installs this way is on the One-Click Apps page.

Hosted automation services bill by tasks, operations or active flows, so the price moves as your automations get busier. On a VPS the bill is the plan: a flow that runs every minute costs the same as one that runs once a day, until you need a bigger server.

Among self-hosted tools, the licence is the main reason people pick Activepieces. Its Community Edition is released under the MIT licence, one of the most permissive open-source licences: you may use it commercially, modify it and run automations for clients. That is different from n8n, whose Sustainable Use License limits use to your own internal business purposes. This is a plain-language summary, not legal advice.

What the Community Edition doesn't include is just as clear. Activepieces keeps its enterprise features in a separately licensed part of the code, and those are not enabled on this install. In practice that means:

• Forms you publish show "Powered by Activepieces". Removing it (white-labelling) is a paid feature.
• Single sign-on and the other team-management extras of the paid editions are not part of it.

If the builder, the pieces and the flows are what you need, the Community Edition covers them.

Code steps are one of Activepieces' strengths: you write TypeScript or JavaScript inside a flow and can pull in npm packages. On this install they run unsandboxed, inside the Activepieces container, with the app's own permissions. That is what upstream recommends for a single-owner install, and it is why npm packages work, but it has a consequence worth stating plainly:

• Whoever can build flows can run code as the app. A code step can reach what Activepieces can reach, including its database and the connections stored in it.
• So invite only people you trust as flow builders. For one owner or a small team that already shares the accounts the flows connect to, this is fine. It is not a setup for letting strangers or untrusted clients write flows on your server.

Two more things to know about the pieces. The piece catalog syncs from Activepieces' cloud, so new and updated pieces show up without an app update. And for some pieces, the OAuth sign-in (the "connect your Google account" button, for example) goes through Activepieces' own OAuth apps. Your server is self-hosted, but it isn't sealed off from Activepieces' services.

Activepieces' own guidance for a production server is 2 vCPUs and 4 GB of RAM, which is our Starter plan. Each flow run executes in its own Node.js process, so what drives memory is how many runs overlap and how heavy their code steps are. The install sizes the number of runs that execute at the same time to the plan's RAM: two on Micro, three on Starter and Basic, five on Advanced.

You can upgrade a Devoster VPS to a larger plan from the panel later, and the app picks up the new concurrency with its next update. Start where the table puts you.

To move Activepieces to flows.example.com, add the domain in the dashboard and create a CNAME record pointing at your devoster.app name (or, for a root domain, an A record to the server's IP). The panel checks the DNS, issues the certificate and switches Activepieces' public URL, which webhook and OAuth redirect URLs are built from. Re-copy webhook URLs into the services that call them after the switch, and reconnect any OAuth connection that complains.

Email works differently on this server. Outbound mail ports are blocked by default on Devoster VPS plans, which affects Activepieces in two ways:

• No password-reset email. If you forget the owner password, reset it from the Devoster dashboard instead.
• The SMTP "Send Email" piece won't connect. Send mail through pieces that use an HTTPS API, such as Gmail, SendGrid or Mailgun, which work normally. If you need SMTP, use an external email provider whose submission port can be opened on request.

Slack, Telegram, Discord and webhook steps are unaffected. Our VPS hardening checklist is worth an hour too: Activepieces sits behind HTTPS with a login, but SSH and anything else you install are yours to secure.

Activepieces releases often, and upgrades run database migrations. On the one-click install we take care of that: we test each new version before offering it, then apply it in a maintenance hour you choose, or right away when you press Update now. A snapshot of the whole VPS is taken before every update, and if Activepieces doesn't come back healthy the server is rolled back to it automatically. Auto-update can be switched off.

The server itself is unmanaged. You have root, and its security, what you connect Activepieces to and the flows you build are yours. We don't help with building flows; Activepieces' documentation and community cover that. Nightly backups (3 days) and your snapshot slot cover the whole machine; export flows you could not rebuild and keep them off the server too.

When is this the wrong choice? If you need single sign-on or white-labelling, you need a paid Activepieces plan either way. If you want to split the app and its workers across several servers, a plain Devoster VPS with your own setup fits better. And if your data must stay outside the US, note the servers are in Utah.