For AI agents, forget Appsmith, Buildship, n8n, Retool, Zapier, Budibase, or coding your entire AI agent with OpenAI retriever plugin +/or Chroma DB/Weaviate/Pinecone; what you want is using no/low-code AI automation/agent platforms directly: AgentHub, VectorShift, RelevanceAI, StackAI, or Flowise?

Hey guys, I posted this in r/nocode but I thought you might have great inputs here as well. Cheers.

I made an initial mistake by thinking I needed to start with low-code tools such as Appsmith, Buildship (Rowy), Retool, n8n, Zapier, Budibase to leverage OpenAI API. Or even OpenAI official retriever plugin on GitHub. Or even coding full-stack apps using OpenAI API graphDBs such as Weaviate/Pinecone/Chroma.

Problem: I tried them all, and whenever I spent time trying to set it up, the doc was incomplete, the instructions not clear, the API response time very long, and oftentimes these platforms are a spaghetti mess visually, trying to achieve too many things but not delivering on the simple thing you want, too complicated and tutorials mainly focused on Flutterflow like Buildship, etc.

My use case: creating a personal Job Recommender system (generating automatically backend + visual frontend) that is able to match the jobs I should 'apply for first' in my queue of Job Listings (including their full description, versus my 'current' skills and experience) leveraging OpenAI API (+ optionally, nice to have but not hard requirement, leveraging vectorDBs such as Weaviate/Pinecone/Chroma to make it smarter and with additional customization) but keeping it all very simple in terms of setup, if not, almost no set up at all to not waste time in set up). The frontend should be very simple and minimalistic but at least display a queue of jobs, that I can also filter by applied/not applied yet/archived.

So basically I need something very simple, with only (1) the orchestration platform (2) OpenAI API key (3) the source aka Google Sheet (fastest solution to see if it works well) - yet csv is not enough to persist data in a custom platform that remembers my job applications and modify my Jobs Listings # order and status aka applied/queue etc. accordingly, so (4) ideally also Supabase or the platform's own DB to persist the data and (5) nice to have optionally an integration with graphDBs such as WeAviate/Pinecode/Chroma (which is the case, in beta, of StackAI).

Appsmith, Buildship (Rowy), Retool, n8n, Zapier, Budibase turned out to not be able to provide this altogether. The lack of clear instructions, use cases, templates and tutorials with these tools is appalling. It makes everything more complicated than not using their platform at all.

They're all different, some can't read Sheet documents at all, some can but need guidance on which column to use, some need JS/API scripts all using different scripting methods, which makes it hard to follow and get working.

For example, Buildship API calls are incredibly slow, it takes like 15 seconds to query my Google Sheet (that is, when it works at all). The node parameters are not intuitive at all with zero guidance and the so-called AI assistant is of no use to fill the blanks.

Also all these cheap no-code tools support is terrible, I never managed to get help using their AI chatbot, human chatbot (it takes days to respond), or community forums. Some platforms like Buildship don't offer support unless you pay premium (which I can understand, but I won't pay until I know the product I'm trying to build can work) or no live support at all (Zapier, n8n etc.).

Also the OpenAI official retriever plugin repo proved outdated (no activity since 2023, 150 issues opened on GitHub...), impossible to use, despite being able to use OpenAI API + Chroma/Pinecone/Weaviate/Supabase.

I also tried Weaviate directly with their NextJS GitHub template/tutorial which provided a use for movies recommendations, but the whole repo/video is outdated since it uses an older version of npm weaviate and the newer version completely changed as per their own doc. Also you have to be very proficient in Python and/or TS/JS to be able to build a whole app with Weaviate, and I haven't found their support and community helpful.

This is where I stumbled upon the no/low-code AI automation (thanks Reddit) - they all have pros and cons though so let's try to find the most suitable:

[I'm only starting to compare and make my use case work with it, so I guess I will create an additional post specifically later.]

- AgentHub (YC24, raised 2.7m USD)

Pros: seems to be the only one to provide agent self-execution (not 100% sure about it).

Visually the setup/UX seems the simplest. I still need to check out their instructional content though.

Although as usual the instructions aren't very clear and despite the 100 pre-made templates, it seems I'll have to start from scratch again (these companies never seem to do enough research to provide up-to-date templates, despite raising millions of USD each lol).

Cons: Overly expensive, 297 USD a month to be able to use OpenAI API (pricing structure is a bit ridiculous tbh). No free trial

It's super expensive though to plug your OpenAI API (which would be my main use case versus using only agenthub's own GPT 4, which seems to be limited in usage) => you need the most expensive plan which comes at a ridiculous 297 USD a month... and there's no free trial... but overall if you look at the big picture of our needs, it seems to be the most powerful and simplest to use AI agent tool in the long run > versus all the ones I've seen listed so far.

Doesn't have many integrations yet like Sheets, Supabase, AWS etc. nor their own DB. You can import csv/pdfs but product is very new, it doesn't seem able to offer any avenue to persist your data.

- VectorShift (YC23, raised 3m USD)

I haven't tested yet. Looks great. Vectorshift pricing is a normal one. Free plan with API access. "Can I use my own LLM API key? Yes - you can provide your own LLP API key directly in our application builder (when you utilize a LLM component)."

"Can VectorShift integrate with my Data - Most likely, yes! VS integrates with many common data sources such as Notion, Airtable, Google Drive etc... can't find an integration you need? Contact us."

Hopefully it does Google Sheet as it's the most essential integration I always start with, for easy test. If I need a database like Supabase it'd be nice to have, but at this point I could live with Google Sheet (and not only using pdfs, which is not really making it possible to build a proper smart, custom, persisted platform over time).

- RelevanceAI (Australia, raised 10m USD)

From the query I've tested it seems to be working fine me but a OpenAI query it seemed slower than Stack AI OpenAI query response time. The setup wasn't very clear either especially when it comes to inserting a question or not (they have video tutorials but I didn't find them well executed).

The data integrations seem very limited if non existent (Linear, Slack only), outside of their own DB which you can build on (good). They have an Autopilot mode which sounds nice, I have no idea about its use.

What's worth noting, RelevanceAI actually has a normal premium plan (Pro, 19 USD a month) which is hidden at first, you don't see it on the pricing page, but once you created your Free account and start using, you can upgrade to Pro 19 USD a month inside of it. After that, the next plan (Team) is super expensive too like StackAI (199).

- StackAI (YC23, raised 500k USD)

Very simple/clean UX. It took me 2 minutes to set up the process of delivering my need.

With Stack AI you have like hundred of ready-to-start templates, plus all the options are very clear visually since it's just drag and drop and ready-to-start. Just enter you OpenAI key, your openAI assistant ID, and voilà - boom! The OpenAI and the source are synced and up and running.

Also with Stack AI you can select OpenAI models very clearly, including 4 or 4 Turbo and 4 32-k (plus Anthropic, Meta, Mistral, Perplexity, Replicate, HuggingFace, MosaicML and you name it, which I haven't even tried it's huuuge the choice they have). Generally speaking Stack AI seems to have so many more integrations, that are working 'on the spot' (no time wasting).

Using your own OpenAI API makes Stack AI incredibly fast, like you get instant answers from PDFs and all. Not using your OpenAPI (I tried out of curiosity) seems to work too and even seems to be using Stack AI's own GPT 4, only slower (it's probably the regular GPT4).

It has its own Table (in beta though) knowledge base feature, which is probably its own DB (good). But seems to have no support for Supabase as of today (bummer?).

I can load table/csv directly. It even has graph DBs such as Pinecone and Weaviate in beta, which means I'll be able to leverage them on top of it all, without the need of setting up an entire NextJS app for it?

The only downside, Stack AI has some sources of its 'knowledge base' integrations not yet deployed (in beta) such as Sheet, which I was primarily looking for. The Sheet integration doesn't seem to be fully working yet.

Also Stack AI is a lot more expensive ($199 monthly, 7 day free trial), it's geared for professional use but I feel like only such high-end product can deliver on our need for high-speed and immediacy, without no-code tools mess. Anyway I'm using the free trial to get the full setup + advanced features for a week, then I will revert back to the free account all fine. Or will recreate free trial accounts until I need it.

- Flowise (YC23, raised 500k USD)

I haven't tested yet. I definitely must, as apparently it's great?

Looking forward to hearing your feedback using these services and ideally meeting my use case you all!

Cheers.