Relay vs Lindy: Relay Shut Down, What Now?

Updated 2026-10-13 · 1065 words

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Verdict: this comparison is now a history lesson with a migration plan attached. Relay.app shut down for good in 2026, free accounts lost access on August 15, paid accounts on September 14, so there's no live "Relay vs Lindy" decision left to make in the sense the query usually implies. What's left is a real question: if you were using or evaluating Relay for its signature feature, an AI agent that pauses for human approval before it acts, where do you go now? Lindy is the closest match for that specific pattern. If what you actually valued was Relay's drag-and-drop automation canvas more than the approval step, a tool built around that structure, like Gumloop or a self-hosted n8n workflow, is the better fit.

What Relay.app actually was

Relay was a workflow automation platform built around one defining idea: not every action an AI step produces should execute unattended. You'd build a flow much like you would in Zapier or Make, trigger, steps, logic, but at any point you could drop in a checkpoint where a person reviewed a drafted email, a Slack message, or a CRM update through Slack, email, or Relay's own dashboard before it actually went out. That human-in-the-loop pattern was the product's entire identity, not a bolted-on setting, and it's why Relay got cited constantly in "best AI agent" roundups (including earlier versions of our own) as the pick for teams that didn't trust an agent to act fully autonomously yet.

It ran on a tiered, usage-based pricing model, free for light testing, paid tiers scaling with workflow steps and AI credits, and covered roughly 100 integrations, a meaningfully smaller catalog than Zapier's thousands of apps but enough for the common CRM, email, and messaging stack most small teams actually run.

Why this matters: Relay shut down in 2026

Relay's own shutdown notice is unambiguous about the timeline. New signups and free-to-paid upgrades stopped on July 16, 2026. Free accounts lost access on August 15, 2026. Paying customers kept access through September 14, 2026, after which the service, and the account data behind it, went away. If you landed here because an old "best AI agent builders" list or a forum thread recommended Relay, that recommendation is now out of date; there's no live product to evaluate.

This is also a useful reminder for anyone shopping in this category generally: AI-agent tooling is a young, fast-moving market, and vendor survival is itself a real evaluation criterion, not just features and price. Before committing a workflow to any single-purpose agent platform, it's worth checking how long it's been generally available and whether it has a funded path to staying that way.

What Lindy is, for anyone arriving fresh

Lindy is a role-based AI agent builder. Instead of wiring a trigger-to-action chain the way a workflow platform like Relay or Zapier does, you describe an agent's job in plain language, "triage inbound sales emails and draft replies matching our tone," for example, and the agent reasons through the task each run rather than following an identical fixed script. Agents carry memory across runs, can be chained into a "team" that hands work off between steps, and support a human-approval setting on any action you don't want to go out unattended: an agent can draft an email or a message and hold it for review rather than sending it automatically. That last part is the specific overlap with what Relay offered, approval is a configurable setting on an otherwise autonomous agent, not the platform's whole organizing principle the way it was for Relay.

Comparison: what each one covered

Migrating off Relay: your two realistic paths

If what you needed was the approval checkpoint itself, move to Lindy. Rebuild your highest-value Relay workflow, the one with the most approval-gated steps, as a Lindy agent first, and keep the human-review setting on for anything customer-facing while you confirm it drafts output you'd actually approve. This is the more direct conceptual match: you're still describing a job and getting a draft to review, just through a role-based agent rather than a flow canvas.

If what you actually valued was the visual canvas, Relay felt and worked more like a general automation platform than a pure AI-agent product. Gumloop's node-based builder is closer in spirit, and it supports LLM reasoning inside individual canvas steps the way Relay did. A self-hosted n8n workflow with a manual-approval node wired into the flow is the more technical, but fully free, version of the same pattern, and it has the advantage of outliving any single vendor's business decisions since you control the infrastructure. Our guide to building an AI agent in n8n covers that self-built approach in more depth.

When NOT to default to Lindy

Don't migrate to Lindy on autopilot if your real Relay workflows were mostly mechanical, high-volume, data-moving steps with the approval gate rarely actually catching anything in practice. That's a sign a plain automation platform, rebuilt in n8n, Make, or Zapier, will serve you better and cheaper than paying for agent-style reasoning you weren't really using. Lindy earns its price on genuinely judgment-heavy tasks; don't pay an agent-builder premium for a workflow that was always just "if this, then that" with a rubber-stamp approval step nobody read closely.

Which should you pick

Choose Lindy if the Relay feature you'll miss most is the approval checkpoint on a reasoning agent, and you're fine trading the visual workflow canvas for plain-language agent setup. Choose Gumloop or self-hosted n8n if the canvas itself, and the ability to see every step of the flow laid out visually, mattered as much to you as the approval gate. For the fuller category view beyond just these two, our best no-code AI agent builders roundup covers six platforms including Gumloop, and our Lindy review and Lindy alternatives guides go deeper on whether Lindy specifically fits your use case. Check Lindy's current pricing and template gallery directly before committing a migrated workflow, since credit costs shift as the product evolves.

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