Budibase

Budibase's core proposition is unusual among low-code tools: the Open Source tier is not a crippled demo. It ships 1 workspace, unlimited apps, unlimited automations, unlimited agents, and unlimited users, self-hosted on your own infrastructure. That combination — no action meter, no per-seat bill, agents included — is what separates Budibase from the low-code mainstream and makes it a serious option for regulated organizations that cannot put operational data in a vendor cloud. The AI story is the Agent Builder, which entered beta on 12 March 2026. Agents here are workers, not chatbots: they use tool calling to read data, write records, and trigger actions; they can attach knowledge sources such as vector databases for retrieval; and you can test behaviour with Evals before production. Deployment across Slack, Discord, and Microsoft Teams means the agent surfaces in the channel where the request was made. The vendor's own homepage examples — a laptop purchase approval routed to IT, a VPN ticket categorized and assigned, a Salesforce access request created and sent for review — are exactly the kind of internal operations work agents are suited to. Support for bringing your own AI key and connecting your own model providers is listed as a platform capability, which matters if you have opinions about which model sees your data. The tooling around agents is solid for an internal-tools platform: a visual automation builder with 20+ triggers and actions, synchronous automations that return collected data to app users or webhook callers, a custom REST API connector with auth, variables, and pagination, plus a public API. The app builder gives you 40+ pre-built components, multi-screen responsive layouts, design blocks, reusable JavaScript snippets, table and view permissions, PDF generation, custom branding, backups and restore, and environment variables at higher tiers. You can use the built-in Budibase DB (row limits rise from 50,000 on Pro to unlimited on Enterprise) alongside external SQL, Postgres, and MySQL sources and vector databases. The honest weaknesses are pricing and maturity. Cloud plans are metered by actions per month — 5K on Pro, 20K on Premium, 250K on Business — and the AI side is metered separately in Budibase AI credits — 2K, 10K, and 50K respectively. Each plan includes only one creator below Business (three on Business), with extra creators at $50/creator/mo and end users at $5/user/mo, so costs scale faster than the headline price suggests once your team grows. Log retention and security features follow the same ladder: 1 day on Pro, 7 on Premium, 30 on Business, 365 on Enterprise, with enforced SSO, user groups, and environment variables starting at Business. The Agent Builder is still beta and available on paid cloud plans, so treat it as an evaluation project rather than a production dependency on day one. Where Budibase fits best: operations and IT teams in regulated or EU-based organizations that need self-hosting,