Gravity vs Flowise: Self-Hosted Canvas vs Hosted Outcome (2026)

Flowise and Gravity sit in adjacent neighbourhoods. Flowise says: here is a free canvas, host it yourself, build agents visually. Gravity says: skip the canvas, describe the outcome, the runtime is ours.

I have shipped agents both ways. The trade-off is real and the right answer depends on whether your bottleneck is engineer time or platform money.

What Flowise is, and where it actually shines

Flowise is an open-source low-code platform built on Node.js and LangChain. You install it with Docker or npm, open the canvas, drag nodes for models, memory, retrievers, and tools, and connect them. Behind the scenes it generates and runs a LangChain pipeline.

It shines when:

• You need self-hosting. Sensitive data never leaves your network.
• Your engineers want a visual to communicate flow structure to non-engineers.
• You want to extend the platform with custom nodes in TypeScript.
• You are building chatbots or RAG apps where the flow is mostly retrieve, augment, generate.
• You want to avoid platform lock-in. Export, fork, modify.

The community is healthy, the project ships fast, and the canvas is one of the cleaner ones in the OSS LangChain ecosystem.

What Gravity does differently

Gravity has no canvas. You write one sentence:

"Every hour, monitor Twitter mentions of @gravity_fast. For anything that looks like a customer complaint, draft a polite reply, post it in our #support Slack channel for me to approve. Stop after 10 mentions per hour."

That sentence produces a schedule, an X API integration, a sentiment filter, a draft generator, a Slack post, an approval queue, and a rate limit. We did not ask you to wire any of it. The runtime composed it from the sentence.

If you want to see why we picked this model, read describe the outcome, not the workflow. The short version: humans are bad at maintaining graphs but good at describing results.

Side-by-side capability comparison

The OSS-canvas vs SaaS-outcome split

The honest split is this: Flowise gives you the building blocks. Gravity gives you the building.

If you are a control-first team and your engineering culture insists on owning the runtime, Flowise wins. You get the source, you get the canvas, you get to fork. The infra burden is yours but so is the leverage.

If you are a speed-first team and your bottleneck is engineering attention, Gravity wins. You give up the source and the canvas but you get the agent today.

Most teams pick the wrong one out of habit. Engineering teams pick Flowise because OSS feels safe, then quietly never maintain the canvas after month two. Ops teams pick Gravity because the demo is fast, then never feel the urge to inspect a graph because the agent runs. Pick by who operates it, not by who buys it. The same logic is in why most AI agents stop after one task.

Pricing reality

• Flowise OSS: Free. Add infra (Docker host, Postgres, secrets), LLM API spend, and at least a partial engineer for maintenance.
• Flowise Cloud: Tiered pricing, check current public pricing for the latest figures.
• Gravity: One bundled monthly fee that covers runtime, hosting, observability, and connector maintenance. Pricing is public when the waitlist opens.

If you forecast engineer hours per agent per month, Gravity tends to come out cheaper. If you forecast platform dollars per agent per month, Flowise tends to come out cheaper. Both can be the right answer depending on where your scarce resource is.

When Flowise is the right choice

• You have a Node.js team.
• You need on-prem or VPC deployment.
• You are building RAG-shaped products where retrieval is the bulk of the work.
• You want to fork and customise.
• You are okay maintaining the canvas as it grows.

When Gravity is the right choice

• You want an agent in production today, not Friday.
• Your operator does not write code.
• You care more about the result than the structure that produced it.
• You want one vendor on the hook for the whole stack.
• You want to change agent behaviour by editing a sentence.

Migration: what changes if you switch

1. Pick one Flowise canvas you want to retire. Write down what it does in one sentence.
2. Add stop conditions, schedule, and approval requirements to that sentence.
3. Connect the same OAuths in Gravity, run a dry run.
4. Compare outputs over a week. Cut over.
5. Repeat for the next canvas.

If you are coming from a workflow tool instead, see how to migrate from Zapier to an agent.

Frequently asked questions

Is Flowise free?

Yes, the OSS project is free under an Apache-style license. You pay for the server you host it on, the LLM API calls, and any storage you provision. Flowise also offers a paid cloud tier for teams that do not want to self-host.

Can non-engineers use Flowise?

They can use a finished flow that an engineer built. They generally cannot build the flow themselves because the nodes assume familiarity with LangChain primitives like memory, retrievers, and tool calls.

Does Gravity have a self-host option?

Not today. Gravity is a hosted SaaS. The trade is deliberate, we own the ops so you do not. If you require self-hosting for compliance reasons, Flowise is the better fit right now.

Which one is faster to ship?

Gravity, by a wide margin. The canvas in Flowise still has to be built. The outcome prompt in Gravity is one sentence. Time-to-first-running-agent is roughly 60 seconds versus a few hours.

Can I run Flowise and Gravity in parallel?

Yes. Some teams use Flowise for internal RAG chains and Gravity for outward-facing operational agents. The integration is loose, webhooks both ways.

Three takeaways before you close this tab

1. Flowise wins on control. Gravity wins on speed.
2. OSS is not free. You pay in infra and engineer time. Make sure you actually have those budgets.
3. Pick by who will operate the agent, not by who is buying the platform.

Sources

• Flowise. "Official documentation." docs.flowiseai.com
• GitHub. "Flowise repository." github.com/FlowiseAI/Flowise
• Flowise. "Cloud pricing page." flowiseai.com