By default, any active flows that are deployed to a production environment are deployed as inactive.
You can change this behavior in Salesforce. However, this is an all or nothing approach, so if selected, all flows would be deployed as active.
Activate flows on deployment with Gearset
Important to note: This feature is only available when your target is a Production org. Active flows deployed to any other org will always be deployed as active.
Gearset gives you an option to activate flows on deployment of the package. Once a comparison has been run and the package has been generated, an option to activate flows will become available. The option is set to "off" by default.
Once the option is selected, Gearset will attempt to automatically activate all flows in the deployment package.
Once the deployment is completed, you can easily check to see the flows that have been activated on deployment. To do this go to the deployment summary page and check the deployed metadata types.
Using Gearset Pipelines
When using Gearset Pipelines, you can now activate Flows on deployment via our Pre and Post Deployment Steps functionality.
As part of the feature promotion process, an automatic post-deployment step to activate any Flows detected in the promotion's deployment package can be created. This step will automatically activate Flows once the feature has been deployed to a Pipeline static environment linked to a Production org.
You can learn more about Flow Activation in Gearset Pipelines here.