n8n
ZapierAbout Flowise
Flowise is what you use when the automation you're building is really an AI application. Drag chat models, prompts, vector stores, document loaders, memory and tools onto a canvas, wire them together, and you have a working RAG chatbot or agent — exposed instantly as an API endpoint or an embeddable chat widget.
Where n8n added AI nodes to a general automation tool, Flowise is AI-native: agent orchestration with supervisor/worker patterns, streaming responses, conversation memory, human-in-the-loop steps and evaluations are the core product, not an add-on. Under the hood it builds on the LangChain/LlamaIndex ecosystems, so new model and retrieval techniques land fast.
At 54k+ stars it's one of the fastest-growing projects in open source. Self-host it with Docker to keep prompts and data private, or use Flowise Cloud — either way, non-ML engineers can ship real LLM features in an afternoon.
What makes it different
Chain models, prompts, retrievers and tools on a canvas — see your whole AI pipeline at a glance.
Document loaders, chunkers, embeddings and vector stores (Pinecone, Qdrant, pgvector…) built in.
Tool-using agents, supervisor/worker teams, memory and human-in-the-loop approvals.
Every flow becomes a REST endpoint, streaming chat API or embeddable web widget instantly.
How to install Flowise
A hands-on walkthrough of getting Flowise up and running — follow along and you'll have it self-hosted in one sitting.
TypeScript
LangChain
React
DockerThe honest read
- Fastest visual route from idea to working LLM app
- Full RAG stack included — no glue code
- Model-agnostic: OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Ollama, local
- Apache-2.0 with a massive, fast-moving community
- Self-host keeps prompts and data private
- Narrow outside AI — not a general automation tool
- Complex flows can outgrow the visual paradigm
- Fast-moving upstream libs mean occasional breakage
- Production hardening (scaling, evals) takes extra work
Quick answers
Yes — Apache-2.0 licensed and free to self-host without limits. Flowise Cloud offers hosted plans if you'd rather not run it yourself.
If AI is one step in a broader business workflow, n8n's AI nodes may be enough. If the AI is the product — a RAG chatbot, an agent, a copilot — Flowise's AI-native tooling (vector stores, memory, agent patterns, chat widgets) is far deeper.
Yes — it connects to Ollama, LocalAI, vLLM and other local runtimes, so you can run fully private pipelines with no external API calls.
Yes — every chatflow ships with an embeddable widget (a script tag) plus REST and streaming APIs for custom frontends.
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