AI agents are what everyone is talking about this year. Just open up LinkedIn and scroll for more than 2 seconds.
You’ll see 80% of posts discussing how agents are completely transforming how people get things done.
The dark side of this coin: There’s a lot of noise. Most people are interested in them, but don’t know how to custom-build agents.
This guide is for both technical and non-technical people interested in AI agent platforms. Below, we break down the leading AI agent tools of 2025, what they are, how they work, who should use them, and how much they’ll “really” cost.
✅ Inside you’ll find:
• Clear side-by-side comparisons of popular AI agent platforms
• Smart questions most people don’t think to ask before choosing
• Quick summaries of who each tool is best for
• Honest pros, cons, and pricing so you know what to expect
• Tips on when to buy ready-made bots or build your own, plus real-world examples
Whether you’re a developer, a product manager, or just AI-curious, you’ll get a fast, practical overview (with zero hype).
👇 Dive in to find the right AI agent platform and avoid expensive mistakes.
An AI Agent Platform is a software environment or framework that helps you create autonomous AI systems—called agents—that can think, plan, and act to complete tasks with minimal human guidance.
Unlike traditional AI models (like ChatGPT) that respond passively to prompts, AI agents can:
Capability | Description | Example |
---|---|---|
Autonomous decision-making | Agents can decide what to do next without a new prompt | A support agent escalates a ticket after checking order history |
Tool & API integration | Agents can interact with external tools like databases, calendars, or APIs | A sales agent sends a follow-up email and updates your CRM automatically |
Memory & context | Agents can recall previous user inputs, facts, or sessions | A booking agent remembers your hotel preferences from a past request |
Planning & task execution | Agents break goals into sub-tasks and execute them in sequence | A coding agent generates a feature, debugs errors, and writes documentation |
Orchestration | Agents can coordinate with other agents or modules to complete complex workflows | One agent gathers data while another formats and presents it in a dashboard |
Benefit | Description | Example |
---|---|---|
Automation of complex tasks | AI agents can handle multi-step workflows that typically require human coordination | An onboarding agent sets up accounts, sends welcome emails, and schedules a training session |
24/7 availability | Agents work around the clock without breaks, providing always-on service and support | A customer service agent resolves tickets and answers questions overnight and on weekends |
Personalization at scale | Agents tailor responses and actions based on user history and preferences | A shopping assistant recommends products based on past purchases and browsing behavior |
Increased operational efficiency | Agents reduce the workload on human teams by automating repetitive or low-value tasks | An internal agent files expenses, updates dashboards, and syncs data across platforms |
Faster decision-making | Agents analyze data and take action instantly, improving speed and accuracy | A trading agent monitors markets and executes orders based on predefined strategies |
Even the most advanced single-agent AI often falters when complex tasks demand collaboration among agents. Platforms with strong orchestration let multiple agents reason, delegate, and escalate tasks seamlessly.
Power users want to tweak agent behaviors, data sources, and logic — yet forum threads reveal frustration with vendor lock-in or cryptic scripting languages.
AI agents surprise users by taking unexpected—or outright risky—actions. Savvy buyers look for granular guardrails, real-time audit trails, and live rollback.
💡 Honorable mentions: Tight integrations with in-house apps, continuous performance analytics, and robust developer support communities are also frequently highlighted as valuable.
👉 Read this blog to discover 15 AI Agent Examples Changing The World in 2025
Buying a pre-built AI agent like Big Sur AI saves you a massive amount of time. You can launch in minutes with a chatbot that's already trained to handle website sales, support, and onboarding, no need to spend weeks building logic, handling edge cases, or wiring up tools.
Pre-built solutions come with polished UX, smart fallback behavior, and built-in integrations with CRMs, calendars, and knowledge bases. That means your agent works out of the box, without needing a dev team to stitch everything together.
You also receive ongoing improvements, new features, enhanced models, and security updates, all without lifting a finger. And while building may seem cheaper at first, the real costs of engineering time, token usage, and maintenance quickly add up.
Most importantly, with a tool like Big Sur AI, you're focused on business outcomes, not backend infrastructure. You get results faster, without becoming an AI ops company.
You might consider building from scratch if:
👇 Ready to find your AI agent platform? Dive in below!
Tool | Best For | Key Strength | Drawbacks | Pricing |
---|---|---|---|---|
Relay.app | Ops teams, startups, workflow automators (non-technical & technical) | Collaborative workflow automation, multi-agent, human-in-the-loop controls | Debugging visibility, rigid data handling, integration limitations | Starter $18/mo/seat; Pro $38/mo/seat; Enterprise custom. Task/user limits apply |
n8n | Developers, automation power users, privacy-conscious orgs | Open-source, self-hosting, node-based visual workflows, extensibility | Steep curve for advanced use, complex error handling, UI can be unwieldy at scale | Free (basic); Pro $20/mo; Enterprise custom. Usage & feature-based tiers |
Botpress | Enterprise chatbots, support agents, developer teams | Visual conversation builder, NLU, multi-channel, on-prem deployment | Deep scripting required for advanced, costly at scale, manual integration effort | Free; Pro $495/mo; Enterprise custom. Usage caps can drive upgrades |
OpenAI GPT-4o + Assistants API | AI product teams, developers, advanced conversational agents | LLM+functions, native function calling, multi-turn memory, orchestration | Debugging/logging opacity, integration limited, rate limits for scale | Usage-based: $5/1M input tokens, $15/1M output tokens (GPT-4o) |
Langchain | Engineers, data scientists, app teams needing custom LLM integrations | Highly composable, advanced tool/data/LLM chaining, flexible memory | Steep learning curve, rapid API changes, abstraction can slow performance | Open-source (free); possible platform-specific cloud/hosting costs |
Stack AI | Enterprise teams wanting customizable agents + workflow, low/no-code builds | Visual builder, modular agent chaining, transparent debugging | No self-serve pricing, features behind enterprise sales, integration lag for niche APIs | Custom – contact sales for quote |
Voiceflow | Teams building chatbots or voice agents for multiple channels | No-code visual flow, multi-channel deployment, strong team collaboration tools | Complex at scale, limited custom logic, enterprise integrations lag | Starter $40/mo (2 seats), Team $140/mo (5 seats), Enterprise custom |
Public reviews: 4.7 ⭐ (G2, Product Hunt)
Similar to: Zapier, Make
Typical users: Operations teams, startups, and workflow automators
Known for: Collaborative workflow automation with AI copilots
Relay.app is an AI-powered workflow automation tool that lets teams create, assign, and track tasks across their favorite apps. It’s a popular AI agent platform for non-technical users.
Relay.app streamlines agent workflows by connecting triggers, APIs, and structured logic, letting teams deploy and manage automations without extra infrastructure.
💡 Summary: Relay.app orchestrates task automation for AI agents using customizable workflows, triggers, API integrations, human-in-the-loop steps, and team collaboration tools.
✅ Human-in-the-Loop Automation
Relay.app seamlessly integrates approval steps for manual oversight within autonomous workflows.
✅ Native, Actionable Email Bot
It can triage, draft, and respond to emails natively without requiring third-party integrations.
✅ Multi-Agent Collaboration
Relay.app enables multiple AI agents to coordinate on workflows, reducing single-point automation bottlenecks.
❌ Opaque Workflow Debugging
Users report that diagnosing failed automations can be difficult due to limited step-by-step visibility and log detail.
❌ Rigid Data Handling
Relay.app’s automation flows struggle with complex data manipulations compared to node-based competitors like n8n.
❌ Third-Party API Limitations
Some users find integration options less extensive or slower to update than open-source platforms, restricting advanced agent use cases.
Relay.app uses a transparent, flat-rate pricing model with monthly billing based on the number of seats and automations you need.
Choose between these 3 plans:
💡Expect to pay more if your business requires a high number of tasks or many users as your organization scales.
Public reviews: 4.7 ⭐ (G2, Capterra)
Similar to: Zapier, Make
Typical users: Developers and automation enthusiasts
Known for: Flexible open-source workflow automation
n8n is a workflow automation tool that lets anyone connect apps and automate tasks without coding. Through a visual editor, you can build custom workflows to move data, send notifications, or sync information across tools.
n8n connects APIs, handles data flows, and triggers automations easily, making AI Agent deployment simple, flexible, and fast—without vendor lock-in.
💡 Summary: n8n enables users to visually build, connect, and automate complex workflows using integrations, custom code, and decision logic—making it highly adaptable for deploying and managing AI agent operations.
✅ Extensibility
Native JS editing and a vast node library make integrating custom AI workflows seamless.
✅ Data Sovereignty
Self-hosting lets teams keep sensitive AI and automation data fully on-premises.
✅ Fine-grained Automation Control
Every workflow step, including AI agent calls, is scriptable and easily auditable.
❌ Complex Error Handling
Debugging and tracing failures in multi-step agent workflows can be tedious without granular error reporting.
❌ Steep Learning Curve for Advanced Features
Configuring sophisticated AI agent scenarios often requires JavaScript and workflow logic expertise.
❌ UI Scalability Issues
Large or heavily branched automations can become unwieldy to manage in the visual editor, slowing iteration.
n8n uses a tiered pricing model based on monthly node execution volume, user seats, and advanced features.
Choose between these 3 plans:
💡 As your workflow or team size grows, expect costs to increase due to execution volume or needing premium controls.
Public reviews: 4.6 ⭐ (G2)
Similar to: Dialogflow, Rasa
Typical users: Developers and enterprise teams
Known for: No-code chatbot building and conversational AI platform
Botpress is an AI platform that lets users create, manage, and deploy chatbots and virtual assistants. It’s designed to automate customer support, answer questions, and handle tasks through conversational AI, all without requiring coding.
Botpress offers fast deployment, strong modularity, and seamless API integration, making it ideal for building scalable, customizable AI agent workflows.
💡 Summary: Botpress enables teams to visually design agent workflows, interpret natural language, deploy across channels, inject custom logic, and connect dynamic knowledge sources.
✅ Composable Modular Architecture
Flexible node-based design enables rapid creation and customization of agent workflows.
✅ On-Prem & Private Cloud Deployment
Deploy anywhere, meeting strict enterprise privacy and compliance requirements.
✅ Advanced Multimodal Integrations
Seamlessly combines LLMs, traditional NLP, and external APIs in a unified agent pipeline.
❌ Steep Learning Curve for Advanced Use
Integrating custom logic and advanced agent workflows often requires deep scripting, which can slow non-developers.
❌ Premium Features Locked Behind Paywall
Access to analytics, enterprise integrations, and higher usage tiers quickly escalates costs for scaling teams.
❌ Limited Out-of-the-Box Integrations
Many users report that integrating new channels or APIs frequently demands manual setup or custom connectors.
Botpress uses a usage-based pricing model that charges based on monthly active users and conversations.
Choose between these 3 plans:
💡 While the Free plan is generous, scaling serious bots with Botpress can become costly as user interaction increases and advanced features are utilized.
Public reviews: 4.7 ⭐ (G2, Capterra)
Similar to: Google Vertex AI, Anthropic Claude
Typical users: Developers, enterprises, and AI product teams
Known for: Flexible LLM-based APIs for conversational AI, task automation, and creating advanced virtual assistants
By combining OpenAI GPT-4o with Functions and the Assistants’ API, developers can build AI-powered apps and agents that can chat, perform tasks, and call functions to fetch real-time data or take action, making digital helpers more interactive and useful.
GPT-4o pairs fast reasoning with live API calls and modular Assistants, allowing developers to launch responsive, customizable agents with reduced overhead.
💡 In summary: OpenAI GPT-4o w/ Functions + Assistants API combines advanced function calling, multi-turn memory, integrated knowledge retrieval, tool orchestration, and structured output generation for building sophisticated AI agent workflows.
✅ Native Function Calling Integration
Combines native function calls and conversational orchestration, minimizing the need for custom routing logic.
✅ Multi-Step Action Chaining
Handles complex agent workflows by chaining multiple function calls within a single response natively.
✅ Context Persistence across Sessions
Enables assistants to retain relevant context across sessions, supporting long-lived, multi-turn agent experiences.
❌ Opaque Error Handling
Debugging failed agent actions is challenging due to the limited transparency and granularity of logging in the workflow.
❌ Limited Native Integrations
Compared to agent-centric platforms, out-of-the-box integrations for business tools and data sources are less extensive.
❌ Concurrency and Rate Limits
Strict request throttles can bottleneck high-volume, multi-agent deployments, requiring costly workarounds or upgrades.
OpenAI offers pricing on a pay-as-you-go, usage-based model with varying rates for different models and API features.
Choose between 2 metered plans:
💡 Users should monitor API usage carefully to avoid unplanned expenses, as costs scale directly with the volume of processed tokens and enabled features.
Public reviews: 4.7 ⭐ (G2, Product Hunt averages)
Similar to: LlamaIndex, Haystack
Typical users: AI developers, data scientists, software engineers
Known for: Streamlining the building of applications that integrate language models with external data
Langchain is a software framework that enables developers to build applications utilizing large language models. It connects these models with data, APIs, and other tools, enabling AI to answer questions, automate tasks, and power chatbots.
✅ Advanced composability
Langchain’s modular architecture makes it easy to combine multiple language models, data sources, and tools in sophisticated workflows—allowing developers to create complex and customized AI agents with minimal friction.
✅ Built-in integrations
Langchain offers a rich ecosystem of pre-built integrations with popular APIs, data stores, and third-party services, significantly reducing development time for real-world applications.
✅ Flexible memory and context management
Langchain excels at handling conversational memory, long-term context, and retrieval-augmented generation, giving developers granular control over how AI agents remember information and interact over time.
❌ Steep Learning Curve & Complex Debugging
Debugging and troubleshooting can be especially frustrating, as errors may stem from deep within chains or require a nuanced understanding of how different modules interact.
❌ Opaque & Shifting APIs
The rapid pace of development means that documentation may lag behind, leading to issues where examples or third-party guides are outdated or incompatible with the latest version.
❌ Performance Overhead
Langchain’s abstraction layers and orchestration of multiple components—such as agents, tools, and memory—can introduce unnecessary latency and performance overhead. Users building latency-sensitive or production applications occasionally find Langchain slower and more resource-intensive compared to more streamlined agent frameworks.
Public reviews: 4.7 ⭐ (G2)
Similar to: LangChain, Microsoft Copilot Studio
Typical users: Developers and enterprise teams
Known for: Creating and deploying customizable AI agents
Stack AI is a platform purpose-built for the Enterprise that lets teams build custom AI agents using drag-and-drop tools and connect them to their data and workflows. It helps automate tasks like data analysis, customer support, and reporting with minimal coding.
Stack AI makes it easy to build, customize, and deploy agents fast. It integrates with popular APIs and tools, streamlining workflows without heavy engineering resources.
💡 Summary: Stack AI provides a visual environment to design, integrate, customize, monitor, and control the workflows and logic of AI agents.
✅ Workflow Integration Flexibility
Easily connects AI agents to custom workflows and databases with native no-code integrations.
✅ Agent Modularity
Allows users to compose and chain multiple agents with specialized functions in complex automation pipelines.
✅ Transparent Debugging Interface
Provides detailed, real-time logs and visualization of agent reasoning steps for rapid troubleshooting.
❌ Opaque Pricing & Quotes
Stack AI lacks transparent self-serve pricing, so teams must negotiate custom quotes for every deployment.
❌ Enterprise-Centric Onboarding
Many advanced features are gated behind enterprise sales cycles, making rapid prototyping slower for smaller teams.
❌ Occasional API Integration Lag
User feedback notes delays in support for new or niche API integrations compared to open-source competitors like n8n.
Stack AI offers custom pricing based on your specific use case and scale, rather than publishing fixed plan rates.
Public reviews: 4.7 ⭐ (G2, Capterra)
Similar to: Botpress, Dialogflow
Typical users: Product teams, conversation designers, and enterprises building chatbots or voice assistants
Known for: Collaborative platform for designing and deploying conversational AI experiences
Voiceflow is a platform for designing, building, and launching AI-powered chatbots and voice assistants. Teams use it to create conversational agents for websites, apps, and smart speakers without heavy coding.
Voiceflow streamlines agent design with flexible logic, easy collaboration, and quick integration to leading LLMs, making production-ready AI agent deployment faster and simpler.
💡 Summary: Voiceflow enables teams to visually build, manage, and deploy advanced conversational AI agents for multiple channels, incorporating external data and supporting streamlined collaboration.
✅ Visual Conversation Design
Voiceflow enables complex multi-turn conversational flows using an intuitive, no-code drag-and-drop builder.
✅ Collaboration for Teams
Real-time multiplayer editing and version control make multi-stakeholder agent design seamless.
✅ Omni-Channel Prototyping
Instantly test and deploy agents across web, voice, and messaging channels from a single project.
❌ Workflow Complexity at Scale
As projects grow, managing large or deeply nested conversational flows can become unwieldy and hard to debug.
❌ Custom Code Integration Gaps
Users report limited options for embedding advanced custom logic or running custom code directly within agent flows compared to developer-centric tools.
❌ Enterprise Channel Limitations
Enterprise reviews note that deep, out-of-the-box integrations with certain proprietary CX and telephony platforms lag behind specialist AI agent suites.
Voiceflow offers usage-based pricing with tiers scaling by seats, features, and usage limits.
Choose between these 3 plans:
🔔 Pricing becomes progressively higher as you add users, API calls, or want enterprise-grade features.
Ready to experience answer quality and ease of use like never before?
👉 Try Big Sur AI for yourself at https://hub.bigsur.ai/login