Disclosure, before anything else
One of the eight products below is mine. I build Nora, and it is listed first because this is my list. Most search results for this query are listicles written by a vendor.
I am saying so out loud rather than pretending otherwise. To keep the page useful anyway, I say where Nora is the wrong choice. Where a competitor is better for a given shape of business, I name it.
‘AI employee’ is a marketing phrase, not a product category, and it currently covers four different things. One is a pack of persona-branded assistants that write copy. Another is a workflow builder with a chat wrapper.
The third is a managed agent that lives in your business tools and acts on them. The fourth is an enterprise platform sold to a procurement committee. Some publish their pricing, and others publish nothing until a salesperson quotes you.
For a company of 10 to 500 people, the useful question is which of the four shapes fits the job you want done. Picking the wrong shape turns a cheap subscription into six weeks of wasted evenings, so everything below is organised around that.
The comparison at a glance
| Platform | Shape | How it is sold | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Nora | Managed agent in your channels and tools | Monthly subscription with fair-use model usage included; two-week free trial, no credit card | Owner-operators who want one assistant across WhatsApp, email and their tools |
| 2. Sintra AI | Twelve persona-branded helpers | Sold per helper, or as a bundle on a one, three or twelve-month term | Solo founders and small marketing teams who mainly need output produced |
| 3. Lindy | Agent builder, credit-metered | Per-user plans with a monthly credit allowance that does not roll over | Teams comfortable wiring their own triggers and steps |
| 4. Vellum | Personal assistant with its own compute | Free tier and three paid plans, each with its own machine size | Technical operators who want a self-hostable option |
| 5. Microsoft Copilot Studio | Agent platform inside Microsoft 365 | Through Microsoft 365 Copilot, as pre-purchased credit packs, or pay-as-you-go | Companies already standardised on Microsoft 365 |
| 6. Salesforce Agentforce | Agents on top of Salesforce data | Per conversation, Flex Credits, or per-user editions | Existing Salesforce customers, service and sales use cases |
| 7. Relevance AI | ‘AI workforce’ platform | Enterprise plan, price on application | Larger teams building a fleet of agents with a vendor relationship |
| 8. Ema | Enterprise AI employees for HR, IT, finance | Outcome-based, not published | Enterprises with governance and on-premises requirements |
This page lists no prices, because they change often and each vendor’s own pricing page is the source. Check that page before you budget.
1. Nora: one assistant across a small business’s channels
This one is mine, so read it with that in mind. Nora is a managed AI assistant that sits where a small business already works: WhatsApp, web chat and email. It connects to the tools behind them, so it can answer, look something up, file it and follow up with nobody in the middle.
The public terms are a two-week free trial with no credit card, then a monthly subscription. The subscription now includes fair-use Gemini 3.7 Flash, so it works from day one without an AI account of your own. Point it at Claude or GPT instead and you pay that provider directly, at no markup.
Best for: owner-operators and small teams whose enquiries and admin arrive in five places at once. They want one thing that covers all of them rather than five automations to maintain.
Where it is the wrong choice: your company runs on Salesforce and the job is service-case deflection. Agentforce is closer to that data than anything I build. If you are a Microsoft shop and the agent needs to read SharePoint and Teams, Copilot Studio starts inside the tenant and Nora does not.
If you want a marketing content factory rather than an assistant that acts, Sintra is a better fit. And if you need on-premises deployment with formal governance sign-off, look at Ema.
2. Sintra AI: twelve named helpers
Sintra sells a roster of twelve persona-branded helpers: a social one, a copywriting one, an SEO one and so on. Each can be bought on its own, or all twelve can be taken together in the Sintra X bundle.
The bundle is sold on a one, three or twelve-month term, and the longer the term, the lower the advertised monthly rate. All bundles include a monthly credit allowance and a 14-day money-back guarantee.
The honest framing is that these are excellent drafting tools with strong onboarding, not agents that run your operations. Watch the credits, because the monthly allowance goes quickly if you use it daily.
Best for: solo founders and one- or two-person marketing teams who want a lot of decent output for little money. They are fine being the person who reviews and sends it.
3. Lindy: build your own agents, pay by credit
Lindy is the builder in this list. You wire triggers, steps and tools together into agents, and pay per user per month for a credit allowance. There are three plans, Plus, Pro and Max, and a custom Enterprise tier with HIPAA compliance and a signed BAA.
Credits reset monthly and do not roll over. When they run out, credit-using actions pause rather than generating an overage bill. That is a more honest default than most of this market.
The trade is the usual one for builder tools: enormous flexibility, and someone in your company has to own it. If nobody has three or four hours a week for that, an unmaintained Lindy build quietly stops matching reality.
Best for: teams with an operations-minded person who enjoys this work and will keep the builds alive.
4. Vellum: an assistant with its own machine
Vellum sells a personal AI assistant that comes with a small cloud computer attached. That is an unusual and quite practical shape: the assistant has somewhere to run things. There is a free tier and three paid plans, each with its own machine size.
Mighty has 1 vCPU, 2 GiB and 10 GB of storage. Super has 2.5 vCPU, 5 GiB and 30 GB, plus an assistant email address and subdomain. Ultra has 4 vCPU, 8 GiB and 60 GB.
Each paid plan includes some usage credits, and usage is billed in credits. The runtime is open source under an MIT licence, so self-hosting with no platform fee is a genuine option.
Best for: technically confident operators who want an assistant they could take with them. They value the self-hosting escape hatch more than a polished business UI.
5. Microsoft Copilot Studio: the default for Microsoft companies
Copilot Studio is Microsoft’s platform for building agents, connecting them to business data and publishing them into Teams and other channels. It is sold three ways.
The first is Microsoft 365 Copilot, sold per user and paid yearly. The second is a Copilot Studio pre-purchase pack of Copilot Credits, which Microsoft advertises as a saving over pay-as-you-go. The third is straight pay-as-you-go with no commitment.
The advantage is position rather than modelling. The agent already sits where your documents, mail and identity live, and IT already knows how to govern it.
The disadvantage is that credit consumption is hard to forecast before you run something real. So start on pay-as-you-go and only pre-purchase once you have a month of actual numbers.
Best for: companies standardised on Microsoft 365 with an IT function that will own the deployment.
6. Salesforce Agentforce: agents where your customer data already is
Agentforce puts agents on top of Salesforce data for service, sales and support work. Salesforce now offers three commercial models: per conversation, Flex Credits, and per-user editions. A single org must pick either conversations or Flex Credits, not both.
Conversations win when your average interaction is long and multi-step. Credits win when it is short.
Best for: existing Salesforce customers. If you are not one, this is not a reason to become one.
7. Relevance AI: an ‘AI workforce’, sold by a salesperson
Relevance AI pitches an AI workforce: teams of agents with custom actions, unlimited agents, tools, users and projects, and a dedicated account manager. As of August 2026 its pricing page shows an Enterprise plan with no published figure and a ‘talk to sales’ button. Treat it as a vendor relationship rather than a subscription.
Best for: larger teams that want a platform partner and have someone whose job includes managing that partner. If you have fewer than fifty people, the sales cycle alone will cost more than the problem.
8. Ema: the enterprise end of ‘AI employee’
Ema uses the phrase most literally: AI employees that own workflows across HR, IT and finance. It has a named recruiting agent, on-premises deployment options, role- and attribute-based access control and immutable audit trails. Pricing is described as outcome-based and is not published.
It is worth understanding even if you will never buy it, because Ema is where the category’s language comes from. It explains why so much ‘AI employee’ marketing sounds like it was written for a CIO. It was.
Best for: enterprises with governance requirements and a procurement process. Explicitly not an SMB product.
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Which of the four shapes do you need?
- A content factory. The job is producing drafts: posts, emails, listings, product copy. Sintra is built for exactly this, so do not buy an agent platform for it.
- A builder. You have a specific multi-step workflow in your head and someone who will maintain it. Lindy, or Copilot Studio if the data lives in Microsoft 365.
- A managed assistant. The job is ‘handle the incoming, act on it, keep the systems in sync’ and nobody wants to maintain a builder. Nora is my answer to this; Vellum is the technical operator’s version.
- An enterprise platform. Governance, audit trails, on-premises. Ema, Relevance AI, Agentforce.
Two questions cut this faster than any feature table: can it act, or only draft, and who owns it in month three. Nearly every failed rollout I have been called into failed on the second one.
What these platforms cost beyond the subscription
The subscription is rarely the real number. Model usage is billed separately on most of these. Nora is the exception, since its price now covers fair-use Gemini 3.7 Flash.
The setup hours, the internal owner and the month-one corrections are on you in every case. I broke that down properly, with the four costs vendors leave off the page, in what an AI employee really costs in 2026.
For a single assistant in a small company rather than a workforce, the breakdown is in AI assistant cost for small business.
The other cost nobody quotes is integration. Every platform above advertises a connector count, and none of them explain month one. That is when logins expire quietly, permissions turn out scoped far too wide, and two of your tools have no usable API.
I cover it in connecting an AI assistant to your business tools, which is worth reading before you sign anything annual.
To see a whole deployment rather than a pricing table, how I set AI employees up walks through the sequence.
When none of these fit, and you should build instead
Buying beats building most of the time, and I say that as someone who sells builds. Commission a custom system only when one of three things is true.
The first is that the work depends on a system none of these platforms integrate with. The second is that the data cannot sit on a vendor’s infrastructure. The third is a per-seat or per-conversation meter attached to a number about to grow much faster than your headcount.
If that is you, the cost estimator frames the scope in about thirty seconds. A short scoping chat with me turns that into a fixed price. For what that engagement looks like at SMB scale, read custom AI for small business.
If it is not you, take the free trial on whichever platform above matches your shape and spend the money elsewhere.
Common questions
What is an AI employee, actually?
A managed AI agent that owns a recurring job rather than answering one question at a time. What matters commercially is whether it can act: read your inbox, update the CRM, send the reply. Platforms that only draft text for a human to paste are assistants with a better name.
How much does an AI employee cost per month in 2026?
It depends on how the platform is sold, and I list no prices because they change often. Sintra AI and Lindy publish self-serve plans, while Ema and Relevance AI publish no price at all. Published figures are not like-for-like: most bill model usage separately, while Nora now includes fair-use Gemini 3.7 Flash in its price.
Do AI employee platforms replace staff?
Not in any deployment I have run. They absorb the repetitive middle of a role, such as triage, data entry, first-draft replies and chasing, and hand the judgement calls back. The honest measure is hours returned to a named person each week, not headcount removed.
Should a small business buy a platform or commission a custom build?
Buy first if an off-the-shelf monthly subscription covers the job, because a custom build is then a worse deal in every dimension. Commission a build when the work depends on a system nobody integrates with, or the data cannot leave your infrastructure. Commission one too when the platform fee scales with a number about to grow fast.