This comparison changed on 29 July 2026, when the Flowise team announced a code freeze. The repository was archived on 10 August and the project reached end of life on 31 August.

So the question is no longer only canvas versus sentence. It is whether you want to take on a dependency nobody is patching.

I read the vendor's own sunset notice and checked the repository state on 13 September 2026. Below is what I found, and what I would do with it.

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:

The canvas is still one of the cleaner ones in the OSS LangChain ecosystem, and 55,456 stars say the design landed. That part of the assessment has not changed.

What changed is everything around it. The team gave its reason plainly in the sunset notice: developers are moving to coding agents, and "the typical rigid workflow low code approach quickly hits the limit when it comes to complexity."

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

CapabilityFlowiseGravity
Setup modelDrag-drop canvas, JS for advancedOne sentence
HostingSelf-hosted or Flowise CloudFully hosted only
Operator personaEngineers and technical PMsNon-technical operators
Time to first agent1 to 3 hours60 seconds
IntegrationsLangChain ecosystem, custom nodesNative connector catalogue
ObservabilityBuilt-in trace per nodeBuilt-in run history
SchedulingCron node or external triggerFirst-class in prompt
Open sourceYes, Apache 2.0, repository archived 10 Aug 2026No
MaintainedNo, end of life 31 Aug 2026, last release 3.1.4Yes
Pricing modelFree OSS plus infra and LLMBundled monthly fee

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

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 still makes sense, and what you inherit

There is still a case for it, and it is narrower than it was in May.

It holds if you already run Flowise in production and it works. An archived project does not break on a schedule. If your install is behind a VPN, pinned, and doing a job, ripping it out this quarter is busywork.

It also holds if you have a Node.js team that genuinely intends to fork. Apache 2.0 means you can, and the team explicitly encourages it.

Be clear about what a fork inherits. Two CVEs were published after the final release and affect every version up to it: CVE-2026-67622, an IDOR allowing cross-workspace credential access, rated CVSS 3.1 base 9.9 critical and published on 6 August 2026, and CVE-2026-67620, an SSRF where cloud metadata endpoints are missing from the deny list. No release has been issued since. Whoever owns the fork owns those two fixes.

Where it no longer holds is a greenfield build. Starting a new project on an archived dependency in September 2026 means you are volunteering to become its maintainer before you have shipped anything.

When Gravity is the right choice

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 project is free under Apache 2.0, and archiving does not change the licence. You pay for the server you host it on, the LLM API calls, and any storage you provision. Note that the repository was archived on 10 August 2026, so nobody upstream is shipping patches; the sunset notice did not cover Flowise Cloud, whose pricing page was still live on 13 September 2026.

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?

No, Gravity is hosted only, and I would rather say that plainly than pretend otherwise. If self-hosting is a hard compliance requirement, Gravity is not your answer. I would point you at a maintained open-source project rather than an archived one; I compared the realistic options in the best Flowise alternatives.

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, and some teams do exactly that, with Flowise on internal RAG chains and Gravity on outward-facing operational work. The integration is loose, webhooks both ways. Given the archive, I would treat the Flowise half as a system you are winding down rather than one you keep extending.

Three takeaways before you close this tab

  1. Flowise still wins on control, but control now includes patching it yourself. 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