The best AI agent platform for a business in 2026 depends on the shape of the work: one repeatable automation (Zapier Agents, Lindy, Make), a pipeline a technical team owns (n8n), an agent inside a suite you already pay for (Copilot Studio, ChatGPT Business), or a shared workspace where the whole team runs many agents in its own logged-in tools (TODO for AI). This guide compares nine platforms on price, what the agents can reach, team controls, and whether the output sounds like you.
Disclosure: TODO for AI is ours. Every price below carries the date it was checked; the vendor pages are linked so you can re-check. Where another tool is the better buy, the table says so.
The short answer
| Platform | Best for | Entry price | What the agent can reach | Team controls | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zapier Agents | wiring SaaS apps with a trigger | Free 400 activities/mo; Pro $33.33/mo billed yearly | ~8,000 app connectors | Zapier Team plan, separate meter | 2026-11-06 |
| Lindy | no-code business workflows (email, CRM, meetings) | $29.99/user/mo, 3,000 credits; $50 free trial credit | integrations + computer use in its cloud | credits pooled per workspace | 2026-11-06 |
| Make | visual multi-step scenarios on a budget | Free 1,000 credits; Core $9/mo | connected apps, own LLM key allowed | Teams plan $29/mo | 2026-11-06 |
| Microsoft Copilot Studio | agents for a Microsoft 365 tenant | $200/mo per 25,000-credit pack, or pay-as-you-go | Microsoft Graph, Power Platform connectors, external channels | tenant admin, Azure subscription | 2026-11-06 |
| Relevance AI | sales/ops “AI workforce” teams | Pro $29/mo ($19 yearly), 2,500 actions; Team $349/mo ($234 yearly) | 2,000+ integrations, calling agents on Team | shared actions per org; no free plan | 2026-11-06 |
| Gumloop | AI research and enrichment pipelines | Pro from $37/mo, 20,000 credits + 8% fee; no free plan | connected apps and the web | Enterprise | 2026-11-06 |
| n8n | technical teams, self-hosted | self-host free; Cloud Starter €20/mo | anything with an API; Code node | self-hosted, you own it | 2026-11-06 |
| ChatGPT Business | a better assistant for everyone | $25/seat/mo ($20 yearly), min 2 seats | OpenAI sandbox, connectors, its own cloud browser | shared projects, per-feature caps | 2026-11-06 |
| TODO for AI | a team running many agents in its own tools | Free; team seats $30 / $120, min 2 | your logged-in browser, your PCs, a cloud VM, any MCP server | one board, per-agent allow/ask/block, pooled credits | 2026-11-06 |
How we compared them
Four things a business buyer actually hits in the first month:
- Reach. Can the agent act in the tools you already use, including the ones with no API? Connectors cover apps with an API. A browser session covers the rest, and it matters whether that browser is yours or the vendor’s.
- Who sees the work. One person’s chat history, or a board the team can read, continue and audit?
- Control. Can you say, per agent, which tools it may use and which need a human first? Can anyone stop a run?
- Price shape. Per seat, per task, per credit, or per pool. Metered-per-action pricing punishes the automations that work.
Brand voice and company context get their own section below, because the tools differ more there than the tables show.
1. Zapier Agents
The largest integration network, with Agents added on a separate activity meter. When we asked ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode and Perplexity ten buyer questions in October 2026, Zapier Agents was named in 25 of 40 answers and named first in 8, more than any other tool.
- Reach: ~8,000 apps. If both ends have an API, Zapier connects them.
- Price: Zaps and Agents are billed apart. Free tier: 100 tasks and 400 agent activities a month. Agents Pro is $33.33/mo billed yearly for 1,500 activities.
- Where it stops: Zaps are trigger-shaped, something must fire before anything happens; Agents take open-ended requests and can browse, but act through connectors. No shell, no machine, no session in your real browser. Two meters, each with its own plan.
- Choose it if your work is deterministic plumbing between SaaS apps. We would not try to replace it there.
2. Lindy
No-code AI teammates built from triggers and steps: inbox triage, CRM updates, meeting notes, support replies. Lindy picks the model per task unless you override it; computer use is included.
- Price: one Team plan, billed for every active user: from $29.99 a month for 3,000 credits each, with larger credit tiers up to 1.75 million, pooled across the workspace. Top-ups $10 per 1,000. A free start gives $50 of credits for seven days, no card.
- Where it stops: defined workflows rather than open-ended work. Credits are an abstraction whose price per credit drops at higher tiers. Lives in its own cloud.
- Choose it if an ops or go-to-market person needs to automate a repeatable process this week without engineering.
3. Make
A visual scenario builder, materially cheaper per run than Zapier at comparable volume, with AI agents on every plan including Free. You can point it at your own LLM key.
- Price: Free 1,000 credits/mo with 2 active scenarios, Core $9, Pro $16, Teams $29 at 10,000 credits.
- Where it stops: you draw the scenario before you get value, so a one-off task never earns it. Credits are per module action and expire each term.
- Choose it if most of your work repeats and you want branching and error handling you can see.
4. Microsoft Copilot Studio
Build agents that run inside Microsoft 365 and Teams, grounded in your Microsoft Graph, with the admin controls an IT department expects.
- Price: $200/mo per prepaid pack of 25,000 Copilot Credits, or pay-as-you-go through an Azure subscription. Microsoft 365 Copilot licence holders ($30/user/mo yearly) get some in-suite usage zero-rated. Unused pack credits do not roll over.
- Where it stops: built around the Microsoft tenant. Reach beyond it goes through Power Platform connectors, not your machines or code. Both pack and pay-as-you-go billing need an Azure subscription, and a Copilot licence is a separate line.
- Choose it if your company lives in Outlook, Teams and SharePoint and IT wants one vendor.
5. Relevance AI
Markets itself as an “AI workforce”: multi-step agents for sales and ops, with calling and meeting agents on the Team tier. Named in 12 of 40 AI answers in our audit, half of them by Gemini.
- Price: Pro $29/mo (2,500 actions, 2 builders, 1 project), Team $349/mo (7,000 actions, 5 builders, 45 end users). The free plan was retired. Top-ups: $80 per 1,000 actions.
- Where it stops: there is no tier between $29 and $349, and Pro has two builders and one project. Actions are metered per step, so cost scales with how much the agent does.
- Choose it if you are building a sales development agent and want the BDR templates and phone channel out of the box.
6. Gumloop
AI-native automation where nodes are AI steps by default: scrape, summarise, classify, write. Agents take tasks in chat, Slack, Teams, Gmail and by voice.
- Price: no free plan, a 14-day trial of Pro. Pro from $37/mo with 20,000 credits plus an 8% orchestration fee; Enterprise custom.
- Where it stops: reach ends at connected apps and the web. The highest entry price in the automation group, and the fee on top of credits.
- Choose it if a marketing or ops team runs AI-heavy research and enrichment pipelines. It is the closest tool in this list to what we do.
7. n8n
Fair-code workflow automation you can self-host, priced per whole workflow run rather than per step. A Code node runs real JavaScript or Python, and it ships LangChain-based AI agent nodes that the other automation tools do not.
- Price: Community Edition free to self-host. Cloud Starter €20/mo for 2,500 executions, Pro €50 for 10,000.
- Where it stops: genuinely technical. Most non-developers will not build in it. Self-hosting means you own uptime, upgrades and secrets.
- Choose it if an engineer owns the pipelines and the data must stay in-house.
8. ChatGPT Business
The default assistant with agents, deep research and connectors, on a per-seat team plan with shared projects.
- Price: $25/seat/mo, or $20 billed yearly, minimum two seats; Premium seats $125 ($100 yearly). Caps are per feature: messages, deep research runs, agent runs, images; purchased workspace credits fund extra use.
- Where it stops: OpenAI models only. Agent runs happen in OpenAI’s sandbox with its own built-in browser (it keeps its own logins, but it is not your Chrome profile), not on your machine or in your repo. Per-feature caps mean you hit a wall in one place while allowance sits unused in another.
- Choose it if the team mainly wants a better assistant for questions, writing and research, and the output can land as a document.
9. TODO for AI
A shared board for the business where each item can be done by a person or an agent. The agents work in the team’s real tools: the logged-in Chrome or Firefox via an extension, your PCs and servers via a small bridge, or a cloud VM that comes with every plan (paid plans add a cloud browser).
- Reach: anything you can log into, without a custom integration, plus any MCP server. Any CLI on a connected machine is reachable through the shell, under the same permission rules.
- Who sees the work: one board per project. The card shows who asked, which agent ran it and what came back. Anyone can pick up an item the AI started, or hand one to the AI.
- Control: every tool is allow, ask first or block, per agent; for the shell, per command pattern (allow
git status, ask beforegit push). Ask-first is a real gate: the call waits for a human. Secrets live in an encrypted vault. Any run can be stopped mid-task. - Price: free to start, no signup, $2 of usage included on Claude Sonnet and Haiku. Team seats $30 (standard) and $120 (premium) a month, minimum two; seat prices go into one shared usage pool, with per-seat session and weekly windows. Paid plans add GPT, Gemini, Grok and DeepSeek, all on one bill.
- Voice and context: give it your website at setup and it drafts the company context every agent starts from; it keeps a voice profile per channel, learned from what you have published, so a customer email and a LinkedIn post come out in your voice, not the model’s.
- Where it stops: setup is per person (extension, and the bridge if they want their machine connected). Tasks in your own browser session need Chrome or Firefox open. Permissions go by tool and command, not by amount: it can ask before every payment, not only the ones over €500. We are a small company, which matters for a vendor security review.
- Choose it if the problem is that agent work is scattered across one-person chats and you want the team, and many agents, on one list.
Brand voice and company context
Three different things get sold under this heading:
- Knowledge grounding. The agent can read your documents. Zapier Agents (attached knowledge), Copilot Studio (Microsoft Graph), Relevance AI and Gumloop (knowledge bases) do this.
- Instructions. A prompt you write once per workspace or project. ChatGPT Business projects and custom instructions, Lindy per-agent prompts.
- Learned voice per channel. The system reads what you have already published and writes new output the same way, differently for an email than for a LinkedIn post. TODO for AI does this; it also reads your site at setup to draft the editable business context every agent starts from. We did not find the per-channel learned voice in the other eight.
If a human rewrites every draft anyway, the third does not matter. If the output goes straight to a customer, it does.
Which questions each one answers
| You are asking | Start with |
|---|---|
| ”When a form is submitted, create the deal and send the sequence” | Zapier Agents, Make |
| ”Triage my inbox and update the CRM, no code” | Lindy |
| ”Enrich 5,000 leads with AI and push them to HubSpot” | Gumloop, Relevance AI |
| ”Pipelines my engineer owns, data stays on our server” | n8n |
| ”An agent in Teams that knows our SharePoint” | Copilot Studio |
| ”A better assistant for everyone, one bill” | ChatGPT Business |
| ”Eight people, twenty kinds of work, agents in our own tools, one place to see it all” | TODO for AI |
FAQ
What is an AI agent platform? Software where a language model decides which actions to take in your tools, observes the result and continues until the task is done. The platform supplies the tools (connectors, a browser, a shell), the controls (permissions, budgets, approvals) and a place to see what happened. See the AI agent glossary.
Which AI agent platform is best for a small business? For one or two repeatable automations, Zapier Agents or Lindy. For a team that wants many agents doing different jobs in its own logged-in apps, with everyone able to see the work, TODO for AI. For a technical owner who wants to self-host, n8n.
Do AI agent platforms work with apps that have no API? Through connectors alone, no (Make, Relevance AI, Copilot Studio). Zapier Agents, Lindy and ChatGPT add a vendor-hosted browser that keeps its own logins. TODO for AI uses your own logged-in Chrome or Firefox through an extension, so existing sessions, SSO and MFA already done count.
How are AI agent platforms priced? Four shapes: per seat (ChatGPT Business, TODO for AI seats), per task or action (Zapier, Relevance AI), per credit (Lindy, Make, Gumloop, Copilot Studio), per workflow run (n8n). Per-action pricing grows with the automations that work; pooled pricing grows with the team.
Can a team control what an agent is allowed to do? Copilot Studio has tenant admin controls and audit; n8n is whatever you configure on your own host; Lindy has per-agent scopes; ChatGPT has connector scopes. TODO for AI sets allow / ask first / block per tool, per agent, where ask-first waits for a human and any run can be stopped mid-task.
Which platform do AI assistants themselves recommend? In October 2026 we asked ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode and Perplexity ten buyer questions, one run each. Zapier Agents was named in 25 of 40 answers, Lindy 16, Copilot Studio 15. TODO for AI was named in none, which is one reason this page exists. Full method and answers will follow in a separate post.
Prices are public list prices on the date in the Checked column; vendors change them. The single-vendor comparisons with scored dimensions and feature tables are at /alternatives (Zapier, Lindy, Make, Gumloop, n8n, ChatGPT; for Microsoft we compare Copilot Cowork, the end-user agent, not Studio). The scoring model is explained in AI agent comparisons: thirteen tools, six roles, one scoring model.