The best AI agent builder software in 2026

2025 was the year of the AI agent. Major tech companies, new startups, and the big AI players have all been rolling out features with AI agents, AI tools that can think and act somewhat independently. In addition to AI agents built into existing products like ChatGPT and Claude, there’s also been a rise in AI agent builders that allow you to create your own AI agents for work. 

I’ve been writing about tech for almost 20 years and have been covering AI since before it was a household term, so I had high expectations when looking at AI agent builders. AI agents make it easier to build complex and dynamic automations, and while most options are still a bit too technical for the general public to deploy, there are a handful of excellent AI agent builders that anyone can use.

With that in mind, we’re going to look at the current state of AI agent builders for businesses. This category is so new and changing rapidly—companies are launching, getting acquired, and shutting down on an almost weekly basis. Any detailed head-to-head testing I conducted this week might be out of date by next month and possibly irrelevant by next year. Still, I tested the AI agent builders that seemed the most promising, and based on all my research and experience, these are the four best choices for building an AI agent for your work.

The best AI agent builders

What makes the best AI agent software?

I’m basing my definition of an AI agent for this article on Simon Willison’s: an LLM agent runs tools in a loop to achieve a goal. More specifically, AI agent builders allow you to make systems that take a goal or instruction as their starting input, use an LLM to plan and iterate over tool-enabled actions, and autonomously act to achieve their goal. 

With this in mind, I was looking for apps that:

• Enabled true agentic behavior. The AI agents I could build with each app had to meet Willison’s definition. This means they couldn’t just be chatbots responding to one-off prompts; they needed to be able to decide how to pursue a goal and deploy tools (like searching the web, running code, or using third-party APIs) to do it. 

• Powered by an LLM (or multiple LLMs). AI agent is still such a new term that there’s some ambiguity in its use. To be absolutely clear, I was looking for systems that used the latest LLMs like GPT-5, Claude 3.5, and Gemini 2.5.

• Native and third-party tool integrations. Tool-use is one of the big things that sets AI agents apart, so a good selection of native and third-party tools was essential.

• Control, safety, and observability. As much as AI agents are intended to operate with some level of autonomy, you need to be able to direct them, set guardrails, and see how they’re tackling their goals. I wanted features that took this into account. 

• Ease of use. I prioritized low-code and no-code platforms. Developers have a range of options available for deploying AI agents, but they’re far too complex for most people. Instead, I was looking for tools that non-developers (like myself) can use. 

Pulling this all together, I was looking for AI agent builders that could build agents capable of the following sorts of tasks:

• Find three recent studies on mixture-of-experts models, summarize them in 200 words or less, and add all this info to a Google Sheet. 

• Find the financial statements for and recent news about a company, and create a report that will help me make an investment decision. Save the report as a PDF in my Dropbox account and email me a link. 

• For new leads added to HubSpot, create a custom welcome package that highlights which marketing strategy best fits their market position using information from HubSpot, the web, and RAG databases. 

What’s the difference between an AI agent and an AI chatbot?

At first glance, AI agents can look pretty similar to AI chatbots or seem like slightly smarter chatbots, but there are some key differences. AI agents are built to think, plan, and act—not just reply. 

Look at it this way. A chatbot waits for your prompt and gives a one-off response. It might still search the web or a database to give you an answer, but it’s reactive: you ask, it answers.

An AI agent, by contrast, takes your goal and figures out how to achieve it. It can break the goal into smaller tasks, deploy tools like web search and APIs, and loop through reasoning steps until it finishes the job. An AI agent might have its goal set through a chat interface or appear to your customers as a chatbot, but what it does under the hood is what makes it different.

The best AI agent builders at a glance

The best AI agent builder for automation and AI orchestration

Zapier Agents

Zapier Agents pros: 

• Natively connects with 8,000+ apps

• Easy to use even for non-technical employees

• Enterprise-grade security

Zapier Agents cons: 

Zapier Agents combines Zapier’s 8,000+ integrations, the power of large language models, and an easy-to-use vibe coding agent builder. Just describe what you want the agent to do, configure the relevant tools, and it’s ready to take action across your entire tech stack.

Ok, a Zapier app on a Zapier blog post. There’s obviously some reasonable expectations of bias, though in this instance, they’re overblown. I’m a freelancer, so I was able to test Zapier Agents with a fresh set of eyes and no expectations, and it’s hard for me to overstate how well it works. I’ve already set up multiple agents to handle small bits of life admin.

Start by giving your agent access to your company’s source of truth in apps like HubSpot, Notion, and Airtable. You can ask it about your data as well as all the data in your apps—and data sources will sync automatically. And you can train your agents to work while you’re not there: tell your agent what to do when it’s triggered, how to process or summarize data, and which actions it should take, all without writing a line of code.

While the AI agents work great and the builder is simple to use, the other features are also worth noting. Zapier Agents has a Chrome Extension so you can trigger agents from your browser on any site on the web, you can organize agents into pods, and you can share them with your coworkers and other users.

Zapier Agents can help you streamline your inbox, create content, manage projects, support customers, manage leads, track expenses, and wrangle your schedule—all from one place. And because it works with every app on Zapier, it’ll be able to access all your work data, in an enterprise-ready, secure environment.

You can build from scratch based on your unique workflows, or get started with a template.

Zapier Agents pricing: Free for 400 activities/month, live data sources, web browsing, and a Chrome extension; paid plans from $33.33/month for 1,500 activities/month.

The best AI agent builder for building complex and powerful agents

Botpress

Botpress pros: 

Botpress cons: 

Botpress is at the very edge of apps I feel confident I have the technical skills to use, and there are certainly features that are aimed at developers. In testing it, I had to rely more on the documentation than I did with some easier to use apps. The tradeoff to this complexity is that Botpress gives you the tools to build complex and powerful agents. 

Botpress uses a combination of prompts, knowledge bases, tools, and communication channels to create custom agents that you can deploy on the web, embed in applications, or use internally. Botpress Studio has a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to visualize how your agents work—and work together. Built-in tables allow you to store data in Botpress rather than rely on integrations for absolutely everything. 

As for those integrations, Botpress works with a range of LLMs, across a few dozen integrations, and channels like Slack and Messenger. If you use its more developer-focused features, you can have it integrate with any API-based service as well.

Botpress certainly isn’t the first AI agent builder you should jump into, but for creating powerful custom bots for a large organization with lots of moving pieces, it’s a great tool.

Botpress pricing: Pay-as-you-go pricing for 1 bot; from $89/month plus AI spend for the Plus plan with 2 bots and 2 users.

The best AI agent builder for voice agents

Voiceflow

Voiceflow pros: 

Voiceflow cons: 

If you’ve tried ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode, you’ll have realized that the latest LLMs are really good at voice conversations. It’s not quite the same as chatting with a human, but it’s usable and a lot better than the old “Say yes to continue” robocallers. Voiceflow capitalizes on this and allows you to build voice agents and matching chatbots. If you want an AI agent answering your phone calls, generating leads, scheduling appointments, and otherwise helping out, it’s a great way to do it.

Voiceflow is surprisingly easy to use. Within a few minutes of signing up, I was on the phone with my test bot. It was pretty useless, seeing as I hadn’t had a chance to configure anything else, but it was still a very impressive proof of concept. Using one of the templates, I soon had a much more functional voice agent up and running. Creating a voice agent that can really handle everything your customers and clients will throw at it might take some setup—and you can hire Voiceflow experts to help—but it isn’t some impossible ideal the platform can never reach. 

Voiceflow enables you to use a wide range of AI models from different providers, and you can use different models to handle voice calls and chat conversations. It also integrates with a whole slew of business software, including general purpose tools like Airtable, eCommerce platforms like Shopify, and even Zapier. 

Because of that Zapier integration, your voice conversations aren’t stuck in Voiceflow. Instead, you can do things like start outreach calls or conversations based on actions you take in all the other apps you use at work. Here are a few templates to show you how it might work.

Voiceflow pricing: Free for 2 agents and 1 concurrent voice call; from $60/month for Pro with 20 agents and 5 concurrent voice calls. 

The best AI agent builder for customer support agents

Intercom

Intercom pros: 

Intercom cons: 

Every great customer support platform is adding AI agents—Intercom just happens to be slightly ahead of the curve and the tool with some of the best integrations. If you already have a great customer support tool, check out its agent builder first. But if you’re starting fresh with AI-powered customer support, Intercom is well worth a look. 

While AI is now embedded everywhere in Intercom’s help desk software, from AI conversation summaries to a copilot that helps your customer support staff respond according to your policies, the Fin AI Agent is the main agentic feature. (You can actually add Fin to other help desks like Zendesk now, but I’ve only tested it on Intercom’s platform, so that’s what I’m recommending.)

Once you train Fin on your procedures, knowledge, and policies, it can solve the vast majority of customer queries by itself. Because it integrates with services like Shopify, Stripe, and Salesforce, it can handle complex customer tasks involving other tools like refund requests and order changes. You can deploy it across your social channels, email, and messaging apps; there’s even Fin Voice channel. Fin also ticks some of the more advanced agent boxes, like the ability to learn and improve based on its performance. 

Fin works on a flat per-resolution fee of $0.99 on top of your help desk subscription. While that can add up fast, it should save you time and money in the long run as it can minimize the customer care work your staff need to do. 

While Fin doesn’t integrate directly with Zapier, Intercom does, so you can do things like automatically route tickets to the right teams, add customers to your CRM or email list, or use AI to automatically analyze conversations and enrich leads. Learn more about how to automate Intercom, our get started with one of these pre-made templates.

Intercom pricing: From $29/seat/month plus $0.99/resolution.

Other AI agent builders worth a look

As with so many AI tools, there’s been a huge initial rush of AI agent builders with a lot of overlapping features. The list above highlights the tools that I think stand out from the crowd, but there are plenty of other options out there. Here are some other tools worth considering, based on my research:

• LangChain is an open source framework that allows developers to exercise low-level control and build agents. If you have the coding chops, it’s an increasingly popular option for business and enterprise uses. 

• Dify is another AI agent builder that straddles the line between easy-to-use and developer focused. 

• Vellum allows you to vibe code an AI agent, which comes with its own pros and cons. 

• Flowise is a drag-and-drop AI agent builder from Workday. 

• StackAI is an enterprise-focused AI tool; it can build AI agents as well as other AI applications. 

• Lindy is an easy-to-use AI agent builder that also has a vibe coding option. 

Which AI agent builder should you choose?

With so much changing so fast in the AI space, choosing an AI agent builder is a challenge. Pick the wrong app and it could get acquired and shut down before you’ve even built your first agent. With that in mind, be sure to select a tool that meets your needs and is either part of a mature business or looks like it will grow into one.

While I feel all the AI agent builders on this list meet those criteria, I’d suggest giving Zapier Agents a serious look first. It really is just an extension of Zapier’s existing features, so it’s already incredibly functional and only looks set to grow into something bigger and better. 

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