About ActiveWorkflow
ActiveWorkflow is a self-hosted workflow platform that sits alongside your existing technology stack. It groups business logic for periodic execution, polls resources, and orchestrates event-driven functionality, for example generating a weekly report, checking whether a file has appeared in S3, or triggering an email campaign in response to user behavior.
Workflows are made of agents, which are self-contained services or microservices written in any programming language. The platform connects the agents, provides extensive logging and state management, and offers a base for building scalable systems without vendor lock-in. It is explicitly not a no-code platform, but a full UI lets engineers and other stakeholders manage and monitor workflows.
ActiveWorkflow started as a fork of Huginn, aimed at business use, an API, polyglot support and a smaller codebase, and it is incompatible with Huginn. It is written in Ruby, can be tried quickly with Docker, and has documentation at docs.activeworkflow.org. The repository lists its license as Other, so check the license file for terms.
Key features
- Workflows of language-agnostic agents
- Scheduled periodic execution
- Resource polling
- Event-driven orchestration
- Web UI for managing and monitoring
- Logging and state management
Good fit for
- →Scheduled report generation
- →Event-triggered email campaigns
- →Polling cloud storage for new files
- Built with
- Ruby
- Tags
- workflow
- orchestration
- scheduling
- event-driven
- self-hosted
- ruby
- agents
- automation
ActiveWorkflow: questions and answers
- What is ActiveWorkflow used for?
- ActiveWorkflow lets engineers schedule, orchestrate and monitor workflows of agents written in any language, with a management UI. It is a good fit for scheduled report generation, event-triggered email campaigns and polling cloud storage for new files.
- Is ActiveWorkflow open source?
- Yes. ActiveWorkflow is open source under a custom licence. Its source code is on GitHub at automaticmode/active_workflow and is written mainly in Ruby.
- Is ActiveWorkflow free?
- Yes. ActiveWorkflow is open source, so the software itself is free to use under the terms of its own licence.
- Can I self-host ActiveWorkflow?
- Yes. ActiveWorkflow can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
- What is ActiveWorkflow an alternative to?
- ActiveWorkflow is an open-source alternative to Zapier and IFTTT. Other open-source alternatives to Zapier include Huginn, n8n and Node-RED.
- Is ActiveWorkflow actively maintained?
- The most recent commit to ActiveWorkflow was on 3 April 2023, and the latest release is v0.9.17, published on 3 April 2023. The project has 864 stars on GitHub.
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