AI agent software

AI agent platform and AI agent software compared: which AI agents actually finish the job.

Nearly every roundup in this category reprints pricing that vendors changed months ago. We checked all nine on their own pages in July 2026, and two of the numbers everyone quotes turned out not to exist.

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In short

Last updated July 2026

AI agent software splits cleanly into two groups, and the split matters more than any feature list. Builders give you a canvas and make you assemble the agent: Make from $9 a month, n8n free self-hosted, Gumloop $37, Zapier Agents $33.33. Delegates take a job description in plain English and return the finished work: Lindy $49.99 to $199.99, WorkAgent $149 flat. The enterprise platforms, Relevance AI and CrewAI, no longer publish pricing at all and route you to sales. Two live traps to know about: OpenAI's Agent Builder is scheduled to shut down on November 30, 2026, and Make now bills in credits rather than operations, so older comparisons of its price are wrong.

Builders (you assemble it): $0 to $37 / month
Delegates (it finishes the job): $49.99 to $199.99 / month
Enterprise platforms: No published pricing, sales-led

What it handles

What businesses actually buy AI agent software to do

The jobs businesses buy AI agent software for, and whether you have to build it yourself first.

Research and monitoring

Market scans, competitor pricing checks and account briefs, cross-checked and returned with sources.

Lead generation

Building and enriching a targeted list of companies that match who really buys from you.

Outbound and follow-up

Personalized sequences that go out on schedule and keep going out, with replies triaged.

Inbox and support triage

Sorting, routing and drafting the routine replies so a person only handles the exceptions.

Data movement and cleanup

Records synced, deduped and corrected between tools without a person copy-pasting.

Recurring reporting

The weekly numbers pulled, sanity-checked and written up on a schedule.

Why it works

The only question that separates these products

Do you want to build, or delegate?

Builders are cheap because you supply the labor: you design each flow, test it and fix it when an API changes. Delegates cost more because the product does that work. Neither is better. Buying the wrong one is the most common and expensive mistake in this category.

How does it meter you?

Tasks, operations, credits, actions, activities and seats are all in use here, and they are not comparable. A credit is worth different amounts at different vendors. Two tools advertising $49 can cost wildly different sums in practice.

Is the price even published?

Relevance AI and CrewAI have both moved to sales-led pricing with no public numbers. That is legitimate, but it means any figure you read for them in a listicle is either stale or invented.

Compare

AI agent software and platforms compared, July 2026

Every figure below came from the vendor's own pricing page or help center in July 2026. WorkAgent is one of the options listed, so weigh accordingly.

Platform	US price	Model	Best for
n8n	Free self-hosted. Cloud from EUR 20 / month annual	Builder, execution-based, priced in euros	Technical teams who want control and will run it themselves
Make	Free tier, Core $9, Pro $16, Teams $29 / month	Builder, credits (changed from operations, older comparisons are wrong)	Visual automation on a budget, with repeatable steps
Zapier Agents	Free (400 activities), Pro $400 / year = $33.33 / month	Builder, activity-based, separate from Zapier's main plans	Teams whose stack already lives inside Zapier
Gumloop	Free tier, Pro $37 / month, unlimited seats	Builder, credits	Small teams wanting a friendlier canvas and no seat tax
Lindy	$49.99 / $99.99 / $199.99 per month	Delegate-ish, usage allowance, no free tier	Inbox, calendar and meeting workflows. Genuinely strong there.
WorkAgent	$149 / month flat, no credits	Delegate, brief it in plain English	Research, lead gen, outreach and reporting handed over whole
Manus	Free (300 credits daily), Pro from $20 / month	General agent, credits	One-off autonomous tasks and experimentation
Relevance AI	No published pricing, sales-led	Platform. Top-ups listed at $80 per 1,000 actions.	Enterprise teams with a procurement process
CrewAI	Free tier (50 executions / month), Enterprise custom	Developer framework, sales-led above the free tier	Engineers building multi-agent systems in code

Two corrections worth more than the table itself. Relevance AI publishes no prices at all now: their pricing page contains zero dollar figures and five "talk to sales" links, so the $19 and $199 tiers still circulating in roundups are stale. And OpenAI's Agent Builder is scheduled to shut down on November 30, 2026, with migration to the Agents SDK, so do not start a project on it today.

Builders and delegates are not the same purchase

This is the whole category in one distinction. A builder hands you a canvas: triggers, steps, branches, tools. Make, n8n, Zapier Agents and Gumloop are builders. They are powerful, they are cheap, and the reason they are cheap is that you are the labor. You design the flow, you test it, and you fix it at 11pm when a vendor changes an API response. If you enjoy that, or you have a genuinely fixed process, a builder is the correct buy and $9 a month is a bargain.

A delegate takes a description of the outcome and works out the steps itself. You write "research the 20 largest competitors in this category and tell me how each one prices" and you get the brief back. There is no canvas. The trade is control: you cannot rewire a delegate the way you can rewire n8n. Almost everyone who is unhappy in this category bought a builder while wanting a delegate, or the reverse. Work out which one you want before you look at a single feature list. Our AI agent vs automation post is the long version of that decision.

What we found when we checked the pricing ourselves

We fetched all nine vendors' own pages in July 2026 rather than trusting the roundups, and the roundups are in bad shape. Relevance AI is the clearest case: its pricing page has no dollar figures on it whatsoever, only Enterprise and five links to sales, following a repricing in September 2025. The $19, $199 and $599 tiers still being quoted around the web are simply gone. CrewAI is the same story above its free tier. Make has moved from operations to credits, which quietly invalidates every older price comparison, and its advertised $9, $16 and $29 tiers are all pegged to the default 10,000-credit slider position, scaling up from there.

The one you should act on: OpenAI's Agent Builder is scheduled to shut down on November 30, 2026, with users pointed to the Agents SDK or Workspace Agents. If you are evaluating platforms this quarter, that is a live migration risk rather than a footnote. Zapier also splits Agents pricing from its main platform, so a team already paying for Zapier plans is looking at an additional $400 a year for Agents Pro, not an upgrade. And n8n bills in euros, which is a real difference for a US buyer once conversion moves.

How the metering actually gets you

Six different units are in play across these nine products: tasks, operations, credits, actions, activities and seats. They do not convert. Relevance AI's published top-up rate is $80 per 1,000 actions. Zapier Agents Pro includes 1,500 activities a month. Manus gives 300 credits daily on free and 4,000 a month on the $20 tier. Lindy does not publish the underlying metric for its usage allowance at all, only that Pro is roughly three times Plus and Max roughly seven times.

The practical consequence is not that you get overcharged, it is that you change your behavior. Metered users ration the agent. They stop giving it the complex jobs, because complex jobs burn credits fastest, which means they stop giving it the jobs that were worth automating. That is the reasoning behind our flat $149: not that metering is dishonest, it is arguably the fairest way to charge for compute, but that an assistant you are afraid to use is not doing anything for you. If the low entry price genuinely matters more, buy Make at $9 and accept that the building is your job.

Which one to buy, honestly

If you have someone technical and you want control and no bill, self-host n8n. It is free, it is genuinely capable, and nothing else on this list beats it on those terms. If you want a visual builder and a low price, Make at $9. If your company already runs on Zapier, Zapier Agents at $33.33 a month is the path of least resistance. If your bottleneck is email and your calendar, Lindy from $49.99, and we say so on our Lindy alternative page too. If you are an engineer building a multi-agent system in code, CrewAI.

Come to us when the problem is that whole jobs are not getting done and you do not want a new thing to maintain. Research, prospect lists, outreach, reporting, briefed in plain English, $149 flat. That is a narrower claim than most of this category makes, and it is the one we can actually keep. The category-wide roundup with more vendors is on best AI agents for small business, and if outbound sales specifically is the problem, the dedicated platforms are laid out on our AI SDR page.

FAQ

Questions buyers ask about AI agent software

What is the best AI agent platform?

It depends on whether you want to build or delegate. For control and no cost, n8n self-hosted, free. For visual building on a budget, Make at $9 a month. For teams already on Zapier, Zapier Agents at $33.33. For inbox and calendar, Lindy from $49.99. For handing over whole jobs like research, lead gen and reporting without building anything, WorkAgent at $149 flat. There is no universal winner.

How much does AI agent software cost?

Builders run $0 to $37 a month: n8n is free self-hosted, Make starts at $9, Zapier Agents is $33.33, Gumloop is $37. Agents that finish jobs run $49.99 to $199.99, with Lindy in that band and WorkAgent at $149 flat. Enterprise platforms like Relevance AI and CrewAI no longer publish pricing at all. All figures verified on vendor pages in July 2026.

What is the difference between an AI agent and automation software?

Automation follows rules you wrote: this trigger, then that step, every time. An agent decides how to reach an outcome you described, choosing steps and tools itself. Automation is better when the process never varies, because it is cheaper and fully predictable. An agent is better when the work needs judgment each time, like research or personalized outreach, where writing every rule is impossible.

Is Relevance AI still $19 a month?

No. Relevance AI's pricing page carries no dollar figures at all as of July 2026, only Enterprise tiers and links to sales, following a repricing in September 2025. The $19, $199 and $599 tiers quoted in many roundups no longer exist. The only published rates are top-ups at $80 per 1,000 actions and $20 per 10,000 vendor credits. Contact them for a real number.

Is OpenAI Agent Builder being discontinued?

Yes. OpenAI has scheduled Agent Builder to shut down on November 30, 2026, and directs developers to migrate to the Agents SDK or Workspace Agents. AgentKit components have no separate pricing and are billed at standard API model rates. If you are choosing an agent platform this quarter, treat anything built on Agent Builder as carrying a known migration cost.

Do I need coding skills to use AI agent software?

For delegates like WorkAgent and Lindy, no: you describe the job in plain English. For CrewAI, yes, it is a developer framework. Builders like Make, n8n, Zapier and Gumloop are the tricky middle. They are marketed as no-code, and technically that is true, but you still design, test and maintain every flow. That is real work, and it is the part people underestimate.

What is the best free AI agent software?

n8n self-hosted, without much competition, if you have someone who can run it. It is genuinely capable and the Community Edition costs nothing. Make, Gumloop, Zapier Agents and Manus all have free tiers that are useful for evaluating but too limited for production work. Lindy has no free tier, only a 7-day trial. Free always means you are paying in setup and maintenance time instead.

Why do some AI agent platforms hide their pricing?

Usually because their deals are large, variable and negotiated, which is a legitimate way to sell enterprise software. Relevance AI and CrewAI both route to sales above their free tiers, and Ylopo, Lofty and Artisan do the same in their categories. The practical effect for a buyer is that comparison shopping requires a sales call, and that any number you read in a third-party roundup for those vendors is unverifiable.

Put it to work

Compare the approaches: see AI virtual assistant, AI virtual agent, AI assistant for business, AI personal assistant for business, AI agent for small business, AI assistant for small business, AI SDR, AI executive assistant, AI agent software, AI for real estate agents and AI employee, compare us against Lindy AI, or read how the AI agent works and AI worker pricing.

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