Moxo vs Gumloop in 2026: Texting the Client, or Building the Agent

Overview

Moxo and Gumloop both put AI into work people used to do by hand, and they point it at different people. Gumloop is an agent builder: your own staff describe a task, connect their tools and run the agent from Slack, email or a hosted page. Moxo is a process orchestrator: a template of human steps, AI steps and automations, where each flow waits on named people, including people outside your company. The two meet at the approval, and they mean different things by the word.

Five rounds are scored below, and Gumloop takes three of them. Gumloop's side rests on gumloop.com/pricing, its about page, its privacy policy and four pages of docs.gumloop.com, all read 28 September 2026. Moxo's side rests on the last published moxo.com/pricing list, read 28 September 2026 before the page began redirecting to Moxo's homepage, and its developer documentation read the same day, plus synthetic AutomationAtlas builder tests recorded on 14 and 15 September 2026.

Company Snapshot

The Core Trade-Off: Reaching the Person Outside Goes to Moxo, by Knockout

Moxo wins this round by knockout, because its process can text the person it is waiting for. Each person in Moxo carries a primaryChannel of email, sms or email_and_sms, and a reminder "picks email or SMS per the participant's primaryChannel" (Moxo MCP documentation, read 28 September 2026). SMS notifications were listed on Team, the one plan with a published price on the last published plan list (28 September 2026). Your client gets a text, taps the link, and the approval, form or signature they owe is in front of them. The flow does not move until they act.

The texted link does not have to point at Moxo either. The API changelog says "every URL-bearing SMS and WhatsApp notification consults the partner target first", so the short link lands on your own URL. That routing belongs to the SDK configuration, which the last published plan list (28 September 2026) put on Enterprise. The client behind all of this holds a Moxo user record of kind external, with no login to learn.

Gumloop points its approvals inward. Its human-in-the-loop page says a request arrives "via in-app notification, Slack DM, or directly in the chat thread" (docs.gumloop.com, read 28 September 2026). Every surface it documents for a person runs through a Gumloop account. A hosted page asks each visitor to sign in and creates an account for anyone without one. The agent's email inbox is stricter: "The sender must have a Gumloop account", and the sender's domain must sign its mail with DKIM. A user outside your organisation who is shared into an agent pays for it too, because "their usage is deducted from their own credit balance".

Asking a client to join an AI platform, and to fund their own turn in your process, is the trade this round turns on. If nobody outside your company ever has to act, the round is worth nothing to you, and Moxo is the wrong purchase: Team's last published $5,000 a year pays for reaching people outside the company, which such a team would not use.

The Way In Goes to Gumloop, by Knockout: $37 a Month Against $5,000 a Year

Gumloop wins the way in by knockout. Pro "Starts at $37 / month" with 20,000 credits, unlimited seats, unlimited agents and more than 35 models (gumloop.com/pricing, read 28 September 2026; the $37 start and the 14-day trial were still listed when re-read on 13 October 2026). Twelve months of it cost $444. Moxo stopped publishing prices, so the comparison uses its last list: Team at "$5,000/yr" for "100 flows/yr · $100 of AI/yr · Unlimited seats", sold by the year with no monthly figure (moxo.com/pricing, read 28 September 2026, before the page redirected to Moxo's homepage). On that list the cheapest Moxo year cost more than eleven Gumloop years.

The money is only half of it. Gumloop's about page says "If you can explain the task in plain language, you can build the agent", and claims "over 300 integrations natively supported" plus any external MCP server. An operations lead can start a research or enrichment agent on a card, without a sales call. On the last published list, Moxo's Team carried the human actions and AI utilities, but branching, loops, triggers, scheduled flows and the named agents started on Scale, a custom quote, with Supervisor Agents on Enterprise.

What Moxo does well here is scope, not speed: the last-listed $5,000 bought a process with outsiders in it, which Gumloop's $37 does not attempt. For a team automating its own work this month, that is beside the point.

Gating an Agent's Own Actions Goes to Gumloop

Gumloop takes the gating round, because its gate sits on the agent's hands rather than on a step. Each connector has five approval modes, "Always allow", "Ask each time", "Ask for writes/deletes", "Never allow" and "Custom", and Custom sets the rule tool by tool (docs.gumloop.com, read 28 September 2026). App Rules go further. They are CEL expressions that "evaluate the actual arguments of each tool call", so a rule can demand approval only "when the email recipient is outside my company domain". On Pro, connector policies and guardrails are "Agent-scoped"; Enterprise makes them "Org-wide". It is the most granular control in this comparison.

Two settings deserve a second look. "Always allow" is the default mode, and the approval card carries a "Don't ask again for this tool" box that turns one approval into a standing one, saved to the agent's configuration for everyone who uses it. One ticked box therefore removes the prompt for every user of that agent.

Moxo's gate is a step: an approval in the template that a named person closes, with AI agents filling preparer or reviewer slots around it. Our Moxo vs n8n guide covers how its API refuses a machine credential on that step. Its checks on AI output are switches rather than rules, and in synthetic AutomationAtlas tests on 15 September 2026 an AI extract step's "Human review" and "Supervisor Agent" switches were both off by default.

What a Person Can Be Asked to Do Goes to Moxo

Moxo takes this round on range. The last published plan list put eleven human actions on Team: Approvals, Forms, Acknowledgements, Decisions, Questionnaires, To-dos, eSignatures, File requests, Payments, Checklists and Time booking (moxo.com/pricing, read 28 September 2026). One client can sign an engagement letter, upload a passport and pay a retainer inside the same flow, each a step with its own assignee and completion time, and each recorded against a person. A step assignment in Moxo's API carries the role (preparer, executor, reviewer or viewer) and a completedAt timestamp.

Gumloop asks a person two kinds of question. An approval card offers Approve or Reject on a tool call, with an optional reason. The Ask Question ability presents "structured choice cards (toggle groups, multi-select options)", and every card carries an "Other" option with a free-text box the agent cannot remove, a small, thoughtful guard against an agent boxing a person into its own answers. Neither collects a signature, a document or a payment as a step.

Gumloop's agent will wait for the answer: "It can wait indefinitely for your response". Moxo's step has reminders, overdue states and reassignment around it, which matters more when the person being waited on does not work for you.

When the Credits Run Out, Gumloop Prices the Next One, Narrowly

Gumloop wins this round narrowly, because it prints the price of the unit past the allowance. Credits are "indexed at $0.005 each", Pro's 20,000 a month do not roll over, and past them "Your agents will stop working" until pay as you go is enabled, which bills "at $0.005/credit" (gumloop.com/pricing FAQ, read 28 September 2026). Moxo publishes no overage rate. Moxo told Automation Atlas in writing on 6 October 2026 that "Additional flow capacity and AI usage can be purchased" without giving a rate, and its API answers 402 QUOTA_EXCEEDED when a plan quota is reached.

Gumloop's meter also carries a percentage fee. It charges "an 8% orchestration fee on the full list cost of the task", covering tokens, compute and tool calls, and "if you bring your own API key(s) for models, the orchestration fee increases to 16%", calculated on what the task would have cost without them. Bringing your own key moves the token bill to your provider and doubles the platform's percentage. Moxo's own AI meter is opaque in a different way: "$100 of AI/yr" on Team's last published list, with no published conversion to the credits its product logs.

Both products stop by default when the allowance is spent, so neither will surprise you with an invoice. Only one tells you what the next unit costs.

Pricing (as of September 2026)

Moxo (last published list, moxo.com/pricing)

Moxo stopped publishing prices: by 13 October 2026 moxo.com/pricing redirected to its homepage, and the site navigation has no pricing link. The last published list, read 28 September 2026, put Team at "$5,000/yr" for "100 flows/yr · $100 of AI/yr · Unlimited seats", with no monthly figure and no free plan. Every plan's button then read "Book a demo", and the header still links "Request free trial", a trial Moxo's team builds around your processes with no length stated. On that list Scale was a custom quote with unlimited seats; its "500 flows/yr · $500 of AI/yr" line, shown on 22 September 2026, was no longer listed on 28 September. Scale was where branching, loops, triggers, the named agents, SAML SSO, Webhooks, REST APIs, Connect via MCP and the audit log began. Enterprise added Data tables, Supervisor Agents, "Bring your own model / agent" and the Moxo SDK. No overage rate was published; Moxo told Automation Atlas in writing on 6 October 2026 that "Additional flow capacity and AI usage can be purchased", with no rate stated.

Gumloop (from gumloop.com/pricing)

Pro "Starts at $37 / month" with a 14-day free trial, both still listed when re-read on 13 October 2026. The 20,000 credits a month at $0.005 each, unlimited seats and teams, 5 concurrent workflow runs and 25 concurrent agent chats were read 28 September 2026. Enterprise is "Custom Pricing" and carries role-based access control, SCIM/SAML, the admin dashboard, audit logs, custom data retention rules, data exports and an optional virtual private cloud. Workflows, the node-based canvas the Atlas Gumloop profile describes, now sit under a "(Legacy)" heading on the pricing table.

Cost Comparison (Estimated Annual)

Both vendors put the audit log and single sign-on behind a quote. The difference is the floor: Gumloop lets a team prove the idea for $37 before that conversation, and Moxo's last published entry was the $5,000 one.

Governance, Admin Controls, and Compliance

Gumloop's homepage lists "SOC 2 Type II" as "Independently audited and compliant" and GDPR with "Zero Data Retention agreements for third-party models" (read 28 September 2026). Its audit log is thorough on paper. It records credential retrievals, agent changes and trigger changes, and a source field separates a trigger a person changed ("ui") from one the agent changed itself ("ai_agent"). Only organisation Admins can read it, it can stream to S3 or Datadog, and retention follows "Enterprise agreement terms".

Moxo's security page says it "is SOC 2 Type II and SOC 3 certified", while its Description of Services says only that "Moxo undergoes SOC 2 Type II auditing", so ask for the report behind both. Moxo told Automation Atlas in writing on 6 October 2026 that its SOC 2 Type II report is available under NDA. In synthetic tests on 14 and 15 September 2026, its audit log labelled every actor with a person's name, "AI Agent", "System" or "Public link". Its legal pages state no retention period.

The training terms differ in scope. Moxo's Terms say "Moxo will not use AI Content to train Moxo's own AI models", with no plan condition. Gumloop's privacy policy opens its promise with "For premium users", then commits that no data they pass through Gumloop is used for model training. On a paid plan the two promises match. Ask Gumloop whether its free and entry plans count as premium before any client data goes into one.

Selection Framework

Start from who has to act, then from how soon you need it running.

Editor's Note: Gumloop's pricing FAQ, read 28 September 2026, says that with a customer's own model key the credits for tokens "drop to zero" while the orchestration fee "increases from 8% to 16%", charged on "the full list cost of what the task would have cost without BYOK". By our arithmetic, a customer's own key at provider list price costs 8% of the task's list cost more than Gumloop's credits, and a discounted key comes out ahead only if it saves more than that, so the smaller the token share of a task, the deeper the discount must be. We would price one real task both ways before enabling BYOK. — Rafal Fila, ShadowGen