Nubu vs nexrender: which After Effects automation fits?
An honest comparison of Nubu and nexrender: free open source render infrastructure or a managed campaign workflow, with real pricing and both-ways trade-offs.
Nubu and nexrender automate the same engine: real After Effects, driven headlessly, turning a template and a pile of data into finished videos. Beyond that shared core they are barely the same species of product, which makes this an easy comparison to write honestly. So the verdicts go first.
Choose nexrender (self-hosted) if you have engineers and want free, total control. It is open source After Effects render automation (github.com/inlife/nexrender) that you run on your own machines with your own AE licences, and you can embed it inside your own product.
Choose Nexrender Cloud if you want the same job model as a managed service without owning machines, from €99 per month plus €0.18 per render minute as listed on their pricing page.
Choose Nubu if what you actually need is the workflow around the render: a visual editor colleagues can drive without writing JSON, review and approval before anything renders, and finished ads delivered into Meta and Google Ads as paused objects.
Nubu is our product, so read this page the way you would read any vendor's comparison. We have kept every nexrender claim to what its repository and site state, attributed their prices to their pricing page, and conceded the categories it wins, because it genuinely wins several. The largest concession arrives early and gets repeated: Nubu has no public API today, so if renders must be triggered from inside your own software, nexrender is the better shaped tool, full stop. If you want the whole landscape rather than a head-to-head, our After Effects automation guide covers every method, and our full nexrender review goes deeper on the project itself.
Nubu vs nexrender at a glance
| Capability | Nubu | nexrender (self-hosted) |
|---|---|---|
| After Effects rendering | Yes. Every render runs through genuine After Effects in Nubu's managed cloud | Yes. Drives After Effects through aerender on your own machines |
| Software cost | Per-seat subscription with a free plan | Free and open source |
| Trigger renders from your own code | No public API today | Yes. Jobs are JSON documents fed through the CLI or the server |
| Embed rendering inside your own product | No | Yes, and this is a core use case |
| Who runs the machines | Nubu's managed render farm | You: your hardware, your AE licences (Nexrender Cloud rents theirs) |
| Control over the pipeline | Platform-managed | Total. Every part of the stack is yours to shape |
| Interface for non-developers | Yes. Node-based flow editor with live diagnostics | No. Developer-oriented by design |
| Data-driven batches | CSV datasets up to 5,000 rows and 40 columns; one build produces up to 5,000 creatives, the same set every time | You generate one job document per variation from your own data pipeline |
| Render reliability | Duplicate renders cannot happen; failed renders retry automatically; outputs versioned per attempt with full AE logs | A server-and-workers model forms a render farm on your machines; operating it is your job |
| Review and approval | Yes. Builds land in review, comments with @mentions, roles decide who approves, approval queues the render | Not part of the project: no review UI or approval workflow |
| Delivery to ad platforms | Yes, on Business+. Paused ads in Meta; paused Demand Gen ads and Performance Max asset groups in Google Ads | No delivery. Where files go next is your pipeline's job |
| Downloads for media buyers | ZIP exports with a manifest CSV: every field of ad copy plus UTMs per creative | Whatever packaging you build |
| AI campaign builder assistant | Yes, on Business+ | No equivalent |
| Per-seat fees | Yes, per member per month | None. Free software has no seats |
Read the table both ways. Four rows favour nexrender outright: the software is free, it is the only one of the two you can drive from your own code, it is the only one you can embed in your own product, and it charges nothing per teammate. Those are not small wins. They are the whole reason the project has several thousand GitHub stars, and if any of those four rows is your deciding row, you do not need the rest of this page.
Pricing: what free costs, and what seats buy
The two models are not just different prices, they are different substances. With nexrender you pay in infrastructure and engineering time. With Nubu you pay in seats. Comparing the numbers only works once you price both substances honestly.
nexrender, self-hosted. The software costs nothing, and that is genuinely true, not an asterisk. What the system needs to run is machines capable of rendering, an After Effects licence on each of them, fonts and plugins kept in parity across every worker, storage for what comes out, and an engineer's time: standing the farm up, generating job JSON from your data, watching the queue, and building anything a non-developer colleague might ever touch. For an engineering team that wants control, this is a fair and often excellent deal. At sustained scale, with the engineers already on payroll, the marginal cost of one more render approaches the electricity, and no SaaS pricing page can compete with that. We say so plainly because it is true.
Nexrender Cloud. The managed middle path, as listed on their pricing page: Pay-As-You-Go at €99 per month plus €0.18 per render minute, a Dedicated Engine at €350 per month, and a custom Enterprise tier. The machines, licences and scaling become their problem while the JSON job model stays the same, which makes it a sensible route for a product team that wants the nexrender shape without the ops.
Nubu. Per-seat, in GBP with VAT included, and yearly billing saves 20%:
- Free: £0. One member, 10 GB of storage.
- Starter: £29 per month plus £12 per seat.
- Pro: £79 per month plus £24 per seat, with a priority render queue.
- Business+: £199 per month plus £39 per seat, and this is the tier with Meta and Google Ads delivery and the AI features.
A worked example: a four-person in-house team on Pro pays £79 plus four seats at £24, which is £175 per month, or £140 per month equivalent on yearly billing. That number does not move with render volume, and nobody on the team writes or babysits a queue worker. The structural difference in one sentence: nexrender's cost curve falls as volume rises and engineering capacity is a given, while Nubu's cost curve is flat against volume and assumes no engineering capacity at all. The trial needs no credit card, and the full numbers live on the pricing page.
Which should you choose?
| Your situation | Lean towards | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Product team embedding video in your own software | nexrender, or Nexrender Cloud | You need renders triggered by code inside your product. Nubu has no public API, so it is simply not built for this job. |
| Studio with a technical artist | Either, honestly | If owning the infrastructure appeals and the artist enjoys running it, self-hosted nexrender is free and yours. If the rest of the studio needs to build, review and approve without queueing behind that one person, Nubu. |
| In-house performance team | Nubu, Business+ | Review roles, comments, approval before rendering, then finished ads pushed into Meta and Google Ads as paused objects with a manifest for the media buyer. |
| Agency running client campaigns | Nubu | Roles and review map onto client approval loops, and the manifest CSV makes handover to any media buyer clean. Starter or Pro to begin, Business+ when delivery matters. |
The workflow Nubu adds around the render
For nexrender, rendering is the product. For Nubu, rendering is the middle third of a longer pipeline, and the other two thirds are where the product earns its subscription.
A visual editor instead of job documents. A Nubu campaign is a node graph: templates, CSV datasets, assets and outputs wired together on one canvas, with live diagnostics surfacing problems while you build rather than at render time. Datasets take CSVs up to 5,000 rows and 40 columns, and one build produces up to 5,000 creatives, with the same flow and the same data always producing the same set. Where a nexrender pipeline expresses a variation as a JSON document an engineer generates, a Nubu flow expresses the whole matrix visually, and anyone on the team can read it.
Here is the interactive version, a live graph you can prod:
Review and approval before anything renders. Builds land in a review state, not a render queue. Teammates comment on individual creatives with @mentions, roles control who may approve, and approval is the act that queues the render (how a creative moves from build to render). This ordering matters: nothing consumes render capacity, and nothing moves towards an ad account, until a person has said yes.
A render farm you never operate. Under the workflow sits the same kind of infrastructure a nexrender team builds by hand, except Nubu runs it: duplicate renders cannot happen, failed renders retry automatically, and every attempt produces versioned outputs with full After Effects logs attached. The difference is not that our farm is cleverer than one your engineers could build. It is that nobody on your team has to build it.
Delivery and handover. On Business+, approved and rendered creatives push into Meta as paused ads, and into Google Ads as paused Demand Gen ads and paused Performance Max asset groups. Everything arrives paused, so a human always flips the final switch inside the ad platform. Every download is a ZIP export with a manifest CSV listing every field of ad copy plus the UTMs for each creative, which is the sheet a media buyer actually needs. Honest limits, stated plainly: delivery covers Meta and Google Ads only.
An assistant that drafts, and only drafts. Business+ also carries Nubu's AI campaign builder assistant. It drafts campaigns and whole flows as proposal cards that a human approves, and every flow it offers has already been test-built end to end, exactly as a real Build would run it, with the card showing the expected creative count and a matrix of real copy per row. It cannot render, publish, spend or delete, because those abilities simply do not exist for it, and it runs on your organisation's own OpenAI, Anthropic or Gemini key, billed by the provider at raw prices with no Nubu margin. nexrender has no equivalent, which is no criticism of a render engine, but it matters if drafting campaigns is part of your week. The full write-up is at AI campaign builder for ads.
Migrating: the same .aep files work in both
Neither tool locks your templates in, and that deserves saying clearly. A nexrender job points at your After Effects project and composition as they sit on disk. Nubu works from the same .aep projects: you run the Nubu Builder plugin inside After Effects to export the project as an ordinary template package describing its dynamic fields, then upload it to your library (exporting your template, uploading a template, templates overview). Moving between the two tools, in either direction, is a re-wire of the pipeline, never a rebuild of the creative.
Frequently asked questions
Is nexrender really free?
The software, yes: genuinely free and open source, self-hosted, no licence fee and no per-seat charge. The system around it is not free: you supply the render machines, an After Effects licence for each, font and plugin parity across workers, storage, and the engineering time to run the queue and build whatever your non-developers need. If you would rather rent that, Nexrender Cloud is listed at €99 per month plus €0.18 per render minute Pay-As-You-Go, €350 per month for a Dedicated Engine, and custom Enterprise pricing.
Does Nubu have an API like nexrender's job system?
No. Nubu has no public API today, and we would rather say so here than have you discover it in a trial. If your renders need to be created from your own code, or rendering needs to live inside your own product, nexrender is the better shaped tool and you should use it.
Is Nubu's rendering real After Effects, like nexrender's?
Yes. Both drive genuine After Effects rather than a lookalike engine, which is what preserves template fidelity. nexrender drives it through aerender on machines you operate. Nubu renders on its own managed infrastructure, where duplicate renders cannot happen, retries are automatic, and every attempt keeps versioned outputs with full AE logs.
Can I use the same .aep templates in both?
Yes. Your templates are standard After Effects projects in either world. nexrender's jobs name the project and composition directly; Nubu has you export the project once with the Builder plugin into a template package, then upload it (the template docs cover the structure).
How much does Nubu cost for a small team?
A three-person team on Starter pays £29 plus three seats at £12, which is £65 per month with VAT included. The same team on Pro pays £151. Yearly billing takes 20% off either, there is a permanent Free plan for one member with 10 GB, and the trial needs no card. Full details are on the pricing page.
Try the one that fits
If you have engineers and the render must live inside your own software, clone nexrender and start there; it is free, and it is the right call. If what your team is missing is the workflow, the review, the approval and the delivery around the render, create a Nubu account, upload a real template, and run a real build against real data. The features page has the full capability list. For more context before deciding, our nexrender review and alternatives examines the project in depth, and if you are weighing managed platforms against each other instead, start with Nubu vs Plainly and the wider Plainly alternatives round-up.
