Reviewing Gumloop AI Automation Framework (Workflow Tool)

Last week I wrote a n8n review. n8n is open source, so after that I thought I should review one of the competing closed source workflow tools. This is my Gumloop review.

To make a fully automated company, as per my challenge, I need some form of generalist ‘connector’ tooling which can wire together various inputs, triggers, and logic and resemble, in a crude sense, an AI employee. It’s in this vein that I’m writing this Gumloop review.

I’m going to be trying lots of different AI tools, starting with the workflow builders like Gumloop. Subscribe above to get each review as it comes out, or check back here later where I’ll put a link to the combined outcome of my AI Workflow framework tests.

My Gumloop Review

What is Gumloop?

Gumloop, (like n8n), offers you a selection of ready made parts which you can wire together using a smooth UI to create sequences (workflows).

The concept of these workflow tools is to enable simple to complex work to be mapped out without having to dip into code (no-code or half-code). They’re heavily AI focused and Gumloop is able to do browser-like activities via prompts, which will be invaluable to me achieving this challenge.

Here’s a super simple example:

Walking through the steps in this Gumloop template (which scrapes details from a LinkedIn company page):

1. Takes form input “Company URL” and “Company details or “Company details + news”
2. Fires one of two ‘subflows’ (with or without news)
   • This subflow is a pre-written component which extracts key info from LinkedIn pages
   • Combines the scraped data into a single text output
3. Finally, the workflow returns the results.

You can see the flows here, but you may need to click into them to see the detail:

This is a basic flow, empowered by the good range of default pre-written components (actions) that Gumloop has built in. I’m going to leverage as many existing tools as possible for my challenge, so I was happy to see some key components built into Gumloop:

• Browser extension
• AI Browsing
• Data enrichment
• Integrations like Slack, Google Drive, Github, Reddit, WordPress, X, SEMRush

It’s worth noting that n8n also had such integrations.

What do I want to do with Gumloop?

As I test Gumloop my main aim is to see if it’s capable enough to be the main hub for my AI business workflows. In an ideal world it’ll seamlessly run workflows representing the different buckets of work an actual employee would do.

Like n8n, it needs to be able to let me organise fairly complex logic and AI agents into automatic flows that take little-to-none human input, all the while interacting with each other.

Tasks I need to address in this challenge, that I think Gumloop might help me manage:

• Retrieval of key data (keyword research, trend data)
• Use this key data to build out strategies and eventually landing pages (pSEO)
• Manage transactions and send transactional emails
• Automate customer support across channels
• Manage social media marketing
• Financial summarising
• Email outreach
• … and more

n8n seemed a good start in achieving a lot of these, but does have a few blocking features currently. Let’s see if Gumloop is a better fit:

First impressions of Gumloop

Gumloop is smooth. n8n, though impressive, is somehow less smooth than Gumloop. The UI is very clean and the way it organises components makes more rational sense to me. It’s probably the nature of the different models – n8n is open source, Gumloop a paid service. Gumloop feels more refined, probably because it has a more focused vision.

Initially I signed up to Gumloop with Github. It then prompted me to verify my email, but I never got the email. I resent this 3 times, checked my spam, and never received any verification email. Bummer.

In the end because I needed to review Gumloop for this post, I signed up with my Google account and that ‘just worked’.

Like n8n, Gumloop has a list of existing workflow templates, though the list is much smaller than n8n’s; the quality seems high.

Rather than using one of the templates, I jumped straight in to making my own workflow.

My first Impressions:

• Sign up hiccup when using Github connect
• Startup wizard walked me through a ‘how to’, but seemed a bit broken at last step (gives you tokens for trying)
• Template library sparse but high quality
• Felt easy enough to master that I jumped straight in
• Pricing is fair, but trenches deep (Free trial = 1000 credits, next price is $97/mo for 30,000+)
• Credits system seems fair, but can see it quickly escalating the price (running a single AI node with a model like GPT4o-mini is 2 credits)
• UI is CLEAN

Testing Gumloop

Having just reviewed n8n, I quickly adapted what I’d learned there and applied it to Gumloop. Both workflow tools are very similar, so it wasn’t hard to switch up.

For this test I decided to work on my “Directory Prospector” automation set which I need to build this Directory business.

I created several different workflows, one to ideate, one to request a Niche Report; these were simple but worked as expected, (which was awesome).

Unfortunately I did hit a blocker, and that was in my ‘Explore Trends’ task:

Test Workflow: Google Trends Scraper

The premise of this automation is simple: Take an input of 1-5 keywords, call up Google Trends, and export the trend data.

I was super hopeful when I saw that Gumloop has an AI web browsing agent, and I built this flow:

Here are the steps:

• Receive keyword inputs (5x) – In this example I’m using a form, but ultimately this’ll come from another workflow. Gumloop has super nice input forms 🙂
• Combine the keywords into a string – This is so we can call Google Trends directly with the keywords
• Format the string with urlencode – This was a custom component I added very quickly (nice), which simply turns plain text into encoded URL parameters
• Combine the urlencoded string with final URL – Basically make the URL to call
• Use an AI web browsing agent to crawl the page – I love how simple this is in Gumloop, being able to quickly prompt with instructions is great

I noticed a few things as I made this workflow.

1. The Gumloop UI is very refined – I never had an issue finding what I needed; Gumloop reads cleanly, and I love the nesting of subflows, but…
2. Zooming/framing is irritating – This might be because I’m using a non mac mouse, but I felt the zoom feature was difficult, and Gumloop lacks a nice ‘center the view’ button like n8n
3. Creating custom components was smooth – It took less than 20 seconds to make my urlencode component (so it should!)

Overall I’d say Gumloop has much less friction than n8n. All in it probably only took me 15 minutes to make this workflow.

Back to the workflow. Here’s what happened when I ran it:

The first steps ran quickly and smoothly, then…

Google says no.

What’s probably happened here is Gumloop has faithfully done what I’ve asked, but because there are so many users on Gumloop building tools which query Google things, Google has blocked requests.

This is sensible for Google, because they don’t want a bunch of automated tools draining their resources.

But it’s a stonewall for me in Gumloop.

This automation will probably never run well on a cloud service which uses AI Browser agents sitting on the same server. They probably all share IP addresses, and it’s relatively hard for Gumloop to avoid these IP addresses being blocked by third parties like Google.

All in all, though, because Gumloop’s UI is so refined, I’ve not wasted more than 15 minutes before finding out this limitation. And knowing it, I can change the tooling for this specific task to be run locally by a browser agent on my computer.

Test Workflow outcomes

2 out of 3 tests I did on Gumloop worked well. The third was blocked by something somewhat out of Gumloops control. In time I am sure this can even be worked out via proxies or me building a middleman service to fire these automations on my device and pump back the results.

So far so good.

Will I continue to test Gumloop?

Having now tried n8n and Gumloop, I’m 50/50 on which I’ll use going forwards. I love Gumloops UI and refinements, but it being a closed source gated service (with chunky pricing) does mean I am behoved to pay whatever they ask if I get this up and running.

Gumloop Review: Pro’s

I very much like Gumloop, though I won’t be able to automate everything there. That might not matter for you, if you’re not doing a crazy challenge like me 😂. Here are the pro’s from my point of view:

• Great UI
• Sensible component design & refinement
• Onboarding awards you tokens (nice concept)
• Key integrations present (though not as many as n8n which has 1k+)
• Notion-like naming, branding, which makes for pretty outputs in situations like form inputs
• Responsive – I found the workflow debugger common-sense and fast

Gumloop Review: Con’s

Once you’re registered and inside the workflow editor, Gumloop is a pleasant place to be. If I’m being picky, getting there wasn’t as smooth as it could have been, (but that’s easily fixed).

Overall I feel like the cons I mention here are minor, and that if you’re looking for a solid AI enabled workflow tool, they might not matter to you at all.

• Signing up with Github didn’t work – never got the verification email
• Onboarding hit a hitch (enrich workflow didn’t make sense to me, couldn’t complete the last steps)
• Google has blocked Gumloop’s IP, making some scraping impossible with their AI browser agent
• Pricing might be prohibitive for some small businesses
• Despite the lovely UI, I struggled with zooming & arranging my workflow (vs n8n)

Gumloop Review Summary

As I review these different workflow tools, I slowly start to realise their real power; flexibility.

Gumloop is a good example of how through allowing you to arrange nodes, make custom nodes, and connect to external services, you can now pretty much automate anything. Gumloop is an incredibly flexible tool.

As I used Gumloop I felt that in comparison to n8n it’s shallower in some aspects, (less integrations, fewer templates), while being more refined on the whole. I think Gumloop suits entrepreneurs who don’t mind paying a bit more for this refinement, and speed, and who don’t need the 1k+ integrations and self-hosting ability of n8n.

For me personally I wonder how these tools will play out in a world where AI can even design it’s own workflows – but I’d bet that if these tools do make sense in 5 years, Gumloop will be one of the main contenders then.

All in all, I like Gumloop. I think it’s a refined, solid, flexible AI workflow tool and it certainly will be something I use in some aspect of my business challenge, (unless one of the other workflow tools trumps it in my testing).

Gumloop Review Final Thoughts

I like these workflow tools. If I look back over the last 20 years of making software as an entrepreneur, I can see dozens of use cases where this could have saved time, money, effort and been more reliable. It’s a wild time to be building things. Gumloop is a great example of how far we’ve come in balancing flexibility and refinement, in automation tools.

I do see, though, in the split between open source (n8n) and closed source (Gumloop and others), that it may suit some of us who have the means to write our own automations logic to do so; primarily to avoid being trapped in a system so integral to our businesses that we have no choice but to pay whatever’s asked.

It’d be amazing in the long run to have ‘portable workflows’ – like a standardised format for workflows to be moved between workflow designers like Gumloop/n8n.

… but that’s just me, I tend towards homebrewing. Gumloop is a decent choice if you (sensibly) want less headache 😂.

What do you think of Gumloop?

Have you used Gumloop or another workflow tool like it? I’d love to read your thoughts in the comments below.

Gumloop Discount Code: profit

Update: After I posted this review, Gumloop gave me a discount code I can give to you, (you save 20% and I get a small affiliate fee). If you’re going to try Gumloop, please use the code “profit” at checkout, it’ll help support this mad challenge 😅!

Gumloop Discount Code: profit