A free AI agent platform is one you can use without paying, but “free” covers five different arrangements and only two of them survive a real workload. Of the ten platforms here, two are free forever if you host them yourself, four are free forever with a monthly cap that pauses your work, one is free but cannot be used in production, one gives a small daily allowance, and two are trials with a free label attached.
Most lists of free AI agent platforms count the price and stop. That produces a list that recommends a free tier which runs out in a week, or one that quietly forbids the thing the reader needs to do, which is usually running the same job every day.
This comparison starts from what the free tier actually allows, what happens when you exceed it, and how much work you can get through before that happens. Every price here was read on the vendor’s own pricing page in October 2026.
Almost every platform here can build something for free. The question that separates them is whether the same workflow still runs in month three without a card on file.
What “free” means in this market
The word covers five arrangements, and they behave differently once a job runs on a schedule.
Free because you run it yourself. The software is downloadable and costs nothing to operate beyond your own server. The cost is setup effort and maintenance, not money. n8n Community Edition and self-hosted Dify sit here, and our open-source platform comparison covers what that maintenance actually involves.
Free forever with a monthly cap. You get a fixed allowance each month and the platform pauses or queues when it runs out. Make, Activepieces, Zapier and Botpress all work this way.
Free but restricted by shape. The plan is permanent, but something structural limits it: development only, or two-step workflows only, or a hard cap on conversations. You can stay on it indefinitely and still be unable to do the job.
Free as a small allowance. A one-off or limited amount of usage, enough to evaluate the product rather than run on it. Dify’s cloud sandbox is 200 message credits.
Free as a trial. Time-limited, sometimes card-free, sometimes not. Lindy’s free credits expire after seven days. Gumloop’s only no-cost route is a 14-day trial.
A sixth category is worth naming because it is now common: platforms that used to be free and no longer are. Gumloop’s pricing page today lists Pro and Enterprise only. Reviews written earlier in 2026 still describe a free plan with thousands of credits, which is why the claim keeps circulating.
The arithmetic that decides whether a free tier is real
Free allowances are quoted per month, and work is quoted per day. Converting between the two is where most of these plans fall apart.
A job that runs once a day is roughly 30 runs a month. Hourly is about 730. Every fifteen minutes is about 2,900. Every five minutes is about 8,760. Those are the numbers to hold against any monthly allowance.
Take Zapier’s free plan, which allows 100 tasks per month. A daily workflow with three steps uses three tasks per run, so 30 runs consumes 90 tasks, or 90% of the entire free allowance, for one workflow. Add a second workflow and you are over.
Make’s free plan gives 1,000 credits a month, with a fifteen-minute minimum interval between runs and two active scenarios. At one credit per action, that supports roughly 33 single-action runs per day. An hourly job fits comfortably. A five-minute job does not come close.
Activepieces also gives 1,000 credits a month, but resets them daily and does not bill you for the overage. You get about 33 credits a day, and the rest waits until tomorrow. That is a materially better failure mode than a bill or a hard stop.
Botpress counts conversations instead of actions, at 100 per month on the free plan. For a support agent handling even a handful of real conversations per day, that is a two-week allowance.
The pattern is consistent: free tiers are sized for building and testing, not for operating. That is a reasonable design, and it means the honest question is not which free plan is biggest, but how quickly a real job moves you off it. Our guide to scheduled and recurring agent tasks runs the same arithmetic against hourly and weekly cadences.
The 10 best free and low-cost AI agent platforms in 2026
The list is ordered by what the free tier actually delivers over time, from a platform you can run indefinitely at no cost to one that no longer has a free tier at all. Each entry covers the same four points: what it is, where it holds up, where it falls short, and who it suits.
1. n8n
What it is: n8n is a workflow automation platform with native AI agent nodes, available as a self-hosted Community Edition on GitHub or as n8n Cloud. Self-hosting is free and has no usage cap.
Strengths: The Community Edition is the most generous free option in this list by a wide margin, because it is not metered at all. Run 30 executions a month or 30,000, the platform cost is the server you already pay for. Node-based workflows make branching and error handling visible, which matters once something runs unattended overnight. It supports 400-plus integrations and connects to any model provider with your own key.
Weaknesses: The free tier requires a server, Docker knowledge and ongoing upgrades, so the cost is engineering time rather than money. Cloud is a 14-day trial of Pro features rather than a free plan, which surprises people who expected the hosted version to match the Community Edition. The licence is source-available under the Sustainable Use License rather than OSI-approved, so building a product on it carries conditions.
Best for: technical freelancers and small teams with someone who can run a container and is willing to trade setup effort for an uncapped platform.
2. Dify
What it is: Dify is a platform for building LLM applications and agents with visual workflows, RAG pipelines and model management. It can be self-hosted from its public repository or used through Dify Cloud.
Strengths: Self-hosting is free and the community edition is capable enough for production work, including retrieval over your own documents and multi-step workflows. Cloud is cheap per workspace rather than per seat, at $590 per workspace per year for 5,000 message credits a month, so a small team of five costs the same as a team of one. Model credentials stay under your control.
Weaknesses: The free cloud sandbox gives 200 message credits, which is an evaluation allowance rather than a working one, and sandbox workspaces are rate-limited when they test retrieval repeatedly. The licence is a modified Apache 2.0 with conditions attached, including a clause on multi-tenant operation, so its open-source status is worth reading before you rely on it. Self-hosting also means running several services together.
Best for: teams that want retrieval and agent workflows in one place and are comfortable hosting, or a small team that prefers one workspace bill over per-seat pricing.
3. Activepieces
What it is: Activepieces is an open-source automation platform with AI agents, tables and MCP support, offered as a hosted product or self-hosted.
Strengths: The free plan is the best-designed metered tier here. It gives 1,000 credits a month, supports up to five users, and resets daily, so a burst does not consume a whole month. Going over does not generate a bill: the extra work waits until tomorrow. One plan covers a small team rather than one seat. Paid tiers start at $20 flat per month for 10,000 credits, and bring-your-own-key is available.
Weaknesses: The same daily reset that prevents billing surprises also caps a heavy day at roughly 33 credits, which is limiting for a batch job that needs to finish today. The five-user ceiling on free and Plus is below what a growing team needs, and SSO arrives only at the $200 Team tier. Some workflow features are marked as not included below Team.
Best for: a small team that wants a permanent free tier without a credit card and without the risk of an overage invoice.
4. Make
What it is: Make is a visual automation platform where scenarios are built on a canvas, with AI agents and an MCP server available on every plan including free.
Strengths: The free plan is genuinely permanent and gives 1,000 credits a month across 3,500-plus apps, with routers, filters and support included. Make AI Agents are available on the free tier, which is unusual. Paid entry is low at $9 a month for Core, $16 for Pro and $29 for Teams at 10,000 credits on annual billing, so the jump from free to useful is smaller than on most platforms in this list.
Weaknesses: Free is capped at two active scenarios and a fifteen-minute minimum interval between runs, so anything that needs to react quickly cannot live there. Execution logs are retained for seven days and there is no full-text log search below Pro. Credits became the billing unit in August 2026, and advanced features that call the AI provider consume more than one credit per action, which makes cost harder to predict.
Best for: freelancers building a small number of scenarios who want a visual canvas and a cheap, predictable first paid step.
5. Zapier
What it is: Zapier is the largest no-code automation platform, with Zaps, Tables, Forms, chatbots and an MCP server, plus AI features across its plans.
Strengths: The free plan is permanent, needs no card, and includes 100 tasks a month with unlimited Zaps and access to tables and forms. Its integration catalogue is the broadest in this market, which matters when the tool you need is obscure. Copilot and AI troubleshooting are available on free, and the step from free to Professional at $19.99 a month is well documented.
Weaknesses: Free is restricted to two-step Zaps and a single seat, which rules out most real workflows because a trigger plus one action leaves no room for a filter, a branch or a second system. Polling runs every 15 minutes on free. At 100 tasks a month, one daily three-step Zap consumes 90% of the allowance on its own, so the tier is a trial in practice even though it never expires.
Best for: someone testing whether a specific app pair can be connected at all, before committing to a paid plan.
6. Botpress
What it is: Botpress is a platform for building conversational AI agents, with a visual studio, a developer kit, and a help centre for self-service support.
Strengths: Free includes three seats, three AI agents and 100 conversations a month, with a public help centre and community support. Unlimited AI agents arrive on paid plans, and the plan comparison is unusually specific about what each tier contains. Conversation-based pricing makes cost forecastable in a way resolution-based pricing is not.
Weaknesses: A hundred conversations a month is a small allowance for a customer-facing agent, and the platform is built for that use case rather than for internal automation. Free storage is hard-capped with no add-ons, and automatic AI spend recharge is unavailable on free and community plans. Paid entry is steep for a solo user at $150 a month billed annually for 250 conversations.
Best for: a freelancer who needs to demonstrate a working customer-facing chatbot for a client and can stay inside 100 conversations.
7. Pipedream
What it is: Pipedream is a developer platform for connecting APIs and running code-based workflows, with 3,000-plus connectors and MCP servers.
Strengths: The free plan is unusually complete for building. You get every feature, the full connector library, unlimited team members, MCP servers and custom OAuth clients at no cost. Workflows are written in code, so anything expressible in JavaScript or Python is expressible here, which suits freelancers doing integration work for clients.
Weaknesses: Free is development only. A production environment is not included, and serving external users requires the Startup plan at $99 a month billed annually, or $150 billed monthly. That is a large jump from free for a solo operator, and it means the free tier is a build-and-test environment rather than a place to run client work. Usage credits are capped at development on the free plan.
Best for: developers evaluating whether Pipedream can handle a specific integration before quoting a client for it.
8. Shogo
What it is: Shogo is an AI agent platform that builds and runs persistent applications, including dashboards, forms and internal tools, from conversational prompts, with over 1,000 integrations and several frontier models.
Strengths: Free needs no card and includes daily free usage, starter templates and community support, enough to build and test before deciding. The paid entry is the lowest here at $8 a month for Basic, one user with unlimited usage inside rolling fair-use windows rather than a credit cap. Pro at $20 a seat adds all model options and overage at provider cost plus 20%.
Weaknesses: Basic is single-user and limited to the fast model, so two people need Pro at $20 a seat, and every model starts there. SSO, audit logs and per-member spending limits wait until Business at $40 a seat, putting basic governance out of reach for a small team. No credit figure is published for the free tier, only a description of daily usage, so it is harder to forecast than a numbered allowance.
Best for: a solopreneur who wants a persistent internal tool rather than a workflow, and a low flat fee rather than a credit meter.
9. Lindy
What it is: Lindy is an AI assistant that works inside email, Slack and calendar to handle routines, meeting follow-ups and inbox triage, with 1,500-plus integrations.
Strengths: The free offer is generous in size if not in duration: $50 in credits, no credit card required, and setup takes a couple of minutes. Credit consumption is transparently tiered by task size, from 2 to 250 credits for everyday asks up to 1,000 to 2,500 for large builds. Slack-native operation means a small team can try it in the tool they already use.
Weaknesses: The free credits expire after seven days, so it is a trial rather than a free tier. After that, every active user needs a seat at $29.99 a month for 3,000 credits, and anyone who mentions the assistant in Slack takes a seat. Monthly credits do not roll over, and topping up costs $10 per 1,000 credits. For a freelancer, one seat is the price of two Shogo Pro seats.
Best for: someone who wants to test whether an inbox and calendar assistant earns its keep within a week, and will decide quickly.
10. Gumloop
What it is: Gumloop is a no-code platform for building AI workflows and agents, with a visual builder and bring-your-own-key support.
Strengths: The product is capable and the pricing is simple where it exists: Pro at $37 a month includes 20,000 credits, unlimited seats and a 14-day trial. Orchestration is 8% when you bring your own key, which is lower than a per-credit margin on model calls. Enterprise adds team features.
Weaknesses: There is no free plan. The pricing page lists Pro and Enterprise only, and the free plan that earlier reviews describe with thousands of credits was removed during the summer of 2026. The 14-day trial is the only no-cost route, and it requires a payment method that rolls into a subscription. At $37 a month, entry is more expensive than every other paid tier here.
Best for: a team already committed to spending on automation, for whom a two-week trial is enough to decide.
Which free tier fits which situation
If you can run a container, self-host n8n or Dify. An uncapped platform for the cost of a server is the best value in this list, and the only real cost is the time to set it up.
If you cannot, Activepieces and Make are the strongest permanent free tiers. Both give 1,000 credits a month; Activepieces is better for a small team because of the five seats and the daily reset, and Make is better if you need a wide app catalogue and a cheap first paid step.
If your work is a daily job with a few steps, check the arithmetic before choosing. Zapier’s 100 tasks will not carry a three-step daily workflow and anything else. Make and Activepieces will.
If you are evaluating rather than operating, Lindy’s seven-day credit grant and Gumloop’s 14-day trial are both reasonable ways to decide quickly. Neither is a place to run production work.
If a budget is genuinely fixed at zero, the honest answer is self-hosting or a metered free tier with a pause rather than a bill. Every hosted free tier in this list will stop you at some point, and the question is whether it stops you politely.
Our breakdown of AI agent pricing models covers what happens after the free tier in more detail, including how per-seat, per-credit and flat-rate plans diverge at scale.
Where Shogo fits, and where it doesn’t
Shogo is worth a look when the thing you want to build is an application rather than a workflow, and when you would rather pay a small flat fee than manage a credit meter. The $8 Basic plan is the lowest paid entry in this comparison, and the free tier is enough to build something real before paying anything.
It is the wrong choice in three situations. If you need two or more people on it, Basic does not apply and you are at $20 a seat. If you need SSO, audit logs or per-member spending controls, those start at $40 a seat, which is more than a small team may want to spend on governance alone. And if your priority is a precisely forecastable allowance, the published free tier describes daily usage rather than naming a credit number, so a platform with a hard cap is easier to budget against.
For a sole trader building one internal tool, the free tier followed by Basic is a cheap path. For a team of five that needs administration features, the maths changes and a self-hosted option may cost less in money, though more in time.
Frequently asked questions
Which free AI agent platform is actually free forever?
Only two kinds. Self-hosted platforms such as n8n Community Edition and Dify are free indefinitely because you pay for the server rather than the software. Metered tiers on Make, Activepieces, Zapier and Botpress are also permanent, but each pauses or queues work when the monthly allowance is gone. Anything described as free credits that expire is a trial.
How many runs a month does a free tier support?
Divide the monthly allowance by the credits each run consumes. Make and Activepieces give 1,000 credits, which is roughly 33 single-credit runs a day. Zapier gives 100 tasks, which a daily three-step Zap will consume in full. Hourly jobs run about 730 times a month and five-minute jobs about 8,760, so most free tiers cover a few daily workflows rather than continuous ones.
Is Gumloop still free?
No. Its pricing page lists Pro at $37 a month and Enterprise, with a 14-day free trial and no permanent free plan. The free plan with thousands of credits that appears in reviews published earlier in 2026 was removed during the summer. Any list still describing a free Gumloop tier is out of date. The Gumloop alternatives that keep a permanent free tier are worth comparing if that was the draw.
What happens when I hit the limit on a free plan?
It depends on the platform, and the differences matter. Activepieces waits until the next day and does not bill you. Make pauses scenarios until credits are added, queueing incoming webhooks. Botpress adds conversation packs automatically at 95% of quota, which is the most expensive outcome. Zapier stops running tasks. Checking the overage behaviour is more useful than checking the allowance.
Can I use a free AI agent platform for client work?
Sometimes, but check the terms rather than the price. Pipedream’s free tier is development only and excludes production use entirely. n8n’s Sustainable Use License permits internal business use but restricts commercial distribution. Activepieces and Make allow you to build client workflows on the free tier, subject to the monthly cap. Free tiers are usually licensed for your own business, not for resale, which is why the platforms agencies choose tend to differ from the ones solos pick.
Is a self-hosted free tier really free?
In licence terms, yes. In practice you are paying for a server, backups, upgrades and the time of whoever maintains it. For a technical freelancer that is often cheaper than a subscription. For a solo operator without infrastructure experience, the maintenance cost usually exceeds the subscription they were avoiding.
Which low-cost AI agent platform is cheapest once I outgrow free?
Shogo Basic at $8 a month is the lowest entry in this comparison, followed by Make Core at $9 and Zapier Professional at $19.99. Activepieces is $20 flat with 10,000 credits, which is better value than a per-seat plan for a team of several people. Lindy at $29.99 per user and Gumloop at $37 are the most expensive entry points, and Botpress at $150 a month is priced for support operations rather than solo use.
Sources
- n8n, pricing page and Cloud trial documentation
- Dify, pricing page and licence repository
- Activepieces, pricing page
- Make, pricing page
- Zapier, pricing page
- Botpress, pricing page
- Pipedream, pricing page
- Shogo, llms.txt and pricing page
- Lindy, pricing page
- Gumloop, pricing page
