Best AI Agent Tools in 2026: n8n, Make, Lindy, Gumloop, or CrewAI?
“AI agent tool” covers everything from a simple if-this-then-that automation with an AI step bolted on, to a system that owns an entire outcome and checks its own work. Those are very different products wearing similar marketing. Figure out which job you have first:
- Complex automation you want to self-host and fully own → n8n
- Branching logic (loops, routers, error handling) with no server to run → Make
- Delegating a whole recurring job, not just one trigger → Lindy
- An ops team, technical but not engineers, building its own workflows → Gumloop
- Agents that belong in a repo and a CI pipeline, not a canvas → CrewAI
The power user answer: n8n
n8n is self-hostable, so sensitive workflows never have to leave your own infrastructure, and any node can drop to raw JavaScript the moment the visual builder runs out of road. It’s steeper to learn than Zapier, but you actually own the result: no vendor can raise a per-task price on a workflow that already runs on your own server.
The Community Edition is free, self-hosted, with unlimited workflows, executions, steps, and users, limited only by your own hardware (it ships under a Sustainable Use fair-code license, not OSI open source). The Cloud Starter plan is €24/mo (~€20/mo billed annually) for managed hosting with no self-hosting burden.
Skip it if you just want to connect two apps and never think about it again, that’s Zapier’s job, not n8n’s. See n8n’s full profile for verified pricing. Try n8n →
Real branching logic, no server required: Make
Make sits between Zapier and n8n: its visual canvas handles loops, routers, and error branches natively, without asking you to run or maintain any infrastructure. The tradeoff shows up at scale, the canvas gets genuinely messy once a workflow grows past a handful of branches.
Free gives you 1,000 credits/mo and the full visual builder, capped at 2 active scenarios. The Core plan is $9/mo for 10,000 credits/mo, unlimited active scenarios, 1-minute scheduling, and API access.
Skip it if the automation is a simple two-app trigger, Zapier is quicker to set up for that case and Make’s branching power goes unused. See Make’s full profile for verified pricing. Try Make →
Owns the outcome, not just the trigger: Lindy
Lindy is the clearest attempt on this list at an agent that holds a goal across many steps, an inbox to manage, a schedule to keep, follow-ups to send, rather than firing a single action and stopping. That ambition is also the catch: give it a while running supervised before trusting it on anything where a wrong action is expensive to undo.
There’s no free tier. Pricing starts at $29.99/user/mo.
Skip it if the task involves an action that’s expensive to reverse, verify its output for a while first regardless. See Lindy’s full profile for verified pricing. Try Lindy →
Built for ops teams, not engineers: Gumloop
Gumloop ships prebuilt nodes for scraping and enrichment that would normally need custom code, aimed squarely at the technical operations person who isn’t a software engineer. It hits that mark well, but the price puts it out of reach for an individual.
The standing free tier was discontinued; a 14-day free trial of the Pro plan is what’s available now. Pro starts at $37/month for 20,000 credits/mo, 5 concurrent workflow runs, 25 concurrent agent chats, unlimited seats and agents, and 35+ models, plus an 8% orchestration fee on usage.
Skip it if you’re an individual rather than a team, the price is built around a team’s workload, not one person’s. See Gumloop’s full profile for verified pricing. Try Gumloop →
Agents that live in your repo: CrewAI
CrewAI is code-first, MIT-licensed, and built for developers who want multi-agent systems in version control and CI, not on somebody’s visual canvas. It offers two orchestration styles in one library, Crews for agents that delegate to each other, Flows for deterministic event-driven control, and any workflow can export as an MCP server or a drop-in UI component.
The free hosted Basic tier includes the visual editor, GitHub integration, and 50 workflow executions a month; the underlying framework itself is MIT-licensed and free to self-host with no execution cap at all, beyond your own LLM API spend. There’s no published self-serve paid tier: beyond free Basic, it’s Enterprise, custom-quoted and sales-gated.
Skip it if you’re not a developer, or need a published mid-tier price, CrewAI’s only path past free is a sales conversation. See CrewAI’s full profile for verified pricing. Try CrewAI →
Side by side
| Tool | Best for | Pricing | Free tier |
|---|---|---|---|
| n8n | Self-hosted, fully owned automation | Free (self-hosted) · cloud from €24/mo | Yes, unlimited self-hosted |
| Make | Branching logic, no server | Free · from $9/mo | Yes, 1,000 credits/mo |
| Lindy | Delegating a whole recurring job | From $29.99/user/mo | No |
| Gumloop | Ops teams building their own workflows | 14-day trial · from $37/mo | No |
| CrewAI | Multi-agent systems in code | Free · Enterprise on request | Yes, self-hosted OSS |
The honest caveat
The further a tool moves from “trigger an action” toward “own an outcome,” the more supervision it needs early on, not less. n8n and Make are still fundamentally automations: predictable, auditable, and safe to trust once built. Lindy and Gumloop lean further into autonomous judgment, which is exactly why their own category is the one where a wrong, expensive-to-undo action is the real risk, verify before you trust. CrewAI is the outlier: not a product for non-developers at all, but the right default the moment agents need to live in a codebase alongside the rest of your engineering.
Related guides
Some links in this guide are affiliate links - we may earn a commission if you sign up, at no cost to you. Recommendations are never influenced by commissions.