5 Relay.app Alternatives Ranked Before the Sep 14 Deadline

Relay.app is shutting down, which turns a comfortable question into an urgent one. Free accounts were deleted on August 15, 2026 and paid accounts will be deleted on September 14, after which the account and its data are gone forever. So the search for Relay.app alternatives is something you’ll have to find in days/weeks rather than slowly mull the options over a quarter. It’s a migration with a deadline attached, and whatever you pick is probably where your workflows live for the next few years.

Most alternatives roundups rank tools by integration count and starting price. That’s the wrong lens for someone leaving Relay. You didn’t choose Relay because it had the longest app list. You chose it because it let you put a person in the middle of a workflow and make the automation wait for a decision. If that approval step is what you’re replacing, a tool with 8,000 integrations and no way to pause for review is still a downgrade. This roundup ranks the options by how well each one keeps the feature you came for.

What actually matters when you replace Relay.app

Start with the approval step, because it’s the most differentiated across the alternatives. Relay’s human-in-the-loop steps let a workflow stop and wait for someone to approve an action, complete a task, or enter a value before it continued. All automation tools can send you a notification at any point, but only a few can hold a consequential action in place until a human says go. If your Relay workflows sent outbound email, updated a CRM, or moved money, that pause is the reason you trusted the automation in the first place.

Then there’s the cost of moving. No other platform imports Relay’s format, so every option means rebuilding. Relay softened this by letting you export each workflow as an AI prompt, a plain-language description you can hand to a builder instead of reverse-engineering the logic from scratch. Whatever tool you choose, you’ll also reconnect every integration by hand, since stored credentials never transfer between platforms for security reasons. That reconnection work is the same everywhere, so don’t try to factor it into your decision.

Two smaller things round out the checklist. Pricing shouldn’t punish the review step, because a tool that charges you per approval quietly discourages the oversight you’re paying for. And the approval should reach you where you are, which for most people is a phone, not a browser tab that forces you to sit in front of a laptop to use.

The best Relay.app alternatives for 2026

Here are the five worth looking at, and the kind of team each one fits.

Rills, if the approval step is why you were on Relay. Rills is an approval layer for AI: a workflow proposes a consequential action, it waits in a queue on your phone, and you swipe to approve or reject. That’s the Relay human step rebuilt as the center of the product rather than one node among many. It goes further in a few ways that pay off over time. Every action is scored for confidence against the review step’s inputs, so the routine approvals you make start clearing on their own while anything unusual still stops for a look. Approvals and logic steps are free, so adding review never raises the bill. Every decision leaves a record of what the AI proposed, who approved it, and the context they saw, kept for at least 90 days on every plan. The trade-off is a small (but growing) integration catalog that is dwarfed by the incumbents, so if you depend on a connector for an obscure app, check coverage before you commit.

Zapier, if you need the biggest integration catalog. Zapier connects to more apps than anything else, north of 8,000, and its trigger-to-action model is dependable and easy to learn. It does have a real approval step, Human in the Loop, which shipped in October 2025 and even lets the reviewer edit the drafted work before approving. That’s the closest thing to the Relay experience on any of the big platforms. The catch is the ladder you climb to use it: it’s a premium app starting on the Pro plan, on Pro you can only send approval requests to yourself, every reviewer needs a Zapier account and has to log in to respond, and each decision counts as a task. Zapier is the right call when breadth of connections matters and you can absorb the plan gate.

Make, if you want visual scenarios at scale. Make’s canvas is one of the better visual builders for complex, branching, multi-step automations, and its credit-based pricing is generous at volume. Its native human-in-the-loop app only executes on Enterprise, so on Free, Core, Pro, or Teams your scenarios run on their triggers and burn a credit per module, supervised or not, and the approval is something you assemble from a split scenario and a webhook. If your Relay workflows were elaborate and mostly ran unattended, Make is a strong home for the logic. If they leaned on the human step, you’ll be rebuilding that part by hand.

n8n, if you want self-hosting or per-execution pricing. n8n is open source, and its self-hosted Community edition is free to run on your own server with unlimited executions. Its cloud plans price by execution rather than by task, which is fairer for busy workflows than per-step metering, and a run that sits paused on an approval costs the same as one that doesn’t. The approval machinery is native and free on every plan, down to gating individual AI tool calls. What you don’t get is an inbox: each pending approval lives in whatever channel you sent it to, and the record of who approved what expires with the execution log. If you have engineering time and want control over where your automation runs, n8n rewards it. If you wanted Relay because it hid the plumbing, n8n will feel like a step back.

Lindy, if you want autonomous AI agents. Lindy sits at the other end of the spectrum from an approval layer. Its agents act across email, calendar, and CRM on their own, then report back what they did. There are optional confirmation prompts, but no confidence scoring and no learning loop that shrinks the asks as trust builds. Lindy fits if what you want is to hand off a whole category of work and check the results, rather than approve individual actions before they happen. For a Relay user who came specifically for the before-the-action pause, that’s the opposite direction.

Why the approval step should decide it

The big automation platforms give you reach and drop the approval. The AI-agent tools give you autonomy and drop it too. Relay was unusual in treating the human step as a first-class part of the workflow, and that’s the specific thing at risk when you migrate under time pressure and grab whatever looks closest on the surface.

If you move to a tool without real review, one of two things will likely happen. You’ll either wire up a homemade approval out of split workflows and emailed links, or you’ll quietly give up the oversight and let the automation fire unsupervised, which is fine right up until the day an AI-drafted email goes to the wrong list or a bad record overwrites a good one. The reason you put a person in the loop was to catch exactly that, and it doesn’t come back for free once you’ve traded it away.

This is where Rills is closest to a straight upgrade of the Relay idea rather than a lateral move. The approval is the core of the product rather than a feature bolted onto a trigger engine. The review gets lighter as the system learns which actions you reliably wave through. The paper trail builds itself, so when someone asks why a particular action went out, the answer is a lookup rather than an investigation. And because approvals and logic don’t cost anything, you can put review where the risk is instead of rationing it to stay under a task cap. There’s a full Rills vs Relay.app comparison if you want the side-by-side on pricing and features.

How to migrate before your account is deleted

Whatever you choose, do the export now, because the data will be deleted permanently soon. Pull the JSON and AI-prompt versions of every workflow, your run history, and your tables as CSV while your Relay account is still active. Our guide to exporting your Relay.app data walks through what each file is for and the order to grab them in.

Then rebuild the logic in your new tool, using the AI-prompt export as the source so you’re adjusting a working draft instead of starting from a blank slate. Reconnect your integrations as you go. Put the approval gates where the risk lives, on the external sends and the consequential writes, and leave the internal logic to run untouched. Test each rebuilt workflow on a small batch before you point real volume at it. If you’d rather not do it alone, the step-by-step guide to switching from Relay.app includes a free session where we rebuild your first workflow with you.

The one thing not to do is wait. Relay is giving paid users free access through September 14 and extra credits during the wind-down; that generosity makes it tempting to file the move under “later.” Later arrives fast when the thing you’re moving is a set of live workflows with integrations and history behind them. Export this week so your data is safe no matter what, then rebuild at a sane pace while your Relay account still runs alongside as a reference. For the full picture on the shutdown, the dates, and what’s known about why, see our post on where to move after Relay.app shuts down.

Wherever you land, land somewhere the approval step is treated as more than an afterthought. On Rills, approvals and workflow logic are always free, the review gets lighter as the system earns your trust, and every action leaves a record. Try a live demo and swipe through a pending approval the way your rebuilt workflows would feel on the other side.

Common questions

What is the best Relay.app alternative?

It depends on what you used Relay for. If the human approval step is what you're replacing, Rills is the closest upgrade, since it's built around approving actions before they run. If you mainly need integration breadth, Zapier has the largest catalog; for self-hosting, n8n; for autonomous agents, Lindy.

Is Zapier a good replacement for Relay.app?

For integration breadth, yes. Zapier connects to more than 8,000 apps and is dependable for trigger-to-action automations. It also has a real approval step in Human in the Loop, which lets the reviewer edit the drafted work before approving. The gap versus Relay is the plan ladder: it starts on the Pro plan, on Pro you can only send approval requests to yourself, every reviewer needs a Zapier account, and each decision counts as a task.

Can I move my Relay.app workflows to another tool automatically?

No. No platform imports Relay's format, so you rebuild rather than import. The transferable piece is Relay's AI-prompt export, a plain-language description of each workflow that an AI builder can turn into a working draft.

Which Relay.app alternatives have human approval steps?

Rills is built around one: consequential actions wait in a mobile queue for a human to approve or reject. Zapier has Human in the Loop, starting on the Pro plan and billed a task per decision. n8n has native approvals free on every plan, with no inbox and a record that expires with the execution log. Make's approval app runs on Enterprise only, so everyone else assembles it from a split scenario. Lindy's agents act autonomously with only optional confirmation.

When do I have to switch off Relay.app?

Free accounts were closed on August 15, 2026 and paid accounts remain until September 14, 2026, per Relay's announcement. After your date, the account and all its data are permanently deleted, so migrate during the window rather than on the final day.