Bardeen vs Gumloop
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Editorial assessmentGumloop compared with Bardeen
Bardeen began as a browser extension for automating things you do in a browser tab, and it retains an advantage on in-browser, user-triggered actions on sites without good APIs. Gumloop runs server-side, which makes it the right tool for scheduled and event-driven work that must happen whether or not a laptop is open. For a go-to-market team wanting agents that run overnight, Gumloop is the better fit; for accelerating a person's manual browser work, Bardeen is.
Choose Bardeen if
Sales, revenue operations, and growth people whose prospects are identifiable on public web pages rather than in contact databases, and who are willing to build sourcing and qualification workflows themselves in exchange for a very low price.
Choose Gumloop if
Operations, revenue operations, and growth people who understand a process well enough to encode it but do not want to write and host code: Gumloop gives them agents with real tool access, a shared knowledge base, and per-run cost visibility, with no seat charge as the rest of the team starts using what they built.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Bardeen | Gumloop |
|---|---|---|
| Category | AI SDR | GTM Engineering |
| Starting price | $0 with 100 free credits a month, then $10 per month (Basic) (free plan available) | $37 per month (Pro, 20,000 credits included) (14 days trial) |
| Pricing model | Credit-metered monthly subscription with a recurring free allowance; credits are consumed by automation and enrichment activity. | Usage-based. Seats are unlimited on every plan and the meter is credits, where one credit is $0.005. Credits are consumed by model chat and reasoning tokens, tool calls (minimum one credit per successful call), compute time at roughly five credits per session-minute, and an 8 percent orchestration fee on top of those. Workflow runs bill the same way. Bring-your-own-key removes token charges but raises the orchestration fee on agent chats. |
| Free plan | 100 credits per month, recurring rather than one-off, which supports genuinely light ongoing use at no cost. | No |
| Free trial | No fixed trial period; the recurring free credit allowance serves as the evaluation path | 14 days on Pro |
| Best for | Sales, revenue operations, and growth people whose prospects are identifiable on public web pages rather than in contact databases, and who are willing to build sourcing and qualification workflows themselves in exchange for a very low price. | Operations, revenue operations, and growth people who understand a process well enough to encode it but do not want to write and host code: Gumloop gives them agents with real tool access, a shared knowledge base, and per-run cost visibility, with no seat charge as the rest of the team starts using what they built. |
| Setup time | An hour for a prebuilt scraper, a day or more for a custom source with enrichment and qualification wired in. The variable is how unusual your lead source is, not the platform. | A first useful agent in an afternoon: connect two or three apps, write instructions, test in the canvas, then invite it into a Slack channel. A production process with triggers, error handling, and evaluations is more like a week of part-time work, most of which is spent discovering the edge cases in your own data. |
| Learning curve | Moderate. The scraper builder is no-code but not effortless, and identifying fields on a messy page takes practice. AI qualification is the easy part. Expect a week before the workflows are producing lists you trust without checking. | Low to start and moderate to do well. The canvas and the agent editor are approachable, but the skills that separate a demo from something dependable are prompt discipline, knowing when to force a step into a deterministic workflow instead of trusting the model, and reading the run log to find which node is consuming the credits. |
| Platforms | Web application, Browser-based extraction | Web application, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Email (per-agent inbox), Hosted agent pages with custom domains, Chrome extension, CLI |
| Compliance | Enterprise adds VPC deployment, SCIM and SAML, and audit logs, No SOC 2 status prominently published on the pricing page | SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, Zero data retention options with model providers |
| Founded | 2020 | 2023 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, United States | San Francisco, California (founded in Vancouver, Canada) |
| Ownership | Venture-backed | Independent, venture-backed (legal entity AgentHub Inc.) |
Strengths and limitations
Bardeen
Strengths
- Scraping arbitrary websites gives access to lead sources that database-reselling competitors structurally cannot reach, which is a more durable advantage than better AI copy.
- The free tier with 100 recurring monthly credits is genuinely usable and permanent rather than a time-limited trial.
- At $10 to $50 a month it is the lowest-cost entry point in this category by a wide margin.
- AI qualification from a plain-language ideal customer description is the right level of AI for this job, applied to triage rather than to prose.
Limitations
- It does not send. No email, no sequences, no warmup, no deliverability, no reply handling, so it is at most half an AI SDR.
- Scrapers are maintenance: target sites change layout and extraction breaks, which is a recurring small obligation rather than a one-time setup.
- Nothing works until you build it, so teams without someone who enjoys configuring automations will get very little from any tier.
- Basic at $10 carries no more credits than the free tier, which makes the pricing ladder confusing at the bottom.
Gumloop
Strengths
- Unlimited seats on every plan, so adoption across a team costs nothing extra and the builder is not rationing access.
- Genuinely non-technical building surface that still reaches real systems, with roughly 300 connectors and first-class MCP support.
- Per-node credit and runtime reporting in the run log, which is better cost instrumentation than most automation platforms offer.
- Company Brain with permission-preserving indexing, which is what makes a shared Slack agent safe rather than a data leak waiting to happen.
Limitations
- The free plan was discontinued; evaluation is now a 14-day trial on a paid plan, which is a real barrier for a cautious small buyer.
- Credit consumption is hard to predict before you build. Users report a workflow going from one or two credits per run to dozens after a small change, and credits do not roll over on Pro.
- The 8 percent orchestration fee sits on top of model and tool costs, and rises on bring-your-own-key agent chats, so BYOK is less of a savings lever than it first appears.
- Pro concurrency is a wall, not a queue: 5 simultaneous workflow runs, then HTTP 429. Queuing is an Enterprise feature, which pushes any genuinely high-volume webhook use case upmarket.
Pricing compared
Bardeen
Credit-metered monthly subscription with a recurring free allowance; credits are consumed by automation and enrichment activity.
- Free$0
- Basic$10
- Premium$50
- EnterpriseCustom
Bardeen is the cheapest useful thing in this category and it earns that position honestly by doing less. Fifty dollars a month for scraping, AI qualification, and validated enrichment is far below what an equivalent Clay configuration costs, and the free tier is generous enough to prove a lead source before spending anything. The value depends entirely on one question: do your prospects appear on public web pages? If yes, Bardeen reaches lists nobody else has and the price is excellent. If no, you are paying for a scraper against sources that do not contain your buyers, and a conventional contact database is both cheaper and more reliable.
Gumloop
Usage-based. Seats are unlimited on every plan and the meter is credits, where one credit is $0.005. Credits are consumed by model chat and reasoning tokens, tool calls (minimum one credit per successful call), compute time at roughly five credits per session-minute, and an 8 percent orchestration fee on top of those. Workflow runs bill the same way. Bring-your-own-key removes token charges but raises the orchestration fee on agent chats.
- ProFrom $37
- EnterpriseCustom
The unlimited-seat model is the genuinely unusual part. A ten-person team pays the same $37 base as one person, which inverts the economics of nearly every competing tool and makes Gumloop cheap for the pattern it is designed around: one builder, many users. The offsetting risk is that the credit meter is opaque until you have run real work through it, and the removal of the free plan means you now discover your actual cost during a 14-day paid trial rather than over a leisurely month on a free tier. For a small business, the honest budgeting approach is to assume the $37 covers exploration and light production only, and to instrument the run log early so you know which agent is eating the month.
Editorial verdict on each
Bardeen
Bardeen is the cheapest genuinely useful tool in this category, and it gets there by being clear about doing only half the job. Scraping arbitrary websites is a real structural advantage over the many tools that resell the same contact databases, because a list nobody else has beats a better-written opener every time. The free tier with 100 recurring credits lets you prove a lead source before spending anything, and $50 a month for scraping, AI qualification, and validated enrichment is well under what an equivalent Clay setup would cost. The conditions are strict. Your prospects have to appear on public web pages, you have to be willing to build and occasionally repair scrapers, and you have to accept that scraping third-party sites is a legal question you own. And nothing sends: budget a sequencer, domains, and mailboxes on top. Within those conditions it is excellent value; outside them it is a scraper aimed at pages your buyers do not appear on.
Read the full Bardeen profileGumloop
Gumloop is the most credible no-code agent platform for a go-to-market team that has processes worth encoding and nobody free to write code. The unlimited-seat model is the standout commercial decision: one person builds, the whole company uses it, and the base subscription does not move. Company Brain with permission-aware indexing, skills that give the prompt layer a home, and evaluations that grade output are the parts competitors have not matched. The reasons for caution are commercial rather than technical. The free plan is gone, so evaluation now happens inside a 14-day paid trial; credits are hard to forecast, do not roll over, and carry an orchestration fee on top; and the governance features a compliance review will ask about live entirely on Enterprise. Buy it if the work you want automated genuinely needs judgment, budget for usage rather than a flat subscription, and instrument the run log from day one so you find out which agent is expensive before the invoice does.
Read the full Gumloop profileBardeen profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Gumloop last reviewed 2026-08-23. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.