Do I need to have After Effects installed on my render machines? What about licenses?

Yes. But render-only machines don’t need additional licenses.

Render Boss uses After Effects to do the actual renders, so you do need to have After Effects installed in all the machines you want to use to render. However, per Adobe’s License terms (as of this writing), Render-Only machines do not need a license.

Keep in mind that if the compositions you’re rendering need a certain third-party plugin, all the machines rendering it will need to also have that plugin installed. Some third-party plugins might have different license terms than Adobe and might require you to have a license per machine