Budibase
Save weeks building agents, apps, and automations with your own data, LLMs, and APIs.
By Budibase · 4.2/5 Value-Position score (estimate)
Positioning guardrails
Best for
- Ops and IT teams building internal tools, request portals and approval workflows without a full dev team
- Regulated organisations that need self-hosting, air-gapped deployment and data sovereignty
- Teams wiring AI agents into existing databases, SaaS tools and REST APIs
- Companies wanting an open-source alternative to seat-priced low-code platforms
Ideal size: 20–500 people · Ops/IT function with light technical capacity; scale-up through enterprise
Not for
- Teams looking for a fully managed, zero-build vertical SaaS product
- Customer-facing marketing sites or consumer applications
- Organisations with no technical resource to model data and maintain apps
Value metrics scorecard
Time-to-Value
1–2 weeks
~14 days to first production value
Total Cost of Ownership
$3,588/yr
Starts at $228 · Cloud plans are priced by monthly actions and billed yearly or monthly (monthly = yearly +20%); the self-hosted open-source plan is free.
Implementation Friction
2/5
Engineering + admin effort required
Value-Position score
out of 5 · model estimate
Full cost breakdown
Mandatory implementation fee
None
Seat tiers
Cloud plans include 1–3 creators; extra creators $50/creator/mo and end users $5/user/mo.
Add-on costs
- End users: $5/user/mo
- Additional creators: $50/creator/mo
- Air-gapped deployment (Enterprise)
- Onboarding and training (Enterprise)
Company & support
Who is behind Budibase, and how your team gets help once it is live.
Company
- Founded
- Not recorded
- Headquarters
- Not recorded
How you get support
- PhoneNot listed
- EmailPaid plans
- Live chatNot listed
- Support portal / ticketsNot listed
- Community forumAll plans
- Help centre / docsAll plans
- Dedicated account managerEnterprise only
- In person / on-siteNot listed
- Hours
- Not recorded
- Response time
- Two business days (Enterprise SLA)
Community support via GitHub Issues, Discussions and Discord is open to everyone; email support excludes community/open-source instances; Enterprise adds priority support, an account manager and onboarding.
“Not listed” means the vendor’s public pages don’t mention that channel, not that it is unavailable. Ask about it during evaluation.
Market position
Where Budibase sits against its closest alternatives. Pick any two of cost, speed, friction and buyer score, and up to 9 companies to compare.
Quadrant view
Typical annual cost × Time-to-value
The lines cross at the median of the solutions shown, so about half sit on each side of each line.
Companies on the chart 6 / 10
- Budibase
- Rydoo
- Cheqroom
- ProcureDesk
- Hourly
- Smartsheet
Add or change companies
Up to 10 companies including Budibase. Listed closest first.
Stack fit signal
Compatibility with standard B2B ecosystems.
No supported MCP path today, so it cannot be driven from an AI client.
AI & MCP readiness
What Budibase ships in AI, and what it asks of your ecosystem.
AI features shipped
Agent Builder supports tool calling, evals and vector/knowledge sources; agents answer employee questions and trigger workflows across Slack, Teams and Discord. Cloud plans bundle Budibase AI credits (2K–50K) and also allow bringing your own model key.
Your data & models
- Trains on your data
- Not recorded — ask the vendor
- Runs on
- OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral
- AI pricing
- Included in the plan
In your ecosystem
- AI connection
- Not supported
- Model key
- Either
- AI usage audit
- Basic visibility
Compliance attestations
* IAPP AIGP certifies individuals, not products. It means named staff hold the credential — not that the platform does.
Bottom line
Budibase is an open-source, low-code platform for building internal tools, approval workflows and AI agents on top of your own databases and SaaS systems. It runs on Budibase Cloud or self-hosted, including air-gapped. Cloud plans start at $19/month and are priced by monthly actions, with AI credits bundled and a bring-your-own-model-key option. RBAC, SSO, SCIM and audit logs are built in, and the vendor states ISO 27001 certification. More than 300K teams use it, from SMEs to governments.
Frequently asked questions
What does Budibase cost for a mid-sized team?
Cloud plans are $19/month (Pro), $49/month (Premium) and $299/month (Business) on yearly billing, with monthly billing about 20% higher, plus a custom Enterprise tier. Prices are set by a hard monthly action limit rather than seats, so agent tool calls, automation steps and row writes all consume actions. End users are an add-on at $5/user/mo and extra creators at $50/creator/mo.
Can we self-host Budibase or run it air-gapped?
Yes. Budibase is open source and the self-hosted open-source plan is free to use indefinitely, deployable via Docker, Kubernetes, Linode or Digital Ocean. Enterprise adds air-gapped deployment as a paid add-on along with custom branding, backups, environment variables, enforced SSO, user groups, SCIM and audit logs. Self-hosted infrastructure support is not included in standard support.
How long does it take to get value?
Budibase is self-serve: a 14-day free trial on cloud, and the vendor positions cloud deployment as taking seconds. Most teams build their first working app or approval workflow within one to two weeks, and the open-source path carries no licensing step. Enterprise onboarding and training are available as paid add-ons if you need help.
Does Budibase include AI agents?
Yes. Agent Builder lets you create agents with instructions, tools, models and knowledge sources, with tool calling, evals and vector-backed retrieval, and channels including Slack, Teams and Discord. Cloud plans bundle Budibase AI credits (2K/10K/50K by tier) and you can also bring your own AI key and connect your own model providers.
Which AI models can the agents use?
The connectors catalogue lists Anthropic, Azure OpenAI, Google, Groq, Mistral, OpenAI, OpenRouter and a custom provider option, so you can point agents at your preferred model or your own endpoint. Model choice and credentials are configured by you, which keeps regulated buyers in control of where prompts and data are processed.
What support is included?
Community support via GitHub Issues, Discussions and Discord is available to everyone, including open-source self-hosters. Email support is included on paid cloud plans, and Enterprise adds priority support with a two-business-day SLA, an assigned account manager and onboarding. Self-hosted infrastructure support and custom plugin maintenance are not covered.