Flowise

Flowise is an open-source platform for building AI agents and LLM workflows, aimed at teams that want visual development alongside developer and self-hosting options. Its breadth is useful, but the announced end of life makes it a poor choice for a new production dependency.

Overview

Three visual builders—Assistant, Chatflow and Agentflow—cover assistants, chatbots, single- and multi-agent systems, and workflow orchestration. That range can take a team from a focused chatbot to more involved agent workflows within one platform. But active feature development ceased on July 29, 2026; the repository is scheduled for archival on August 10, with end of life on August 31. Treat Flowise as a migration or independent-maintenance decision, not a platform with an ongoing product roadmap.

The source code remains under the Apache 2.0 license, and Flowise encourages teams to fork it. A fork offers a route for technically capable organizations to continue, but they would take on maintenance themselves. Official core-team presence in Discord and GitHub concluded on August 31, 2026, and npm packages and Docker images are to be marked deprecated after repository archival.

Key features

Execution logs, visual debugging, evaluations, human review and RAG indexing pipelines extend the builders beyond basic workflow assembly. Teams can inspect runs, assess outputs and add review to workflows; knowledge grounding and multi-agent support suit applications that need retrieval or coordinated agents. Flowise connects to more than 100 sources, tools, vector databases and memories, including LangChain, LlamaIndex and Zapier Zaps. That integration breadth can reduce the work of connecting components, though the shutdown weighs heavily against relying on it for a growing system.

APIs, an embedded chat widget, and TypeScript and Python SDKs provide ways to integrate Flowise into applications. Security controls include RBAC, SSO, encrypted credentials, secret managers, rate limiting and restricted domains. For production, Flowise recommends queue mode, PostgreSQL at scale, AWS S3 storage and AWS Secret Manager for credential-key management. These controls and deployment recommendations make it more capable of supporting serious workloads, but do not offset the maintenance horizon.

Pricing

The Free plan costs nothing and includes 2 Flows & Assistants, 100 Predictions / month, 5MB Storage, Evaluations & Metrics, Custom Embedded Chatbot Branding and Community Support. It is suitable for small experiments, but the flow, prediction and storage caps are restrictive for a live service.

Starter costs $35 a month. It adds unlimited Flows & Assistants, 10,000 Predictions / month and 1GB Storage to the Free features, while retaining Community Support. It fits modest workloads that need more room than Free, but offers no stated priority support.

Pro costs $65 a month and includes 50,000 Predictions / month, 10GB Storage, Unlimited Workspaces, Admin Roles & Permissions and Priority Support, along with Starter features. It includes 5 Users, with additional users at $15/user/month. Pro is the more suitable tier for teams that need workspaces and administration, but its quotas remain finite and the end-of-life schedule makes a new subscription hard to justify. A free trial is available. Documentation describes community and vendor support, including SLA support and consultations, while the plan details assign Community Support to Free and Starter and Priority Support to Pro.

Platforms

Flowise supports API, Linux, macOS, self-hosted, web and Windows. The product describes cloud and on-premises deployment; installation guidance includes npm and Docker, alongside self-hosting options. This flexibility suits teams that need control over where the application runs. It also means deployment choice cannot solve the central concern: ongoing development has stopped.

Who it's for

Flowise is most appropriate for teams already using it, or for developers willing and able to fork and maintain an Apache 2.0 codebase. Its visual builders, integrations, evaluation tools and deployment choices provide a broad foundation for agent and RAG workflows. Organizations seeking an actively maintained service, continuing official support or a dependable base for a new production system should look elsewhere.

Pros and cons

Pro: Assistant, Chatflow and Agentflow support varied assistant and agent workflows, including multi-agent systems.

Pro: More than 100 integrations, developer interfaces and deployment options give teams flexibility in connecting and hosting workflows.

Pro: Evaluations, execution logs, visual debugging and human review support inspection and oversight.

Con: Feature development has ceased, with repository archival and end of life scheduled for August 2026; this is a serious constraint for production planning.

Con: npm packages and Docker images are to be deprecated after archival, and official core-team presence has concluded.

Con: Free has tight flow, prediction and storage caps; higher tiers raise those limits but do not change the maintenance outlook.

Alternatives

AI Agent Platforms and Retrieval-Augmented Generation Tools are useful starting points for comparing options by use case.

Microsoft Copilot is a freemium option with a free plan and web, desktop and mobile platforms; consider it when those platforms matter more than Flowise's self-hosting and workflow-development focus.

Camunda is freemium, offers a free trial and supports API, desktop, web and self-hosted platforms; consider it when those deployment choices matter to your workflow needs.

Houston is a freemium alternative with a free plan and support for Linux, macOS, web and Windows.

Retool is freemium, offers a free trial and supports web, mobile, API and self-hosted use; consider it if those platforms better match your deployment needs.

Vellum is freemium, with a free plan and support for web, desktop, mobile, extension and self-hosted use.

Google Agent Development Kit is a free, open-source framework; model and cloud service use may require separate access or billing.

Workato Agentic is freemium, with a free plan and a Pro plan at $75 a month.

Floatbot AI is a paid alternative with a free trial and Android, iOS, API and web platforms.

Verdict

Choose Flowise if you already depend on it or can maintain a fork and want visual agent-building with broad integrations and deployment control. For a new production system, its halted development, deprecated distribution packages and dated end-of-life schedule are compelling reasons to choose another platform.