✓ Tested firsthand by Shinya, solo operator

Activepieces Review (2026): AI Chat Tested (Sep 26)

Verdict: Building by hand was fast and the free tier held up better than Make's. The AI Chat we couldn't find on Sep 7 now exists and built a working-looking flow from one sentence, but our free credits hit zero during that one run and its first test email had the title and link swapped.

We signed up for Activepieces’ free plan (confirmed on its own official pricing page: “Free forever, no card”) and built the same real task we tested against Make and n8n: watch this site’s own RSS feed and email us when a new item appears.

Update, September 26: the Chat feature now exists, and we tested it

On September 7 we could not find Activepieces’ “Chat to automation” anywhere in the product (that original finding is kept below, unchanged). On September 26 a promotional email from Activepieces said Chat was live. We did not take the email’s word for it: we logged in ourselves and looked.

The left sidebar now has a Chat entry, and the credit box at the bottom read “1,000 credits, 0% used, Resets on Oct 7, 2026”. On September 7 our notes recorded a free allowance of 100 credits per day, so either the plan or the way it is displayed has changed. We haven’t checked which.

Activepieces sidebar with a new Chat entry above MCP, Explore and Impact, and a credit box reading 1,000 credits, 0% used, resets on Oct 7, 2026

We gave Chat the same task as the other tools, in one sentence: “When a new post appears in an RSS feed (solostacklab.net/rss.xml), send me a Gmail notification.” What we saw, in order:

It planned two steps (RSS trigger, Gmail send) and asked which Gmail account to use, offering an existing Gmail connection on the account.
The credit box read “0 credits, 100% used” with an Upgrade plan button when we looked at the sidebar while Chat was still waiting for our answer about the Gmail account, before the flow was finished. The box had read 1,000 and 0% before we sent the prompt. We don’t know what a normal Chat request costs, and we ran only one.

Activepieces sidebar showing 0 credits, 100% used, an Upgrade plan button, and Resets on Oct 7, 2026

It kept building anyway. Nothing blocked the run at zero credits. It built the flow, validated the config, and asked permission to run a live test. We pressed Run.
The email that arrived had the fields swapped. The subject was “New post: My First Blog Post”. In the body, “Title:” was empty and “Link:” held the post title. The item was a sample the assistant made up, not a real post from our feed.

A test email from Chat's flow: subject 'New post: My First Blog Post', body 'New post published on solostacklab.net:' then an empty 'Title:' line and 'Link: My First Blog Post'

Chat noticed the swap itself. It said the raw payload showed the title and link values in the wrong order and that it would fix it, then proposed a second live test.

Chat's progress log saying the Gmail send succeeded and a real email was delivered, but the title and link values were swapped in the body, and it would fix that

We never saw the fix work. The second Run prompt disappeared after a long “Thought for 11 minutes” step, and no second email arrived. Chat’s final message said “Your automation is live!” while an Enable button was still showing above it, and the composer said “You’ve reached your credits limit.”

Chat's final message saying the automation is live, with an Enable button still visible above it and a red banner reading You've reached your credits limit

We then opened the flow in the builder. It showed the RSS trigger pointed at solostacklab.net/rss.xml, as we had asked, and a flow toggle that looked switched on even though we had never pressed Enable. The Gmail step’s settings panel was blank, including after a page reload and after opening Edit flow, so we could not check whether the swap was really fixed. The Runs list said “No runs found”. We switched the flow off.

Activepieces builder for the flow 'RSS Feed - Gmail Notification' with the trigger set up and the Send Gmail Notification step's settings panel completely blank

What this does and doesn’t show. Chat exists, and it turned one sentence into a two-step flow that used our real feed URL. In our single run the free credits ran out, the one email that arrived had Title and Link swapped, and the claimed fix was never verified. We did not test it against a real new post, and we don’t know whether the blank settings panel is a product bug or something about our session. Our September 7 statement that building and testing in the manual editor used 0 credits was about hand-built steps; we did not re-test that.

Building it: fast, and it actually worked

(Tested September 7.)

Building it: fast, and it actually worked

Adding the RSS Feed trigger and pointing it at solostacklab.net/rss.xml worked on the first test - it immediately pulled the most recently published article (title, link, and date fields all populated correctly).

Connecting Gmail as the action step surfaced something worth naming upfront: Activepieces’ default OAuth request asked for four scopes at once - gmail.send, gmail.readonly, gmail.compose, and email.

Activepieces' Gmail connection dialog with the Permissions section expanded, showing four requested OAuth scopes: gmail.send, gmail.readonly, gmail.compose, and email

That’s broader than what Make requested by default in our earlier test - the minimal “send” scope, which caused a silent failure (a scenario that reported “completed” while the email never actually sent, traced back to a missing OAuth permission). We ran into no equivalent problem here: with the read/compose/send scopes granted upfront, the connection worked cleanly.

The test actually matched reality

We filled in Subject and Body using the RSS trigger’s Title and Link fields, then ran “Test Step.” It reported “Tested Successfully” - and this time, unlike Make’s misleading “completed” status, that was true. The email actually arrived, with the article’s real title as the subject line and the real URL in the body. The step’s output included a genuine Gmail API response: a real message ID, thread ID, and the labels UNREAD, SENT, INBOX.

Activepieces builder showing the Send Email step's Gmail API output (a real message ID, thread ID, and SENT/INBOX labels) alongside the account's credit panel showing 100 credits with 0% used

The same screenshot also shows something useful for anyone testing on the free tier: building and testing steps in the editor consumed 0 of the account’s 100 daily credits. Credits are apparently only spent on live, published flow runs - not on anything done while building. That’s a meaningfully different shape from Make’s and n8n’s free tiers, where the trigger’s own polling interval is what burns through the free allowance even before you publish anything.

September 7: the feature we went looking for and couldn’t find

This section is our original finding and was accurate on September 7. It is out of date: see the September 26 update above.

n8n’s standout feature in our earlier test was its AI assistant building an entire workflow from one plain- English sentence. Activepieces’ own pricing page lists “Chat to automation” as included in the Free plan, and its documentation describes a “Build with Chat” feature (“Open Chat in the sidebar and describe what you want in plain language”) - labeled Beta.

We looked for it directly: not in the left sidebar (Explore, Impact, MCP, Projects, Platform Admin - all present, no Chat), not in the trigger-search results, and the in-app global search for “chat” returned this:

Activepieces' in-app global search for the term 'chat' returning 'No results found'

No results found. We can’t run the direct n8n-style comparison we planned, because the feature it would have compared against doesn’t appear to exist yet in the live product, despite being listed on the pricing page and documented as a real (if Beta) feature. Worth checking again on a future visit - a Beta feature still rolling out is a different situation than a paywalled one - but as of this test, it’s marketed, not shipped.

Affiliate program

We checked Activepieces’ pricing page and homepage for a public affiliate or referral program. We found none - no per-sale commission program exists that we could locate or apply to.

Bottom line

For the actual job - watching a feed and sending a notification - Activepieces was fast to set up by hand (September 7), the default Gmail scope avoided the exact silent-failure trap Make fell into, and building in the manual editor cost no credits. The AI Chat that would make it a rival to n8n’s assistant now exists (September 26) and produced a plausible two-step flow from one sentence, but in our one run it used up the free credits, its first test email had Title and Link swapped, and we couldn’t confirm the fix. If you want a sentence-to-workflow builder, n8n’s version was the one we saw work end to end. See our Make vs n8n vs Activepieces benchmark for all three tools compared side by side on this same task, or the Make vs n8n comparison for just the original two.