Show HN: Free hosted open-source alternative to Zapier/Airflow

I&#x27;ve used Zapier a fair amount and I wrote an article about Airflow so I have a fairly good understanding of that too.<p>I would never really consider them alternatives though? To me Zapier is a low&#x2F;no code tool that offers a bazillion integrations and Airflow is a workflow orchestration tool.<p>So comparing to both of them confuses me and I guess choosing one would give you a more nieche audience but one that you can connect better to as well.

Hi HN peeps! I single-handedly built Titanoboa (a workflow automation for JVM) and now I am experimenting with hosting dockerized Titanoboa instances - so I built a free hosting service. If you want to play with Titanoboa in your browser without installing anything, give it a try.<p>Feel free to check out Titanoboa on Github: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mikub&#x2F;titanoboa" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mikub&#x2F;titanoboa</a><p>Also: This is an early beta so please do let me know if something breaks or you spot a bug. Atm I have load-balancers set up only on West coast and in Europe, so apologies to folks from down under &amp; similar locations, let me know if it&#x27;s too laggy :)

Wow, this has blown up a bit, so I have added few more servers (now two servers on the West coast and two in Europe), but ultimately I think there is a limit cap of 100 Titanoboa instances in each geography in parallel.<p>So if we break that level please don&#x27;t be mad if you don&#x27;t get your instance :)<p>Instead give me a star on github and come back later :)<p>Cheers Miro

First impression: rename it now while the cost is low. The name is unwieldy.

Nice work!<p>How does it compare to n8n? [0]<p>n8n is the closest OSS alternative to Zapier I&#x27;ve seen so far.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;n8n.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;n8n.io&#x2F;</a>

@newcrobuzon you have some kind of comment string output at the top of your html body tag. Looks like something you do not want exposed.<p>Congratulations on reaching public beta and for submitting to HN! Looks very promising!

Impressive feat of engineering for one person!<p>But is it really an alternative to Zapier? I mean, while Zapier is obviously about automation, it always felt that their big selling point was the sheer number of integrations they provide.

This looks very interesting. The visual component in particular seems very well done.<p>I have a deep interest in DAG-structured ETL tooling and had a couple of questions that the documentation didn&#x27;t seem to address...<p>1. Can I execute workflows without a server running? Something like... $ java -jar titanoboa.jar MyWorkFlowName arg1 arg2 ... ...and then my workflow executes, as a program, on my machine, until it&#x27;s done and then exits? Or does every workflow always execute within the context of a running server?<p>2. Is there any notion of resuming a partially failed workflow? As a point of comparison, Luigi structures its DAG concept using Tasks which create Targets, and invoking a Task whose Target already exists is a no-op, so if you have a big execution graph that gets 80% finished and then dies, you can easily restart it. I find that many competing tools are missing this concept.

How does this compare to Prefect? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;the-prefect-blog&#x2F;why-not-airflow-4cfa423299c4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;the-prefect-blog&#x2F;why-not-airflow-4cfa4232...</a>

This looks really well done, newcrobuzon. Very impressed.<p>I especially love your web UI. It makes it very easy to start experimenting with workflows without the overhead of having to set up a local development environment.<p>I am curious how you store secrets (e.g. AWS access key id, secret access key). There isn&#x27;t a login wall and it&#x27;s not clear that the values will be protected from you, so I am loathe to put my credentials on there.<p>Great work overall. Wish you the best.

Very interesting! What library did you use for the SVG powered diagram tool?

Being a JVM friendly tool, it would be great to unlock other JVM syntaxes to allow scripting in any lanugage.. Jython for Python, Quercus for PHP, JRuby for Ruby, etc.

How does this compare with <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;openintegrationhub&#x2F;openintegrationhub" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;openintegrationhub&#x2F;openintegrationhub</a> ?

is there some recipes or some common scenarios one can &#x27;import&#x27; in to check it out?

Honestly I really like this, I can&#x27;t wait to use it, but my concerns are around certain features being behind a paywall, especially HA and Clustering on the self-hosted version.<p>I understand that the cloud hosted version should cost more for these features but without a way to get pricing for the self-hosted HA and clustered version it will be a tough sell for me to deploy it, use it and have to scrap it in the future.

I liked the video demo really nice and I would say this should be called not low-code or no-code but rather aPaaS which is Application Platform as a Service.<p>So the title should be &quot;Host your own aPaaS&quot; instead.

How does it compare with Cadence&#x2F;Temporal?