{
    "title": "LangChain Alternatives 2027: 11 Paid, Free & Open-Source",
    "url": "https://zekaiwork.com/alternatives/langchain/",
    "summary": "The best LangChain alternatives in 2027 are CrewAI (best overall), Botpress (best free plan: 100 conversations, 3 agents) and Langflow (best open source, MIT). LangChain itself starts at $39/seat/mo. Zekai checked these prices on vendor pages on 11 Nov 2026; 8 more are compared below, including 4 with a free plan and 3 open source.",
    "tool": {
        "name": "LangChain",
        "starting_price": "$39/seat/mo",
        "free_plan": "1 seat, 5k base traces a month",
        "price_checked": "2026-11-11",
        "pricing_url": "https://www.langchain.com/pricing"
    },
    "task": "AI agent builder / framework",
    "prices_checked": "2026-11-11",
    "date_modified": "2026-11-11",
    "alternatives": [
        {
            "name": "CrewAI",
            "type": "Free",
            "starting_price": "Free plan; paid price not published",
            "free_plan_limit": "50 executions, 2 automations, community support",
            "best_for": "Role-based multi-agent crews with a managed cloud",
            "difference": "Runs multi-agent workflows on CrewAI cloud with a visual editor and code API; Free caps at 50 executions and 2 automations, and Enterprise adds SSO, RBAC and a 45-day onboarding.",
            "price_checked": "2026-11-11",
            "pricing_url": "https://www.crewai.com/pricing",
            "website": "https://www.crewai.com",
            "zekai_score": 8.1,
            "zekai_review": "https://zekaiwork.com/ai-tools/crewai/"
        },
        {
            "name": "n8n",
            "type": "Free",
            "starting_price": "20€/mo billed annually",
            "free_plan_limit": "Community Edition self-hosted; cloud trial 1,000 executions",
            "best_for": "Visual workflows with agent steps, self-hostable",
            "difference": "Bills by workflow execution (2.5K on Starter, unlimited steps) instead of per seat, and ships a self-hosted Community Edition; Business is self-hosted only.",
            "price_checked": "2026-11-11",
            "pricing_url": "https://n8n.io/pricing/",
            "website": "https://n8n.io",
            "zekai_score": 9.3,
            "zekai_review": "https://zekaiwork.com/ai-tools/n8n/"
        },
        {
            "name": "LlamaIndex",
            "type": "Free plan + paid",
            "starting_price": "$500/mo",
            "free_plan_limit": "10K free credits, 1 project, 5 concurrent jobs",
            "best_for": "Document parsing and retrieval for agents",
            "difference": "Prices by credits for document parse, extract, classify and split jobs ($1.5 per 1k on Pay-as-you-go), with 100 users included, rather than per-seat tracing.",
            "price_checked": "2026-11-11",
            "pricing_url": "https://www.llamaindex.ai/pricing",
            "website": "https://www.llamaindex.ai",
            "zekai_score": 7.9,
            "zekai_review": "https://zekaiwork.com/ai-tools/llamaindex/"
        },
        {
            "name": "Botpress",
            "type": "Free plan + paid",
            "starting_price": "$150/mo billed annually",
            "free_plan_limit": "100 conversations, 3 seats, 3 AI agents",
            "best_for": "Hosted conversational agents without code",
            "difference": "Sells hosted conversational agents priced by conversations (250 a month on Plus, $25 AI usage included) and covers each conversation's AI usage up to $0.10.",
            "price_checked": "2026-11-11",
            "pricing_url": "https://botpress.com/pricing",
            "website": "https://botpress.com",
            "zekai_score": 7.9,
            "zekai_review": "https://zekaiwork.com/ai-tools/botpress/"
        },
        {
            "name": "Dust",
            "type": "Free",
            "starting_price": "€24/seat/mo billed yearly",
            "free_plan_limit": "500 credits, lifetime",
            "best_for": "Company assistants wired to team data",
            "difference": "Gives teams a seat-based workspace for building agents on company data, with 8,000 credits per seat each month on Pro and a Free seat holding 500 lifetime credits.",
            "price_checked": "2026-11-11",
            "pricing_url": "https://dust.tt/pricing",
            "website": "https://dust.tt",
            "zekai_score": 7.9,
            "zekai_review": "https://zekaiwork.com/ai-tools/dust/"
        },
        {
            "name": "deepset (Haystack)",
            "type": "Free",
            "starting_price": "Free plan; paid price not published",
            "free_plan_limit": "1 user, 100 pipeline hours, 50 files",
            "best_for": "Pipeline-based search and RAG applications",
            "difference": "Its Studio tier is free for one user with 100 pipeline hours and two development pipelines, and Enterprise adds high-availability production pipelines on cloud or custom deployment.",
            "price_checked": "2026-11-11",
            "pricing_url": "https://www.deepset.ai/pricing",
            "website": "https://www.deepset.ai",
            "zekai_score": 8.7,
            "zekai_review": "https://zekaiwork.com/ai-tools/deepset-haystack/"
        },
        {
            "name": "Relevance AI",
            "type": "Paid",
            "starting_price": "Not checked",
            "free_plan_limit": "No free plan",
            "best_for": "Managed AI workforce for business teams",
            "difference": "Pricing page lists a single Enterprise plan with unlimited agents, users and projects, 2,000+ integrations, calling and meeting agents, and SSO with audit logs.",
            "price_checked": "2026-11-11",
            "pricing_url": "https://relevanceai.com/pricing",
            "website": "https://relevanceai.com",
            "zekai_score": 6,
            "zekai_review": "https://zekaiwork.com/ai-tools/relevance-ai/"
        },
        {
            "name": "Langflow",
            "type": "Open source",
            "starting_price": "Free (self-hosted)",
            "free_plan_limit": "No limit (self-hosted)",
            "licence": "MIT",
            "best_for": "Visual builder for multi-agent flows",
            "difference": "Drag-and-drop canvas that exposes each flow through a built-in API and MCP server, licensed MIT, where LangChain is a code library.",
            "repository": "https://github.com/langflow-ai/langflow",
            "zekai_open_source_page": "https://zekaiwork.com/free-open-source/langflow/",
            "zekai_score": 8.8,
            "zekai_review": "https://zekaiwork.com/free-open-source/langflow/"
        },
        {
            "name": "Google ADK",
            "type": "Open source",
            "starting_price": "Free (self-hosted)",
            "free_plan_limit": "No limit (self-hosted)",
            "licence": "Apache-2.0",
            "best_for": "Code-first multi-agent Python toolkit",
            "difference": "Code-first Python toolkit from Google for building, evaluating and deploying multi-agent systems, with a stated roughly bi-weekly release cadence.",
            "repository": "https://github.com/google/adk-python",
            "zekai_open_source_page": "https://zekaiwork.com/free-open-source/adk-python/",
            "zekai_score": 8.4,
            "zekai_review": "https://zekaiwork.com/free-open-source/adk-python/"
        },
        {
            "name": "CAMEL",
            "type": "Open source",
            "starting_price": "Free (self-hosted)",
            "free_plan_limit": "No limit (self-hosted)",
            "licence": "Apache-2.0",
            "best_for": "Research on multi-agent societies",
            "difference": "Community framework aimed at studying how agent behaviour scales with many cooperating agents, installed as the camel-ai package under Apache-2.0.",
            "repository": "https://github.com/camel-ai/camel",
            "zekai_open_source_page": "https://zekaiwork.com/free-open-source/camel/",
            "zekai_score": 7.8,
            "zekai_review": "https://zekaiwork.com/free-open-source/camel/"
        },
        {
            "name": "Dify",
            "type": "Open source",
            "starting_price": "Free (self-hosted)",
            "free_plan_limit": "No limit (self-hosted)",
            "licence": "Dify Open Source License (not OSI-approved)",
            "best_for": "Visual agent and RAG app platform",
            "difference": "Platform combining visual workflows, RAG pipelines and agent building under a custom licence that is not OSI-approved, where LangChain is a code library.",
            "repository": "https://github.com/langgenius/dify",
            "zekai_open_source_page": "https://zekaiwork.com/free-open-source/dify/",
            "zekai_score": 8.6,
            "zekai_review": "https://zekaiwork.com/free-open-source/dify/"
        }
    ],
    "faq": [
        {
            "q": "What is the best alternative to LangChain in 2027?",
            "a": "CrewAI is the best overall LangChain alternative on this page (Free plan; paid price not published). For no cost, Botpress has a free plan (100 conversations, 3 seats, 3 AI agents). To self-host, Langflow is open source (MIT)."
        },
        {
            "q": "Is there a free version of LangChain?",
            "a": "Yes. LangChain has a free plan: 1 seat, 5k base traces a month. Paid plans start at $39/seat/mo, checked on 11 Nov 2026."
        },
        {
            "q": "Is there a 100% free alternative to LangChain?",
            "a": "Yes. Langflow, Google ADK, CAMEL, Dify are open source and free to self-host. CrewAI, n8n, LlamaIndex, Botpress, Dust, deepset (Haystack) have a free plan with limits, shown in the table."
        },
        {
            "q": "What is cheaper than LangChain?",
            "a": "n8n starts at 20€/mo billed annually, against $39/seat/mo for LangChain, as listed on each vendor's pricing page on 11 Nov 2026."
        },
        {
            "q": "How much do LangChain alternatives cost for a team of 5?",
            "a": "If each of 5 people buys the entry paid plan, at the prices Zekai checked on 11 Nov 2026, the monthly cost is Botpress $750/mo, LlamaIndex $2,500/mo, against LangChain $195/mo for LangChain. Team and business plans can cost more per seat. The Zekai Cost Finder on this page recalculates for any team size."
        },
        {
            "q": "Which is better, CrewAI or LangChain?",
            "a": "Runs multi-agent workflows on CrewAI cloud with a visual editor and code API; Free caps at 50 executions and 2 automations, and Enterprise adds SSO, RBAC and a 45-day onboarding. Choose CrewAI if you want role-based agent crews deployed on a managed cloud rather than assembling chains and tracing yourself. Stay with LangChain if you want a large library of model and tool integrations and per-seat tracing without an execution cap."
        },
        {
            "q": "Why are people leaving LangChain?",
            "a": "The documented reasons are: The Developer plan covers one seat and up to 5k base traces a month, then switches to pay-as-you-go; Plus raises that to 10k base traces and bills further usage on top of the seat fee (11 Nov 2026); LangChain Standard Units are charged at $1.00 each in addition to the license fee, and Fleet pauses new runs once the monthly LSU allowance is used on the Developer plan (11 Nov 2026). Each is sourced in the section above."
        },
        {
            "q": "What is better than LangChain?",
            "a": "It depends on the job: LlamaIndex for document-heavy retrieval, CrewAI for role-based agent crews, n8n or Langflow for visual workflows, and Google ADK for a code-first alternative."
        }
    ],
    "publisher": "Zekai (zekaiwork.com) — independently reviewed; prices read on vendor pages on the dates shown.",
    "licence": "Free to quote with a link to https://zekaiwork.com/alternatives/langchain/. Bulk copying or republishing the dataset is not permitted."
}