Tech Roundup: OpenAI Agent Kit

Gavin
Gavin
2 min read •

This week, OpenAI had their annual Dev Day; an exciting conference, with all the hallmarks of your classic Apple product launch. Once more we are witnessing the rollout of brave new technology, which will have a huge impact on our future - good and bad.

But I want to turn your attention to OpenAI's AgentKit, as this peaked my interest. Some are saying it is OpenAI's answer to n8n.

What is n8n?

n8n is a way of developing Agentic AI which is an exciting new type of automatic workflow.

An 'old school' automation uses binary logic. For example:

User signs up -> send written welcome email instantly.

Now AI has made this more fancy, with new AI automations like

User signs up -> write them a welcome email based on their settings -> send instantly.

But at the agentic stage we can enable something with fuzzier logic, but more initiative and adaptability:

For new users, welcome them in the most receptive format.

As you can see, my AI agent is free to do what it sees fit when welcoming my new users. It could email them what it wants, when it wants. This will have unpredictable results, but the AI agent may just unlock a powerful and efficient onboarding mechanism.

n8n makes stuff like this easy to build, with a visual UI which is clean and intuitive. In addition, you can connect it to a large variety of tools, and choose from a host of models. I can use Google Gemini, just as easily as GPT.

When trying out n8n this week, they offered me a 14 day free trial which I am still enjoying. If I want to keep automating after this, I will need to cough up. Here is the price list at the time of writing:

PlanPriceFeatures
Starter£20 per month1 project, 5 automations at once
Pro£50 per month3 projects, 20 automations at once, more misc features.
Business + Enterprise£580+ per month...Far more scalable across a company
Plan: Starter
Price: £20 per month
Features: 1 project, 5 automations at once
Plan: Pro
Price: £50 per month
Features: 3 projects, 20 automations at once, more misc features.
Plan: Business + Enterprise
Price: £580+ per month
Features: ...Far more scalable across a company

Source: n8n pricing.

How have OpenAI responded?

Agentbuilder seems free to use with my OpenAI account. I have some credit on the platform, perhaps it will start burning through that once I get it set up. As for the choice of models, it has all that OpenAI has to offer, but no more. Blessed with a similar visual UI for mapping everything out, I can see that I also have a list of tools I can connect with. This list does not seem anywhere as extensive as n8n, but there are a few built in connections already, and I can see the option to connect to a custom MCP server.

Some clues on AgentKits future pricing is on the OpenAI pricing page, and it seems to be free to use until November 1st 2025, so give it a go while it is fresh!