Is Lindy AI Any Good? My Lindy AI Review

Following on from my reviews of n8n, Gumloop, and Relevance AI – today we have a Lindy AI review.

Lindy AI is another AI automation workflow tool, having many features in common with the other AI tools I’ve mentioned. Lindy AI’s unique spin is a focus on Google products (Gmail, Google Docs, etc.) – and overall, I like it.

To me Lindy AI feels like a simplified Relevance AI, more focused on officey document/calendar work than on complex automations.

Lindy AI Review:

Lindy AI Review: First Impressions

From the outset Lindy AI leads with office-automation promises. You can tell from the homepage and onboarding flows that Lindy AI’s take is to hide most of the cogs of AI automation behind a simplified UI and straightforward ‘tasks’.

When you first sign up (after committing to a $49 per month 7 day free trial) you’re presented with myriad permission requests as part of a short, (and mostly slick), onboarding wizard. This constant hunger for all of your permissions is a recurring theme with Lindy, (more below).

Lindy AI Wants Your Calendar

After you get through that you’re prompted directly with this:

Now I’m aware all these automation platforms need access to be able to do work for us, but leading with a permissions grab and then forcing me to let Lindy have my calendar felt aggressive. (I’d not seen anything of the platform at this point.)

This was a bit of a turn-off for me, but then I’m a fairly introverted software entrepreneur, and probably not the target market. The meeting integrations in Lindy AI (as below) are probably useful for those of you who take more calls.

Lindy AI Wants to Be on All of Your Calls

Sidestepping all of the officey goodness for now, I went straight for their automation template library.

Lindy AI has 100+ pre-made AI automations/agents, and for my challenge I’d say ~10 were things I’d use.

These are the first automations which jumped out at me. I can see that for product managers and marketers there is probably a lot of potential there, straight out of the box.

Let’s take a quick look at one of these pre-written automations behind the scenes.

Lindy AI Wants Your Inbox

This Lindy AI automation reads your email. If that’s not creepy, great. But seriously, it’ll read your gmail messages and (with a filter) find newsletters you receive, scrape interesting stuff from them, and then generate you a batch dump of tweets about them.

I personally have a bad feeling about this one, but I’ve set it to test – I will report back if it just summarises the wrong emails 😅.

There’s a very slick onboarding flow for each of these official workflow templates, the key point from this one was:

That is – without filtering (by ‘contains {x}’ style filters), Lindy AI is going to process and infer the 5,000 spam emails you get each day, and then bill you for it.

Anyway…digging into this automation, (the drag-drop workflow view we’re all used to at this point is hidden under ‘Flow Editor’), you can see some well documented, fairly rational steps:

Pretty straight forward right?

It is… it’s UI is clean, it’s layout was workable and everything here made good sense.

… but I can still see why this sends you tweets for approval rather than auto-posts (slop alert!)

Testing Lindy AI

As per my other tool reviews, to try to get to grips with Lindy AI quickly, I decided to write my own automation.

I suspect most Lindy AI users are rarely going to start fresh, given the targeting – but it’s nice to explore this way.

Making an Auto Outreach AI Agent in Lindy AI

Looking ahead to the third AI agent I need to build for my AI Directory Maker, (AI Directory Marketer agent), I thought I’d explore some marketing examples for this review. Let’s see how easy it is to make an outreach bot!

I created a new Lindy AI automation, and was presented with the need for a trigger.

Now I’m not new to automations at this point, but I struggled with the flow here.

You’re presented with hundreds of options, nearly all of which seem to be external services. Lindy AI could take a page out of the other workflow editors book here – there should be some obvious options at the top, rather than this massive list.

Granted in the end a lot of automations will fire based on external stimulus. But when initially creating an automation it’s nice to have a simple initial trigger so you can build out the flow then finally wire it up to the initiator, IMO.

Next I added a ‘Perform Research’ step, which is Lindy AI’s wrapped search agent.

This worked quite well, and was easy to tweak the prompt to produce formatted output.

After each step you can use typed conditions like ‘Exit when ….’ which are a nice touch.

Next I went to add ‘Add to Google Sheet’, and was again shown the orange permissions triangle:

… but I have to say it worked well. Just these two steps, a tiny automation, taking minutes to set up – did make the spreadsheet I wanted it to. (Although it did put it in the root of my Google drive, not in the folder I specified.)

Next, let’s add Slack:

… Action search could do with improving. The above search didn’t work, but this does:

Here’s how the workflow looked at the end of this test:

As you can see it’s a very simple automation, but you know what? It works. I since tweaked it some more, removing the ‘Write’ step in the loop and rejigging it so that it actually creates the drafts how I want it to, but it works.

I’ll be tweaking this some more and putting it into use when I get to the AI Directory Marketer agent.

What do you think – would you use automations like this to speed up your existing marketing flows? Let me know in the comments.

Lindy AI Review: Things I like(Pro’s):

I think I wanted to dislike Lindy AI because I have previously struggled to get to the raw config level of these officey workflow automation tools, which usually prevents me from reaching the precision I aim for; but with Lindy AI I think the overall functionality outweighs this.

For many Lindy AI will give them the ability to automate typical office tasks in a way which is at once not too complicated, but also practical.

Here’s what I liked about Lindy AI:

• Key strengths:
  • Compiling notes & note-taking
  • Meeting/Interview flow streamlining
  • Interacting with Google products seamlessly
• 100+ well thought out templates, such as:
  • Chat with YouTube Videos
  • Voice of the Customer
• Very simplified conditional flows (typed outcomes) & well designed state transitioning
• Helpful, well timed reminders that things can get expensive (rather than just billing $)
• Mostly ‘just works’; seems to fall over less than others (though simpler flows)
• Web research works quite well out of the box
• Tasks screen will be familiar to ChatGPT users
• Credits seem to last well (my subjective take)

Lindy AI Review: Opportunities for Improvement (Con’s):

If you’re okay giving total control over lots of your services to Lindy AI, and don’t mind jumping through the 5 permissions request steps before you get started, there’s not any massive flaws in Lindy AI that I can see.

I’d say that those of you wanting to make complex nuts & bolts automations would probably get more value for your money elsewhere, (e,g. Gumloop, n8n), but if you’re not interested in that stuff Lindy AI is well worth testing.

Here’s stuff that bugs me a bit in Lindy AI:

• Hyper reliant on your using Google products
• Instantly requires a lot of Google permissions (Gmail, Gdrive, Google Docs, Calendar etc.) before you’ve even entered product
• Overwhelming ‘Select Trigger’ screen. Could have some simple options at top (e.g. user initiated, feedback form, new email)
• Explanations weak in some areas (e.g. Add Google Search API step -> API key Input (no explanation for users))
• Even though I specified to use a subdirectory when adding files to Google drive it ignored that and added to root
• Sometimes takes a good 20s to initialise a new task
• ‘Testing’ side tab reloads on changes, back log available but non-intuitively under ‘tasks’ at top
• Loop debugging is difficult/non-existent

Am I going to use this for ProfitSwarm?

I can see myself revisiting Lindy AI when I get to the marketing agent parts of this challenge. It’s got a lot going for it, if you can overlook the simplification aspect. For dealing with day-to-day stuff via email/calendar/Google docs I think it’ll work well; and a lot of my marketing tasks will call for this.

I find the price steep, but if it could reliably deliver on the marketing output I need, it would be worth it.

For back-end, product development, nuts and bolts stuff, I’ll pass on Lindy AI though, which probably makes sense as this is not built for it 🙂

For now, I’ll see you in a while Lindy AI

Have you used Lindy AI? What are your experiences?

Want to try Lindy AI?