Relay.app alternatives

Relay.app alternatives are now a necessity rather than a nice-to-have, because Relay.app shut down in September 2026 and the vendor says all accounts, workflows and run history have been permanently deleted. The best replacement for most teams is n8n (cloud from €20/mo billed annually, or free self-hosted), with Zapier Agents the easiest option for non-technical teams and Activepieces the open-source pick.

Why are people looking for Relay.app alternatives?

People are looking for Relay.app alternatives because the product no longer exists. According to the shutdown notice on the Relay.app homepage, Relay.app shut down in September 2026, and all accounts, workflows, and run history have been permanently deleted.

That has two practical consequences for you:

1. There is nothing to migrate. Because run history and workflow definitions were deleted, you cannot export your old setup — you will be rebuilding from memory or documentation.
2. There is no grace period. The service is closed, so any automation you ran on Relay.app stopped in September 2026.

If you want to see what the product looked like before the shutdown, the vendor’s notice points to the July 2026 version of the homepage preserved on the Internet Archive. For anything operational, you need a new tool. Our hands-on testing notes for the alternatives below are still pending, so this page relies on each vendor’s published pricing and feature pages.

How do the top Relay.app alternatives compare?

The five strongest replacements differ mainly on hosting, pricing model and app coverage. Here is the quick view, with every figure from the vendor’s own pricing page.

1. n8n — best overall replacement

n8n is the closest match to what most Relay.app users were doing: mixing AI steps with deterministic workflow logic. On n8n’s AI agents page, the company says agents get 600+ native integrations plus your own workflows as tools, that you can replay any run to see where it broke, and that you can set which actions require human approval — the human-in-the-loop pattern Relay.app was known for.

Pricing is based on workflow executions, where one full run counts once regardless of how many steps it has. n8n’s pricing page lists Starter at €20/month billed annually, Pro at €50/month, and a free self-hosted Community Edition on GitHub. All plans include unlimited users and unlimited workflows.

Best for: technical operators, agencies, and EU-based teams (hosted data is stored in Frankfurt, Germany). Not for: complete beginners who want a chat-only assistant.

2. Zapier Agents — easiest for non-technical teams

Zapier Agents is the lowest-friction switch if your team is not technical. You describe an agent with help from Zapier Copilot, connect it to business data, and it acts across what Zapier’s Agents page says is 9,000+ apps — the widest coverage in this directory.

Agents is sold as an add-on on top of Zapier’s platform plans, which Zapier’s pricing page lists as Free (100 tasks/month), Professional from $19.99/month and Team from $69/month. Everything — Zaps, AI steps, code, MCP — draws from one shared task pool, so very chatty multi-step agents can burn through tasks faster than you expect.

Best for: teams already wired into Zapier, and simple delegated tasks like lead enrichment, triage and drafting replies. Not for: self-hosting or strict data-residency needs.

3. Activepieces — best open-source option

Activepieces is the pick if the Relay.app shutdown has made you wary of closed vendors. The company says its 770+ pieces are MIT-licensed open source, and every plan — including the free tier — can run on Activepieces Cloud or on your own servers, with an air-gapped option for enterprises.

Activepieces’ pricing page lists a free plan with 1,000 credits a month, Plus at $20/month flat with 10,000 credits, and Team at $200/month with 50,000 credits; overage on paid plans is $0.007 per credit. Like Relay.app, it supports approval gates on steps that touch money, customers or production.

Best for: teams that want to self-host or run air-gapped, and builders who want flat monthly pricing. Not for: teams that want a vendor to build and maintain agents for them.

4. Make — best for visual thinkers

Make (Make AI Agents) builds agents in the same visual canvas as ordinary automation scenarios. Its standout feature is transparency: a Reasoning panel shows every decision the agent makes, step by step, which makes it easier to trust an agent you rebuilt from memory after the Relay.app deletion.

Make’s pricing page lists a free plan with 1,000 credits per month, with paid Core, Pro and Teams plans billed in credits; most actions use 1 credit and some AI features use more. Make’s AI agents page says agents connect to 3,500+ pre-built apps, and you can add manual approvals or stop an agent at specific points.

Best for: SMBs and ops teams who think visually and want to watch agent reasoning. Not for: self-hosting, or anyone wanting an always-on chat assistant.

5. Gumloop — best for browser-based work

Gumloop is the specialist pick if your Relay.app workflows touched websites without APIs. Its browser agents can sign in with saved logins, browse, click, type and pull data from sites your team already uses, handing off to a person when needed.

Gumloop’s pricing page lists Pro from $37/month with a 14-day free trial, 20,000 credits per month, an 8% orchestration fee, and — unusually — unlimited agents and unlimited seats. There is no permanent free plan.

Best for: ops, marketing and sales teams, and larger teams that would otherwise pay per seat. Not for: self-hosting or very small budgets.

Which Relay.app alternative should you choose?

Choose based on what your deleted Relay.app workflows actually did. Three illustrative scenarios:

• A 5-person agency that ran client-reporting automations with human review steps: rebuild in n8n, using human-approval nodes and the free self-hosted edition to keep client data on your own infrastructure.
• A non-technical marketing team whose workflows mostly moved data between mainstream SaaS apps: Zapier Agents, because the app connections you need almost certainly already exist there.
• An ops team whose automations logged into web portals with no API: Gumloop’s browser agents, with unlimited seats for the whole team.

If you are still weighing the two frontrunners, our n8n vs Zapier Agents comparison goes deeper, and the workflow automation agents category lists every builder in this space. Teams that specifically want to avoid another shutdown risk should browse the open-source and self-hosted category or our guide to the best self-hosted AI agent builders.

How do you migrate from Relay.app to a new tool?

Because Relay.app deleted all workflows and run history, migration means rebuilding, not exporting. Work through these steps:

1. Inventory what you lost. List every automation you remember running, its trigger, the apps it touched, and any human review steps.
2. Check the Internet Archive. The July 2026 Relay.app homepage is preserved there and may jog your memory on how key workflows were framed.
3. Pick your replacement from the table above, prioritising hosting needs (self-host vs cloud) and pricing model (executions vs tasks vs credits).
4. Rebuild your single most valuable workflow first, on a free tier where possible — n8n Community Edition, Activepieces Free or Make Free all work for this.
5. Add approval gates before going live. Recreate the human-in-the-loop steps you had in Relay.app using n8n’s human-approval settings, Activepieces’ approval gates or Make’s manual approvals.
6. Run old and new in parallel where the old process was manual, then decommission the manual fallback.

Bottom line

Relay.app shut down in September 2026 with all data permanently deleted, so the only question is what you rebuild on. For most former users, n8n is the best Relay.app alternative — execution-based pricing, human approvals and a free self-hosted edition — while Zapier Agents is the easier path for non-technical teams and Activepieces is the safest bet if you never want a vendor shutdown to strand you again.

What to ask next:

• How does n8n compare to Zapier Agents in detail?
• Which no-code AI agent builders are best for small businesses?
• Which agent builders can I self-host to avoid shutdown risk?