Dust vs Toolhouse

Dust gives you a construction kit. Each agent gets its own instructions, skills and attached knowledge, and you pick the model per agent from 20+ options rather than accepting one vendor's default. Multi-agent orchestration runs on schedules or event triggers, connectivity spans 70+ connectors (Slack, Notion, Google Drive, GitHub, Salesforce, Zendesk) plus native and remote MCP servers, so an unlisted system is reachable if someone builds the server. Governance is the differentiator: Spaces segment company data and permissions by team, a dual-layer permission model separates what an agent can reach from what a user can reach, SSO covers Okta, Entra ID and Jumpcloud with SCIM provisioning, and Frames turn results into interactive dashboards and apps. Dated July 2026, self-improving skills encode team expertise into reusable instruction sets that adapt from usage.

Toolhouse inverts the model. There is nothing to architect — you email or message a task in plain language and an autonomous worker plans, executes and returns the finished deliverable rather than a notification. Its 1,000+ integrations are broader on paper than Dust's 70+ connectors, covering Gmail, Outlook, Teams, WhatsApp and Twilio alongside Slack, Salesforce, HubSpot, Notion and Google Workspace. Named capabilities are concrete and vertical-flavored: policy abstraction and summarization, lead qualification with outbound SMS and cold calls, copy and image generation, and knowledge assistants for instant policy queries. Audit logs record every worker action and data is encrypted in transit and at rest. What you give up is control — Toolhouse itself flags that it is not for developers needing fine-grained logic or conditional branching.

The two products sit in different pricing worlds, and neither is clean.

Toolhouse is paid-only with credit-based usage and unlimited tokens on paid plans, but its own limitations note users needing a free tier or low-cost alternative are looking at $500+/month. That is a real commitment before you have proven the workflow, and it makes Toolhouse a poor fit for a single team experimenting on a card. In exchange you get unlimited tokens and no per-model arithmetic to do — a predictable ceiling that Dust does not offer.

Dust is freemium, so you can build and trial agents before committing budget, but the cost curve is the opposite of flat: credits vary by model and tool use and do not roll over. That means a GPT-or-Claude-heavy agent hitting many connectors can burn budget faster than a lighter Mistral or DeepSeek configuration, and unused credits evaporate monthly. Budgeting requires knowing your agents' model choices in advance. The trade is explicit: Dust offers a free on-ramp and no fixed floor; Toolhouse offers a high floor and fewer surprises once inside. Organizations that need EU data residency should price Dust with that requirement in mind, since residency is a stated positioning rather than a free add-on.