Visibility in this ranking can be paid for. Payment moves a vendor's position within the
shortlist; it never adds a vendor, and it never changes a word of the review. The largest vendors in AI agent platforms
cannot hold places 1 to 3. Places 1 to 3 go to challengers, vendors outside the best-known brands in a category,
wherever the category has them; the established names follow from place 4 in their ranked order. How it works: placement disclosure ·
editorial process.
The 13 tools, reviewed
#1 Langdock
EU-hosted chat, agents and workflows for companies · Germany · langdock.com
Hosted in the EU Bring your own model keys SSO on the Business plan
Langdock answers the questions a European compliance officer asks before the demo ends. The application and most models are hosted in the EU on Azure, the security page says customer data is never used to train or improve AI models, and a company can plug in its own model provider keys. The company holds ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II.
- Pricing: Per user / month. Business is listed at €25 per user per month and Business Max at €99. Free plan: free trial.
- Best for: European firms with data-residency rules
- Strengths: Agents shareable across the company; Agents usable from Slack and Teams; Actions through native connectors or MCP.
Where it falls short
Serious workflow volume is a separate purchase: the base subscription includes 2,500 workflow runs a month, and the next step is an add-on starting at €539 a month per workspace.
Wrong for
A five-person firm that wants an agent to run unattended back-office automations all day.
Visit Langdock →
#2 Relevance AI
Multi-agent workforce builder for business teams · Australia · relevanceai.com
Two meters: actions and model cost Own API keys on every plan Pick AU, US or EU storage
Relevance AI is the rare vendor that itemizes. An action is one run of a tool, whatever happens inside it, and vendor credits are the pass-through cost of the model and any paid tools; the docs say bringing your own API keys bypasses vendor credits on every plan.
- Pricing: Usage-based. Pro is listed at $19 a month on annual billing or $29 monthly with 2,500 actions and $20 of vendor credits. Free plan: none.
- Best for: Sales and ops teams building agent teams
- Strengths: Multi-agent workforces; Approvals before agent actions; Escalation paths to humans.
Where it falls short
The docs state that the free plan is retired for new signups and existing accounts, so there is no way to build anything without paying. Pro has two build seats and no end users.
Wrong for
A buyer who wants to try before paying, or who needs SSO below an enterprise contract.
Visit Relevance AI →
#3 Lindy
AI teammate that works through Slack, iMessage and email · United States · lindy.ai
Works from Slack and iMessage Approval before writes and sends Every action logged
Lindy skips the canvas. The agent is addressed like a colleague in Slack, iMessage or email, and the site promises that nothing irreversible happens without approval: actions that write or send can wait for a yes. Every action is logged with what happened and when.
- Pricing: Per user / month. Plus is listed at $29.99 a month per user with 3,000 credits, Pro at $99.99 with 15,000 and Max at $199.99 with 35,000. Free plan: free trial.
- Best for: Busy individuals and small teams
- Strengths: Agent reachable by Slack, iMessage and email; 1,000+ integrations; MCP server support.
Where it falls short
No permanent free tier appears on the pricing page; the only free period described is a first week for teammates who join through Slack.
Wrong for
A process owner who needs a repeatable, versioned workflow with branching logic that an auditor can read.
Visit Lindy →
#4 n8n
Workflow automation with agent nodes, cloud or self-hosted · Germany · n8n.io
Charged per run, not per step Free self-hosted edition Approval gate on agent tools
The meter is what earns n8n its place. An execution is one run of a whole workflow however many steps it has, so an agent that loops through a dozen tool calls costs the same as one that makes a single call, and every listed plan allows unlimited users.
- Pricing: Free + paid tiers. Cloud Starter is listed at 20€ a month billed annually for 2,500 workflow executions and Pro at 50€ a month for 10,000. Free plan: free plan.
- Best for: Technical small teams wanting control
- Strengths: AI agent nodes inside visual workflows; Human approval before an agent calls a tool; Approval requests over Slack, Teams, email and chat apps.
Where it falls short
The free Community Edition leaves out single sign-on, projects, workflow and credential sharing, Git version control and log streaming, and on the cloud side SSO with SAML and LDAP sits on Enterprise only.
Wrong for
An office team with nobody who is comfortable reading a workflow canvas, wiring credentials and debugging a failed run.
Visit n8n →
#5 Dify
Agentic workflow and RAG builder with a self-host edition · United States · dify.ai
Priced per workspace, not per seat Community edition on Docker Model providers via marketplace
Dify charges the workspace, not the person: Professional covers three members and 50 apps for one annual fee, Team covers 50 members and 200 apps. The free Sandbox is enough to build a working prototype, and the same product can later be run on a buyer's own machine, where the docs ask for only two CPU cores and 4 GiB of memory.
- Pricing: Free + paid tiers. The cloud Sandbox is free with 200 message credits. Free plan: free plan.
- Best for: Builders who may self-host later
- Strengths: Visual agentic workflow builder; RAG pipelines and knowledge base; Marketplace of model providers, tools and MCP integrations.
Where it falls short
The vendor describes the Community edition as source-available under an Apache-2.0-derivative license, which is not the same promise as an unmodified open source license, so read the terms before embedding it in a product.
Wrong for
A department that wants finished agents wired into its inbox and calendar on day one.
Visit Dify →
#6 Make
Visual automation platform with built-in AI agents · United States · make.com
Agents on every plan Own LLM key accepted Free tier with no time limit
Make is the least intimidating route from "we already automate things" to "an agent decides which automation to run".
- Pricing: Free + paid tiers. A Free plan includes up to 1,000 credits a month. Free plan: free plan.
- Best for: Non-developers automating across SaaS apps
- Strengths: Visual scenario builder; AI agents that call scenarios as tools; Manual approval points for agents.
Where it falls short
Every module action in a scenario spends a credit, so an agent that calls tools freely burns through an allowance faster than a fixed scenario would, and the Free plan caps at two active scenarios with a 15-minute minimum interval.
Wrong for
Anyone who must keep workflow data on infrastructure they operate, or who needs a written no-training commitment covering all content before signing. n8n and Langdock both put that in plain words.
Visit Make →
#7 Dust
Company-wide agents on your internal knowledge · France · dust.tt
Model choice included in the price EU or US data residency Zero retention at providers
Dust sells one subscription that already contains the model bill. The plans include GPT, Claude, Gemini, Mistral and DeepSeek models, more than twenty in all, so nobody has to open five provider accounts to compare them. The privacy policy names its foundational model providers, says they are prohibited from training on customer data, and says they operate under zero data retention.
- Pricing: Free + paid tiers. A Free tier carries 500 lifetime credits. Free plan: free plan.
- Best for: Knowledge-heavy teams, EU or US hosted
- Strengths: Agents grounded in connected company data; Models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral and DeepSeek; Connectors to data sources.
Where it falls short
The Business plan allows up to three data-source connectors and five remote MCP servers; unlimited connectors, SCIM provisioning, audit logs and pooled credits are Enterprise items.
Wrong for
A team whose agents mostly need to push buttons in other systems on a schedule.
Visit Dust →
#8 Flowise
Open source visual builder for agents and LLM flows · United States · flowiseai.com
Runs locally with npm Local models via Ollama Flat hosted tiers
Flowise is the quickest route to an agent running entirely on a machine the buyer owns. The site describes it as open source, the install is a single npm command, and the docs list chat model nodes for OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, AWS Bedrock and Azure OpenAI next to Ollama and LocalAI for models that never leave the building.
- Pricing: Open source + paid tiers. Self-hosting the open source build is free. Free plan: open source.
- Best for: Developers prototyping on their own hardware
- Strengths: Agentflow multi-agent builder; Chatflow for single-agent systems; Assistant builder for beginners.
Where it falls short
The terms allow FlowiseAI to use anonymized and aggregated usage data to improve the platform and do not address model training on customer content in so many words.
Wrong for
A company without anyone to install, update and back up a Node application, and without a developer to build each flow.
Visit Flowise →
#9 LangSmith
Deployment and observability for code-built agents · United States · langchain.com
MIT-licensed LangGraph underneath Deploys agents from any framework Self-hosting on Enterprise only
LangSmith is what a software team buys after its prototype works. LangGraph, the orchestration library, is MIT-licensed and free, supports human-in-the-loop checks and any model provider, and carries no obligation to pay LangChain anything. The paid platform adds tracing, evaluation and managed deployment, and the vendor says agents built with any framework can be deployed on it.
- Pricing: Per seat / month. Developer is $0 for one seat with up to 5,000 base traces a month. Free plan: free plan.
- Best for: Engineering teams shipping custom agents
- Strengths: LangGraph open source orchestration library; Tracing and evaluation; Managed deployment for long-running agents.
Where it falls short
Three meters run at once, seats, traces and compute units, and only the first is predictable. Self-hosted and hybrid deployment, custom SSO and fine-grained RBAC are Enterprise items that need a sales conversation.
Wrong for
A business with no engineers.
Visit LangSmith →
#10 Microsoft Copilot Studio
Low-code agent studio for the Microsoft 365 estate · United States · microsoft.com
Published credit rate table No charge for M365 Copilot users OpenAI and Anthropic models
For a company whose staff already sign in to Teams every morning, Copilot Studio removes the distribution problem: agents publish to Teams, Microsoft 365 Copilot and websites from one low-code studio. Microsoft documents the meter in unusual detail.
- Pricing: Usage-based. Sold tenant-wide in packs of 25,000 Copilot Credits at $200 per pack per month, with a pay-as-you-go meter as the alternative. Free plan: free trial.
- Best for: Organizations standardized on Microsoft 365
- Strengths: Graphical low-code agent and workflow designer; Publishing to Teams, Microsoft 365 Copilot and websites; Prebuilt and custom connectors.
Where it falls short
The credit arithmetic is the weakness. One reply can stack several rates, reasoning models add a per-token premium, and when a tenant reaches 125% of prepaid capacity its custom agents are disabled until capacity is added.
Wrong for
A firm on Google Workspace or a mixed stack, which would be buying into the Microsoft admin centers mainly to run one agent. n8n, Make and Dust do not care which office suite sits underneath.
Visit Microsoft Copilot Studio →
#11 StackAI
Enterprise agent builder with on-premise deployment · United States · stackai.com
On-premise and VPC deployment No-training clause in the terms Nothing between free and quote
StackAI is built for the buyer whose security team has a veto. The terms say the company does not train any models on customer data and does not share it with AI providers to improve their products, and the site lists HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001. Deployment ranges from multi-tenant cloud to air-gapped on-premise.
- Pricing: Quote only. A Free plan at $0 a month covers 500 runs a month, 2 projects and 1 seat. Free plan: free plan.
- Best for: Regulated mid-size and large firms
- Strengths: Visual workflow builder for agents; Human in the Loop node; LLMs hosted on Azure and AWS Bedrock.
Where it falls short
There is no self-serve paid plan: one seat and two projects on Free, then a sales conversation, which makes it hard to budget before talking to a rep. SSO, on-premise and VPC deployment are listed under Enterprise.
Wrong for
A small company that wants to swipe a card and know the monthly cost. Dify, Make and Dust publish prices for the plan most small teams would end up on.
Visit StackAI →
#12 Salesforce Agentforce
Agent platform built into the Salesforce CRM · United States · salesforce.com
Per action or per conversation Zero retention at third-party LLMs Tied to Salesforce data
Agentforce earns its place for one kind of buyer: the company whose accounts, cases and orders are already Salesforce records. The agent reasons over that data without an integration project, and the Trust Layer masks personal data before a prompt reaches a model and states that prompts and responses are never stored by, or used to train, the third-party LLMs.
- Pricing: Usage-based. Flex Credits cost $500 per 100,000, with a standard action using 20 credits. Free plan: free plan.
- Best for: Existing Salesforce customers
- Strengths: Agent Builder with plan preview and testing; Atlas Reasoning Engine; Trust Layer data masking.
Where it falls short
Three meters coexist: Flex Credits at 20 per standard action, $2 per conversation for customer-facing agents, and per-user add-ons from $125 a month, and the pricing page says conversations and Flex Credits cannot be combined in the same org.
Wrong for
Any company that does not run its sales or service operation on Salesforce.
Visit Salesforce Agentforce →
#13 IBM watsonx Orchestrate
Agent control plane for large, regulated organizations · United States · ibm.com
Runs on-premises or multi-cloud Published starting prices External models through a gateway
IBM sells this as one place to build and manage every agent a large organization runs, and the feature a regulated buyer notices first is deployment: a managed service on IBM Cloud or AWS, or an install in the company's own data center. Oversight tools cover access and policy enforcement, quality evaluation and token cost tracking.
- Pricing: Flat monthly. Essentials starts at $530 per month and Standard at $6,360 per month; Premium is quoted; a 30-day free trial is offered. Free plan: free trial.
- Best for: Enterprises needing on-premises agents
- Strengths: Agent building and orchestration; Agents and tools catalog; Custom tool creation.
Where it falls short
Essentials starts at $530 a month and the next plan starts at $6,360, a twelvefold jump with nothing in between.
Wrong for
A small business or a single department testing its first agent.
Visit IBM watsonx Orchestrate →
Questions and answers
What is the best AI agent platform in 2026?
Langdock ranks first of 13, best for european firms with data-residency rules. Relevance AI is second (sales and ops teams building agent teams) and Lindy third (busy individuals and small teams). Places 1 to 3 go to challengers, vendors outside the best-known brands, wherever the category has them.
What is the difference between an AI agent and a chatbot?
A chatbot produces text in reply to a message.
How do AI agent platforms charge?
By almost every unit imaginable.
Can I use my own OpenAI or Anthropic API key?
On several of these, yes. n8n tells builders to plug in their own key for any LLM. Make's pricing page says agents run on Make's AI Provider or the customer's own LLM key.
Which AI agent platforms can be self-hosted?
Three have an edition a customer can install without a contract: n8n's Community Edition, Dify's Community edition, which runs on Docker, and Flowise, which installs with npm.
Do these vendors train AI models on my company's data?
Eight of the thirteen say no in a document we could read: n8n, Langdock, Dust, Lindy, LangChain, StackAI, Salesforce (for its third-party LLMs) and Relevance AI, whose security docs add an exception for customers with a specific partnership agreement.
How do I stop an agent from doing something it should not?
Use the approval features and limit the tools. n8n can require a human to approve a specific tool call, with the request sent to Slack, Teams, email or a chat app. Lindy holds actions that write or send until approved.
Is an open source agent framework enough, or do I need a platform?
A framework such as LangGraph, which LangChain describes as MIT-licensed and free, is enough to build an agent if a developer is available.
Which platforms keep data in the European Union?
Langdock says its application and most models are hosted entirely in the EU on Azure. Dust offers EU or US hosting on both of its tiers.
Should a Microsoft 365 or Salesforce customer just use the incumbent's agent product?
Price it first, then compare. Copilot Studio costs nothing extra for employees who already hold a Microsoft 365 Copilot license and publishes straight to Teams. Agentforce works on the records already in Salesforce. Those are real advantages.
Why are some well-known names missing from this list?
Every product fact on this page was checked on the vendor's own site, and a product was left out when a required fact could not be confirmed there.
