Comparison

Olano vs Lindy

The short verdict: Lindy is a polished self-serve agent builder. You describe what you want in plain English, it assembles the automation, and you are running something useful the same afternoon - email triage, meeting notes, lead follow-up, CRM upkeep. Olano gives you two doors onto an isolated deployment of your own: Olano Cloud, a self-serve managed deployment from $25/month that you configure yourself, or a system scoped, built and operated for you - with approval gates, an audit trail and a hard spend cap around either. If what you are deploying will act in front of customers and has to be governed and kept alive by someone other than you, that is the line.

Discuss a project Read: hosted vs DIY

Side by side

The dimensions that decide the choice - not model benchmarks.

Dimension	Lindy	Olano
Getting started	Self-serve and immediate: sign up, describe the agent, run it. New accounts get $50 of free credits for 7 days with no card; after that, every active user in the workspace is a paid seat.	Two doors: Olano Cloud is self-serve, a managed deployment from $25/month you configure yourself; a Studio engagement starts with a scoping conversation, and a single managed workflow is typically live within 1-2 business days of onboarding, bigger rollouts in 1-3 weeks.
Who operates it	You do. You build the agents, watch them, and fix them when a tool or a model changes.	We do. Design, integration, launch, monitoring and the months afterwards are the engagement.
Pricing shape	Per-seat subscription plus pooled credits: from $49.99 per active user a month with 5,000 credits each, shared across the workspace, with larger monthly credit levels above it. Lindy's own bands put an everyday ask at 2-250 credits, deep work at 250-1,000 and a big build at 1,000-2,500. When the pool runs low, Lindy pauses credit-using work until the next cycle; admins can top up at $10 per 1,000 credits.	No per-task credits and no per-seat pricing. Olano Cloud from $25/month for a managed deployment; Studio engagements quoted as a fixed proposal, with a hard AI spend cap agreed before launch and BYOK at no extra cost.
Where it runs	Shared multi-tenant infrastructure, like most self-serve platforms.	An isolated deployment per customer, hosted and managed, with custom AWS/GCP regions available or self-hosting on your own infrastructure.
Approvals & audit	You review agent output and can require confirmation on steps you set up; the approval policy and its record are yours to maintain.	Trust levels 0-4, per-category approval gates (financial actions, external sends and more), and an immutable audit trail on every action.
Customer channels	Strongest on the work around a business: email, calendar, CRM, and internal workflows. Voice is available and metered per minute.	Built for customer channels: WhatsApp, Telegram, email, Slack, SMS and 15+ messaging channels, plus inbound webhooks - agents answer customers, not only staff.
Multi-agent work	Agents can trigger each other, assembled by you.	An org chart of specialists - 180+ archetypes, 19 starter teams - where delegation is a first-class action, gated and logged like any other.
Improving over time	You edit the agent when it gets something wrong.	Cortex reads the work already done and acts on it on a cadence you set - sharpening memory, writing reusable skills and improving its own procedures, each logged and reversible, the scheduled passes behind a snapshot you can undo in one click. Fully Autonomous is on by default; a rewrite of the agent's own instructions waits for you in either mode, and switching it off queues every change for you to approve, defer or reject.

Lindy's column reflects its pricing page as checked on 20 October 2026; Lindy restructured its pricing more than once during 2026, so confirm current tiers at lindy.ai/pricing.

Where Lindy fits

Lindy is built for small teams automating their own internal work.

You want to be running this week

Self-serve, a trial, and an agent doing something useful the same afternoon. No scoping call, no proposal, no waiting on anyone else.

It is internal work, for a small team

Inbox triage, meeting notes, follow-up drafts, CRM tidying. Low blast radius, easy to supervise, and no customer sees it if it has an off day.

The budget is a subscription

Thirty dollars a seat is a decision one person can make. So is Olano Cloud, from $25/month with unlimited people; a scoped Studio engagement is the other door.

You enjoy building it

Plenty of operators genuinely do, because they know the work. Olano Cloud lets them build too, on an isolated deployment with approvals and an audit trail from the start.

Where Olano is the better choice

Self-serve platforms are optimised for the first week. The differences below only start to matter in the third month, which is unfortunately when they matter a great deal.

Customers are on the other end

An agent answering enquiries on WhatsApp under your business's name needs approval gates before anything goes out, and a record afterwards. That is product here, not your configuration discipline.

Your own environment, not a shared one

An isolated deployment per customer, in a region you choose, or on your own infrastructure - the question procurement asks first and self-serve platforms answer last.

Predictable spend, not a credit meter

A shared credit pool runs out fastest in the busiest month, and when it does the work pauses until the next cycle or a top-up. Olano meters AI usage inside a cap agreed before launch, and a budget can fall back to a cheaper model instead of stopping.

Nobody on your team has to keep it alive

Models change, integrations move, a channel breaks. Operating it is the engagement, not a job quietly added to whoever built it.

About the credit meter

Credit metering is not a trick, and it is not unique to Lindy - most of the self-serve market prices this way, because it maps costs to usage fairly. The problem is a budgeting one. Lindy's own bands put an everyday ask at 2-250 credits and deep work at 250-1,000, so a task that looked cheap in testing can cost several times more in production once it starts doing research. Lindy has removed the surprise bill: when the pool runs low it pauses and tells you, and admins can top up. For an internal workflow a pause means a colleague waits. For a public-facing agent whose volume you do not control, it means customers go unanswered on the busiest day, which is the wrong risk in the wrong place.

Olano's answer is a hard spend cap agreed before launch, a transparent usage meter, per-agent budgets that can alert, fall back to a cheaper model or stop, and BYOK at no extra cost if you would rather buy tokens directly from the provider. The number is set before launch rather than discovered when a pool runs dry, which is the property that matters when a customer channel is on the other end of it - and Olano Cloud starts at $25/month for teams that would rather configure it themselves.

FAQ

Is Olano just a more expensive Lindy?

They are not the same shape. Lindy sells you a builder and you operate what you build, on shared infrastructure. Olano scopes, builds and operates a system on an isolated deployment of your own, with approvals, an audit trail and a spend cap as product features. And where Lindy bills every active user in the workspace, Olano Cloud starts at $25/month with unlimited agents and people, for teams that want to configure it themselves.

Can we start on Lindy and move later?

You can, and what you learn transfers: running an agent is the fastest way to find out which workflows actually matter. Olano Cloud is also a way to start yourself, from $25/month, with approvals and an audit trail from day one. Olano speaks MCP and takes inbound webhooks, so a mixed stack is a legitimate end state, not a migration failure.

Does Olano have a self-serve option?

Yes: Olano Cloud is a managed deployment from $25/month with unlimited agents and people, which you configure yourself. The Studio engagement is the other door, for businesses that want the workflows designed, integrated and operated for them. The platform underneath is the same.

What about security and compliance?

Isolation is the structural answer: your agents run in a deployment of their own rather than in a shared tenant, in a region you choose, with an audit trail on every action. For the Singapore data-protection questions specifically, our PDPA guide lists the eight questions worth asking any vendor - and they apply to us too.

Are the Lindy figures here current?

They were checked on 20 October 2026 against Lindy's pricing page. Lindy restructured its pricing more than once during 2026, moving to per-user seats with pooled credits and $50 of free credits for the first 7 days, so confirm at lindy.ai/pricing before deciding anything on them.

Build it yourself, or have it built for you?

Both doors lead to a governed deployment of your own. Start on Olano Cloud from $25/month, or bring one workflow and we will map it and quote before we build.

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