Comparison
SMELT Studio and n8n
Take the concession first. n8n reaches far more of the SaaS world than we do, its source is public, and you can run it on your own machine for nothing. If the problem is reaching the long tail of applications your business already pays for, buy n8n. If the problem is that wiring one step to the next is guesswork, and that changing a shared agent changes every workflow using it at once, keep reading.
Where n8n is the better buy
This is not a courtesy paragraph. These are the reasons to choose n8n and they are good ones.
Breadth. n8n connects to a far larger catalogue of applications than we do, with a large template library and a community that has already solved most integration problems in public. If your workflow is mostly moving records between tools you already pay for, that catalogue is the whole product and you should buy it.
You can run it yourself. A self-hosted Community edition is published on GitHub and costs nothing to run. We have no equivalent, and that is a real difference, not a positioning difference. If your data cannot leave your network, this comparison ends here and n8n wins it.
A simple meter. n8n prices monthly workflow executions. Their pricing page defines an execution as a single run of a whole workflow, and says the step count and the amount of data make no difference to that. Paraphrased rather than quoted, because their sentence uses punctuation this site does not, and editing it inside quotation marks would misrepresent them.
That is genuinely easy to reason about, and easier than any consumption meter including ours.
Worth knowing before you commit either way: on n8n's published pricing, SSO with SAML and LDAP sits on the Business plan, and an external secret store and log streaming sit on Enterprise. Self-hosting the free edition means owning the upgrade path, the queue and the database yourself.
Agents are a real part of the product now. n8n documents agents as standalone things you build in a project, with a publish history, and they say so plainly:
Agents live alongside your workflows as first-class artifacts in your project.
They also document version restore and revert, and sub-agents that hand work to other published agents. n8n labels the feature Preview and warns that its behaviour may change while it is in development, which is their qualifier and not ours. This page used to argue that an n8n agent was only ever a node inside one workflow. That is no longer true and the argument has been removed rather than reworded.
Pinning a version, not just restoring one
Both products give an agent a publish history. They do different jobs with it, and the difference is worth understanding before you assume they are the same feature.
n8n's history is a rollback control on the agent: you restore or revert the agent to an earlier version, and what runs is whatever the agent is currently set to.
In SMELT Studio the pin lives on the workflow block, not on the agent. A block references an agent and an exact version. Publishing version four does nothing to the workflows pinned to version three until you promote them one at a time. So a change to a shared agent is not a decision about every workflow at once, and a block pointing at a version that was never published fails the run loudly rather than quietly picking something else.
That matters when one agent is used by several workflows and they do not all want the new prompt on the same day. If you have one agent and one workflow, it will not feel like an advantage.
Two honest qualifications. Sub-agent delegation and agent memory are not on the free tier. And the agent page is a page, not yet a dashboard: you can see where an agent is used, and a chat playground on that page is not there yet.
Mapping a field without guessing its name
This is the loop you spend your day inside, so it is the one worth testing first. Wiring a step to the previous step's output means knowing what that output actually looked like.
Open any block and there is a data pane listing the fields the previous blocks really produced, read from the last recorded run, with the actual value beside each one. Click a row and the reference is written into whichever field you were last typing in. No copying a path out of a JSON viewer, and no guessing at a schema.
The part we would ask you to check is what it does when it does not know. It distinguishes three states and says which one you are in: it has never seen this block run, it saw the run but could not read the output, or it read the output and there were no fields. A block that is guessing says so on the block. That is the opposite of a static schema guess, which is confident whether or not it is right.
It reaches every field that takes a reference, and it is on the free tier, so you can try it inside an evaluation rather than after buying.
Two different meters
n8n counts one execution per workflow run whatever happens inside it. The model calls that run inside that execution are billed by your model provider, on a separate invoice, disconnected from the workflow that caused them. That is fine until an agent starts looping, at which point the workflow that costs the most and the workflow that shows the most executions are not the same workflow.
SMELT Studio charges executions against your plan and meters model work in credits. That is a different trade, not a better price. We are not going to tell you we are less expensive on inference, because for plenty of workloads we will not be, and you have a calculator.
Billing is monthly. There is no annual plan.
What a run costs, while it is running
Runs are metered in credits. Each block reports its credits and duration as it finishes, the trace shows the credits a delegated agent call consumed, and your workspace usage shows credits drawn against the monthly allowance on your plan. The number is in the app while the work happens rather than on a model provider invoice four weeks later.
This is not a claim about being inexpensive, and we would rather you did not read it as one. It is one predictable number covering orchestration, inference, retries and key management. If your objection is price per token, connect your own OpenAI or Anthropic key and the meter stops entirely.
Plans are monthly. See pricing for the allowances on each tier.
The answer to "do you support X"
If X has a REST API, you can reach it today. The HTTP block calls any endpoint, with your own headers, query parameters and JSON body, and the response comes back as a typed output the next block can reference.
It is guarded rather than open. The host is resolved once, private, loopback and link-local addresses are refused, and the request is then sent to the address that was checked, with the original host header preserved. A DNS answer that changes underneath you does not turn into an SSRF against our network or yours.
Inbound, a webhook trigger gives a workflow its own ingest URL and a signing secret you send in the x-webhook-secret header, and a Respond to Webhook block lets the workflow answer the caller in the same request. Schedule, form, chat and manual triggers sit alongside it, as do triggers for the providers in the palette.
This is a capability, not an apology for a short list. It is also why we do not publish a connector count: it would be a scoreboard for a game we deliberately are not playing.
Who should not buy this
If you need to reach the long tail of SaaS applications, use n8n. If your data cannot leave your infrastructure, use n8n. If your workflows are trigger to action with no judgement in the middle, an AI platform is overhead you will resent.
Nothing here asks you to cancel n8n. Plenty of sensible stacks run both, with n8n moving the records and a SMELT workflow called over HTTP when something has to be decided rather than routed.
What we do not have
Better you read this from us than find it in a comment thread. Each of these ends some evaluations, and it should.
- No self-host. There is no way to run SMELT Studio on your own infrastructure. Our typed contracts are published and inspectable, so the shape of the architecture is not a secret, but that is weaker than being able to run the thing yourself and we are not going to dress it up as an advantage.
- No Data Tables. There is no built-in store for structured rows between runs. Keep that state in a database you already own and reach it over HTTP.
- No evaluations surface. There is no place in the app to assemble a test set for an agent, score it, and watch the score move when you change a prompt. If a graded regression suite is a condition of putting an agent near a customer, we do not meet it yet.
- No embeddable chat widget. You cannot drop a SMELT chat onto your own website. A hosted form is the only public entry point we offer, and it is a form, not a conversation.
- No MCP server. SMELT can call an external MCP server as a tool. It cannot be one, so another AI client cannot reach into SMELT and run your workflow that way.
- Agent memory is a capped list. An agent decides what to remember, and recall is by semantic search rather than a raw read-back. The list is still capped per agent, and the least recently used entries fall off the end. Treat it as recall between runs, not as a knowledge store.
If one of these is a condition of your buying, say so at [email protected] rather than working around it.
Moving an existing workflow
If you want to see how the pieces line up before signing up, the migration guide maps n8n concepts onto SMELT Studio concepts, including the ones that do not map at all.
Sources
Every claim about another product on this page is checked against that product's own published pricing or documentation, and the date of the last check is recorded in this page's source. Competitors ship quickly, and a page like this goes stale by default rather than by neglect. If something here has gone out of date, tell us at [email protected] and we will correct the page.
Try it against your own workflow
The free tier runs real workflows. Build the one you are unhappy with elsewhere and see whether the second change is easier than the first.