Frends

About Frends

Frends is the integration platform to shortlist when your estate leans on Microsoft and your procurement team prefers a European vendor, and it deserves to be judged on its own terms rather than as a smaller MuleSoft. It comes from Finland's Frends Technology Oy, a wholly owned subsidiary of HiQ International AB, which Triton has owned since 2020, according to HiQ. Frends dates the product to 1988 and HiQ's acquisition to 2010, though the legal entity's current name only dates from 6 February 2024 (Finnish Trade Register). Frends says Gartner placed it as a Niche Player in the 16 March 2026 Magic Quadrant for iPaaS, its fourth year in the report.

Frends is assembled from standard parts, and that is much of its appeal. You draw Processes in a subset of BPMN 2.0, Frends compiles them to C#, and Agents run them: Cloud Agents that Frends hosts, or Self-Service Agents on your own infrastructure. The C# core is the part to think hardest about. For a Microsoft shop it's an asset, because your developers can already read it, and Frends 6.3.0 (4 June 2026) moved compiled Processes to .NET 10. For everyone else it's a hiring question to settle before the pilot. Standard parts don't make the finished Process portable, though. Frends' Process reference says an exported diagram is "solely for including the BPMN in documentational use cases"; working Processes travel as proprietary JSON with their C# inside. BPMN gets your analysts' diagrams in. It won't get your integrations out.

Commercially, the unit that matters is the process, not the run. Frends counts unique Processes, APIs and Pass-through APIs in use on the last day of each month, once however many environments they sit in, and calls its execution limits (0.5M a month on Growth, 10M on Business, 50M on Enterprise) "not a hard-limitation". That quietly rewards fewer, fatter Processes, up to the pricing FAQ's ceiling of 50 Tasks and 10 triggers each: cheap on the invoice, painful to debug. Set your decomposition rules before the meter sets them for you. Tiers can change month to month, but only if you aren't using a higher tier's features. Hybrid Deployment starts on Business, so once Self-Service Agents are in your design, going back to Growth means ripping them out. High-availability Agents are listed on Enterprise; the v1.0.1 Growth and Business service descriptions exclude them.

Frends MCP, launched on 15 September 2026, "connects a Frends environment to Claude, ChatGPT or any AI client", while the MCP Trigger from 6.3.0 exposes a single Process as a tool. The launch release ties every Frends MCP action to "a named user by a personal token that cannot be shared", and AI-drafted Processes are approved in the Frends interface before they run. That's the right instinct for audit; issue AI clients personal applications rather than the Tenant-wide ones the docs also describe. Frends' documentation states ISO 27001:2022 certification and links a DNV Cyber attestation labelled February 2026.

If data governance is why Frends is on your list, check the AI layer as closely as the runtime. The pricing page (read 14 September 2026) offers the "Option to use your own AI models instead of Frends-hosted ones", and Frends' guide to on-premise Ollama, read 15 September 2026, has the AI Connector call your own Ollama service "instead of using the Frends AI services". With on-premise Agents, the guide says, you only need connectivity between the local machines, so the model call can stay on your network. Self-hosted Agents start on Business, and if nothing may leave at all, Enterprise Infinity is the tier that lists fully air-gapped deployment. Heed the guide's warning too: Ollama has no authentication by default, so reaching it from Frends Cloud Agents over the internet "poses a serious security risk".

On price, frends.com/pricing shows limits and quote buttons, not tier prices. The clearest figures sit on Frends' Azure Marketplace listing (Finland): Growth EUR 790, Business EUR 2,000 and Enterprise EUR 5,000 a month, plus per-process meters that include no processes. How much does Frends cost in 2026? does the maths. Before signing, read General Terms v2.0 (9 January 2026): unless your Order Form says otherwise, you pay in euros and fees rise every anniversary by the higher of 6% or euro-area HICP. For hybrid estates the obvious comparison is MuleSoft, with CloudHub 2.0 or Runtime Fabric on your own Kubernetes.

Editor's Note: Frends is like IKEA furniture: standard parts you assemble yourself. Processes are drawn in a BPMN 2.0 subset and compiled to C# on .NET, a notation and language your team may already know. The analogy cuts both ways: the finished wardrobe won't come apart into another brand's furniture, since Frends calls its BPMN export "solely for including the BPMN in documentational use cases". For anyone governing their data, Frends' docs show its AI Connector calling your own on-premise Ollama instead of Frends' AI services. Caveat: we haven't run Frends hands-on, so this is what Frends publishes. — Rafal Fila, ShadowGen