The 9 Best AI Agents in 2026

ChatGPT Work is OpenAI's agent mode for delegated projects: you hand it a goal and it works through the steps for hours across Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Drive, SharePoint, email, calendars and CRMs, connected through plugins. OpenAI launched it in July 2026 alongside GPT-5.6 and built it on Codex technology. In the desktop app it also gets Computer Use with a built-in browser for sites that have no plugin.

Where Manus and Perplexity Computer work in their own environment, ChatGPT Work operates inside the tools your team already uses and keeps you in the loop. You can monitor a run, redirect it midway and approve important actions, with an auto-review layer on top. Scheduled tasks repeat a job on a timer without a fresh prompt. That mix of reach and control is why it ranks first.

As of November 2026, Free gets a limited Work allowance in the desktop app, and the $8/mo Go plan's listing does not mention expanded Work. Plus at $20/mo is the practical entry point, adding web and mobile access, scheduled tasks and more Codex. Pro, from $100/mo, buys longer sessions, the always-on Dot agent and up to $500 in monthly API credits. Usage is metered like Codex, so long multi-app jobs drain an allowance much faster than chat. The 4.8 App Store score from 11,874,173 US ratings covers the whole ChatGPT app, not Work alone.

Claude Cowork is Anthropic's agent for files and multi-step tasks, built on the same agentic architecture as Claude Code, the company's coding agent, and sold on the same subscriptions. Cowork runs in the Claude desktop app on macOS and Windows, with Linux in beta, on every paid plan. Web and mobile access covers Pro, Max and Ultra, and is in beta on Team, as of November 2026. Claude Code is included from Pro upward.

Unlike ChatGPT Work, Claude gives free users no agent at all: the Free plan keeps chat, web search, file creation, code execution and up to 5 Projects, but neither Cowork nor Claude Code. Paying once covers both a desktop agent for documents and a coding agent, much as ChatGPT Plus pairs Work with Codex. Claude Code is compared with other coding agents in our best vibe coding tools.

Pro costs $17/mo billed annually or $20 month to month. Max at $100/mo gives 5x Pro usage, and Ultra at $200/mo gives 10x Pro weekly usage; Team standard seats cost $20 a seat billed annually ($25 monthly) with both agents included. Usage limits move with the model, chat length and file size, so long agent sessions on large files use them up fast. The 4.7 App Store rating from 293,855 US ratings is for the whole Claude app.

Perplexity Computer is the agent Perplexity's paid plans are now built around: it researches a task, then builds the output, whether that is a document, a tool or a small app. On Pro and Max it routes work across models from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and others, and the model picker lists GPT, Gemini, Claude, Kimi, GLM and Grok.

ChatGPT Work starts from your company's apps; Perplexity Computer starts from the open web, so research comes first and the build follows from what it found. Connectors for Slack, Notion, Google Drive and Linear put results where a team already works. That makes it a better fit for market scans, briefs and comparison documents than for back-office work inside a CRM.

Computer runs on credits. Pro is $17/mo billed annually with expanded Computer access, 4,000 bonus credits and deep research; Max is $167/mo billed annually with 10,000 monthly credits and 35,000 bonus credits. As of November 2026 the pricing page also advertises a limited-time grant of free Computer credits worth $40 on Pro and $450 on Max. Two gaps remain: no month-to-month price appears on the page, and the free plan's Computer limits are not published. The 4.8 rating from 521,817 US App Store ratings is for the whole Perplexity app.

Manus is a general-purpose autonomous agent: it takes a goal, plans the steps and works in its own cloud computer until it returns a finished result, usually a research report, a slide deck or a website. Its signature feature, Wide Research, splits a large research job across many parallel sub-agents. Sessions keep running after you close the browser tab, and you can watch one live and step in to redirect it.

Of the five ready-made agents, Manus is the most hands-off. ChatGPT Work runs inside your own tools with approval gates; Manus works in its own environment and hands back files or live links. Paid plans allow 20 concurrent and 20 scheduled tasks, plus API and Slack access, which suits research that repeats on a schedule.

Pricing is credit-based. Pro costs $20/mo for 4,000 credits plus 300 refresh credits a day, per the Manus help centre, and unused monthly credits do not carry over. The pricing page lists larger plans with 8,000 and 40,000 monthly credits, but we could not confirm their prices as of November 2026. Free accounts get daily refresh credits capped at 1,500 a month, usable only with the Manus 2.0 lite model; those never expire. A full website or a large research run burns credits quickly. The iOS app rates 4.7 from 39,973 US ratings.

Devin is a software engineering agent that takes a ticket, works in the cloud or on your machine, tests its own work in a browser and keeps going until a pull request is ready for review. You assign work by tagging Devin in Slack or Microsoft Teams, assigning a Linear issue or turning a Jira ticket into a pull request, and large jobs can be split across several cloud agents running in parallel.

The only pick here built for a single job, Devin targets the engineering backlog: dependency upgrades, test coverage, small features and documentation fixes, with scheduled automations that can respond to failed CI runs and alerts. Unlike Manus, it does not hand back a finished artefact for you to accept as is; a human reviewing the pull request is the expected last step.

Devin's Free plan carries a light quota for coding with agents and limited models; Devin Cloud access is listed from Pro at $20/mo, which adds frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others. Max costs $200/mo, and Teams costs $80/mo plus $40 per full developer seat for up to 200 users. Allowances refresh daily and weekly, and overage is billed at API pricing. The pricing page gives no per-task cost, since the cost per message varies with model and task size, so budget from a trial on real tickets.

Lindy is a no-code AI agent builder whose agents behave like a Slack-native teammate: you describe the job in plain language, and the agent runs scheduled routines, manages an inbox and meetings, and acts in other apps through more than 40 skills, including computer use. You can choose the model for each task.

For people who will never build an n8n workflow, Lindy is the shortest route to a working agent. Unlike Zapier Agents, which sit on top of an automation account, a Lindy agent is the product itself: requests go to it in Slack and results come back there. It also carries the highest score on this page, 4.9 on G2 from 171 reviews.

Lindy prices per user and per credit. The free tier gives $50 in credits with no card, and they expire after 7 days. Team costs $49.99/mo for 5,000 pooled credits, with top-ups at $10 per 1,000; Enterprise adds HIPAA, SSO and audit logs at a custom price. Every active user is billed from $49.99/mo and monthly credits do not roll over, so a ten-person rollout starts near $500 a month, while Gumloop's Pro plan covers unlimited seats from $37/mo.

Zapier Agents is the agent layer of Zapier, the automation platform, and the builder to choose when your apps are already wired together with Zaps. Agents are billed in activities, separately from the tasks that Zaps consume, and they live on the same account as Tables, forms, a chatbots add-on and Copilot.

The metering is the part to read before building. Free includes 400 agent activities a month and Pro 1,500, and a single run is capped at 10 activities on Free and 40 on paid plans, which keeps one runaway agent from draining the month. Unlike Lindy, Zapier bills the account rather than every user: Team costs $69/mo billed annually ($103.50 monthly) for 25 seats and 2,000 tasks, though the pricing page does not state Team's agent allowance.

Pro is $19.99/mo billed annually or $29.99 month to month for 750 tasks, multi-step Zaps and 2-minute polling. Free is limited to 100 tasks, two-step Zaps and 15-minute polling. Unlike self-hosted n8n, there is no server to maintain. G2 rates Zapier 4.5 from 2,112 reviews, the largest review base among the builders here.

n8n is a fair-code workflow automation tool with AI agent nodes, and the builder on this list with a self-hosted edition published on GitHub. Agents are nodes inside a workflow, next to ordinary automation steps, so a team that self-hosts keeps its workflow data on its own servers.

Pricing is per execution, which separates n8n from Zapier's tasks and Lindy's credits. Starter costs €20/mo billed annually for 2,500 executions, 5 concurrent runs and a 5-minute maximum per execution. Pro costs €50/mo billed annually for 10,000 executions, 50 concurrent runs and executions of up to 40 minutes. Assistant credits run from 1,600 a month on Starter to as many as 9,600 on Pro, and Business, at €667/mo billed annually, is self-hosted only with 40,000 executions.

The 5-minute cap on Starter is the trap for agent work: a long agent loop that calls several tools can hit it, which pushes agent-heavy teams to Pro. Only annual prices appear on the pricing page. G2 rates n8n 4.7 from 324 reviews. Non-coders will reach a working agent faster in Lindy or Gumloop; n8n repays the setup with control over where everything runs.

Gumloop is a no-code platform for company agents: you describe an agent in plain language, attach connectors and skills, and it runs on a schedule or when an event fires. It supports more than 35 models, hosts an MCP server and lets admins restrict which connectors each agent may use, so a support agent cannot reach finance tools.

Where Lindy bills every active user, Gumloop Pro starts at $37/mo with unlimited agents, unlimited seats and 20,000 credits a month, plus 5 concurrent workflow runs and 25 concurrent agent chats. You can bring your own API keys, and Gumloop adds an 8% orchestration fee on top of credit costs on Pro. Enterprise, at a custom price, adds VPC deployment, SAML and SCIM sign-in, audit logs and org-wide connector policies; Pro limits guardrails to individual agents and one hosted MCP server.

Gumloop began as a visual workflow builder, and that canvas survives as a legacy feature. There is no permanent free plan, only a 14-day trial, and the public record is thin: 7 reviews on G2, too few for us to show a rating. The pricing page gives no per-task cost, and agents that call many tools use the monthly credits faster than light ones.