We get asked all the time how Gumloop differs from old-school automation platforms like Make or Zapier. We thought we'd write a detailed breakdown of everything we do differently to help you make the most informed choice possible.
AI Functionality
Gumloop is an AI-native automation platform. 'Integrating AI' wasn't an afterthought, it was the main motivation behind building the product in the first place. Letting anyone automate complex work with AI is a primary goal of ours.
AI Nodes
We have a growing set of AI nodes that perform nuanced tasks like categorization, scoring, data extraction, image analysis and more.
These nodes also allow you to swap out the models being used so that you can pick the best one for the job.
For example, I'll often use Claude 3.5 sonnet or GPT4o for creative writing or analysis steps and swap to GPT4o-mini for high volume categorization work. Changing the model takes a single click, no API keys needed.
Advanced AI Nodes
We have several AI nodes that perform much more complex tasks. We've handled the engineering under the hood so users can simply use the prebuilt AI tools. Tasks like...
- AI PDF filling
- PDF OCR with Vision LLMs
- Auto-Data Extraction to Tables
- Vector Search
- Chatting with Open AI Assistants
We try to make the simple stuff easy throughout the platform but these AI nodes exist to make the hard stuff possible.
Subflows
Subflows on Gumloop allow you to use entire flows as nodes within other flows.
This allows you to build reusable, simple tools for yourself and for your team. Using subflows lets you build extremely powerful and complex AI powered automations without needing to worry things getting overwhelming.
This contributes to the 'higher ceiling' that our users often mention Gumloop has. Tremendously powerful automations can feel much more manageable since Gumloop let's you break them up into separate components via subflows.
Custom Nodes
On Gumloop, users are able to build their own nodes with AI and deploy them for their team in seconds. This essentially lets anyone code up their own totally customized tools and use them amongst the existing rich set of Gumloop integrations and AI tooling.
You'll never have to piece together prebuilt nodes to perform some simple task on Gumloop like you might have to on Make. AI can solve everything for you.
Read more about custom nodes here.
UI/UX
Many of our users are converts from Make purely because of the product feel and ease of use.
Chrome Extension
Gumloop is extremely well suited for web scraping tasks and for generally interacting with the web as part of your automations. One major feature we have is our Gumloop Chrome extension which allows people to embed their AI tools directly into their browser.
It makes automations accessible to everyone. Often times, their co-workers don't even need to visit Gumloop.com, they can just hit play on their chrome extension and have the task they care about performed automatically.
It makes web scraping tasks easy. If the content of a website is the input for your AI workflow, the extension is the easiest way to integrate the automation into your daily life.
It allows for complex browser automation. Sometimes your automation might require some clicks on a website or a login to an internal portal. The Gumloop Chrome extension allows you to solve this issue for yourself without needing to code whatsoever.
Read more about our Chrome extension here.
Scale
Some of our users are running millions of Gumloop nodes daily.
Performance and system scalability is extremely important to our enterprise users. We support "concurrent step execution" which is a fancy way of saying your large batch flows will run really fast. The workflow steps run in parallel on Gumloop via our scalable infrastructure and get you the results you care about quickly.
We also have no restrictions on how long flows can run, how many subflows they can use or the number of nodes within a flow. It's all totally open ended for enterprise scale.
Development Speed ⚡️
Make is a ~500 person company. We're a team of 4.
This might sound like a bad thing at first but we keep the team lean intentionally to build the worlds best product. We all deeply care about the problems we're solving every day and we can move much faster since we're such a small close-knit group.
We improve the product daily, speak directly with our users and release large feature upgrades on a weekly basis.
Features you request can be out in hours on Gumloop instead of in 8 months when a new update rolls out.