Relevance AI or n8n? Agents, or workflows you own.

What each one is

Relevance AI calls itself "the home of the AI Workforce" and leads with "Specialist agents for every task". Each agent has one narrow job, and the examples on the site are sales work: enrich an account, prep a call brief, book meetings, review a deal. Chain several and you have a Workforce, where "each agent owns a step, hands off context, and executes end to end". The site says "your ops and revenue teams" run the agents day to day.

You can build on a drag-and-drop canvas, describe the agent and let the Invent builder write it, or work over MCP from coding tools. Triggers start agents from a schedule, an app event, a webhook or a custom signal, and a managed queue paces bursts of work. Evals sample live runs and chart a pass rate, so you can move an agent to the cheapest model that still passes. The integrations page lists 2,000+ integrations, and security covers SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, SSO, audit logs, data residency and PII masking.

Where Relevance AI hands the business a finished agent, n8n hands engineers the parts. Its headline is "AI agents and workflows you can see and control", and it is written for technical teams. A workflow is a trigger and then steps on a canvas, some of them AI agents, any of them able to hold JavaScript or Python. It lists over 500 integrations, takes custom API requests for the rest, and runs on n8n Cloud in Frankfurt or on your own servers.

Cedric is a teammate rather than a platform to build on. You mention him in Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord or Telegram, or write to him in the browser, and ask for the job in a sentence. He plans the steps, works across your connected tools, and answers from one memory shared by the whole workspace. When a step would send, change or spend something, he asks first.

Relevance AI or n8n: how to choose

The first question is who owns the automation. Relevance AI is built for the business side to own it. A head of sales operations defines the play, the agents run it, and the evals tell her whether quality is holding. n8n is built for engineers, who see every input and output, write code where the logic gets hard, and keep the workflow in git.

The second is how narrow and repeated the task is. Relevance AI's design, one agent per task, sampled and scored, pays off when a job runs thousands of times a month and a two-point drop in accuracy costs money. n8n pays off when the steps are known in advance. A lead arrives and you enrich it, score it, route it and log it, the same way every time, with an AI step where judgment helps.

The third is how you like to buy. Relevance AI starts with a sales call and can embed its own team with you for six weeks. Two weeks go to mapping use cases and four to deploying the first agents, and then it trains your experts. n8n lets you start the same afternoon, on a Cloud trial with no card or on a server you already have.

The last is where the data lives. Relevance AI lists data residency and PII masking. n8n can run entirely inside your own network, down to an air-gapped install, and if a security review demands that, the decision is already made.

Why that question is a good test

Agent platforms and workflow tools both start from a known task. Someone decides that accounts should be scored for churn, then builds the thing that scores them. Both products do that well.

Plenty of work in a small company arrives as a question like Devin's instead. It is asked once, it crosses three tools, and the answer turns on something a person said weeks ago. Cedric's memory is fed by the tools he reads, what the team said in channels and calls, and rules someone told him once, so the answer names its sources. The company brain explains what he keeps, and the data analyst page shows more questions like this one.

If the same question will be asked about every account every night, build the agent. If it will be asked once, by whoever is worried that morning, ask.

How each one charges

Relevance AI publishes no price. Its one plan, Enterprise, includes custom actions and vendor credits, unlimited agents, users and workforces, calling and meeting agents, evals, A/B testing, SSO, RBAC, audit logs and an account manager. The FAQ says to start by booking a call. A "Try it out" link on the homepage leads to a sign-up, but the pricing page shows no self-serve plan.

n8n publishes every figure. You pay per execution, one run of a whole workflow however many steps it has, with unlimited users, workflows and integrations on every plan. Starter costs 20 EUR a month billed annually for 2,500 executions, Pro 50 EUR for 10,000, and Business 667 EUR for 40,000, self-hosted only. The Community Edition is free to run yourself, and companies under 20 employees can apply for half off Business.

Cedric's price is public too, and it covers the whole team without seats. Starter is $19 a month for 40,000 credits, and Max starts at $99. A new workspace gets 100,000 free credits, worth $50, and plan credits roll over for a month. See pricing for every size.

The three meters do not convert, so price the shape of the work. Thousands of identical runs of a known task suit an execution meter or an enterprise contract. Irregular requests that someone now handles by hand suit a teammate you ask.