What Albato is actually selling

Albato's pitch to small businesses is the multi-step automation that Zapier keeps behind its paid tiers, for less money. Pro starts at $15 a month billed annually, or $22 month to month, for 1,000 transactions, with unlimited automations and unlimited steps (checked on albato.com/pricing on September 26, 2026). The catalogue claims 1,000+ apps, and an App Integrator lets you build a connector for anything with API documentation by pasting from those docs into a form.

Open the company's homepage today, though, and the headline reads "Embedded iPaaS for SaaS and AI-agents". The self-serve product reviewed here is no longer the only thing Albato wants to sell. The February 2026 price rise and a team plan that still says "Coming soon" both make more sense with that in mind.

The editor is a canvas. You pick a trigger such as "HubSpot: Contact added", then stack actions and tools under it. The built-in tools go further than the price suggests: HTTP requests, a JSON parser, router, iterator and aggregator, date and text formatting, table lookups, an incoming-data filter, and Python or JavaScript code steps. Most CRM and marketing flows never need to leave the editor.

How transactions are counted

Read this before the price table, because it decides what the price table means. Albato bills in transactions. The trigger is free and every step after it costs one, "regardless of where the action takes place - in a third-party service or in Albato", in the words of the help centre article updated in January 2026. A formatter, a parser or a router produces a tool result. A tool result is a transaction.

Zapier counts the other way round: filters, Paths and Formatter steps are not tasks. Make charges nothing for its router. So a five-step Albato flow with two utility steps in it spends four transactions every run, where Zapier would bill about two tasks for the same work.

Two multipliers sit on top. When a trigger delivers several records at once, Albato charges each record at each step. AI steps bill in transactions as well - the pricing table sets 2,000 Albato AI tokens as the price of one transaction.

Hitting the limit does not stop anything. Albato buys another 100-transaction pack automatically, priced 50% above your package rate, and carries unused purchased transactions into the next period. Automations pause only if there is no card linked and no balance. That keeps a lead flow alive mid-campaign, and it also means a runaway loop spends money quietly. The one automatic brake: an automation with more than 50 runs that all errored gets halted.

Pricing after the February 2026 change

On February 9, 2026 Albato separated its plans from transaction packages and raised prices by "approximately 16%", depending on currency. EUR prices stayed put, and customers on auto-renewal kept their legacy plans. The Basic and Standard plans are gone; the page now lists Free, Pro, Teams and Custom, with up to 30% off for annual billing.

Prices checked on albato.com/pricing on September 26, 2026; the slider runs to 2 million transactions at $2,800 a month.

The limit that bites is seats. Pro has one. Teams adds five seats, roles, shared projects and 3-minute updates from $65 a month annually at 5K transactions, but it is still marked "Coming soon". Until it ships, an agency that needs a second login is choosing between Custom, which means a sales call, and sharing a password.

Pro checks polling triggers every 5 minutes. Zapier's Professional plan polls every 2 and Make's Core plan every minute. Triggers that arrive by webhook show as "Real time" in the Albato editor and skip the wait.

The Pro trial runs 7 days with all features and 100 transactions, per the pricing card and the help centre (one FAQ line says 14). The refund terms are narrow: a full refund needs a request within 15 days and fewer than 20 transactions used. After that, you get the subscription fee back minus the first month.

What the free plan blocks

The free plan has no time limit and asks for no card. That is where the generosity ends: 100 transactions a month, 5 active automations, 2 steps each - a trigger and one action - with 15-minute updates, 7-day logs and no live chat.

The premium app list matters more. Google Sheets, Gmail, Google Calendar, Facebook, Webhooks, generic Email and Albato AI all need a paid plan. Those are the apps most people's first automation touches, so the free tier works as a trial of the editor rather than something to run a business on. Make's free plan gives 1,000 credits with multi-step scenarios. One Trustpilot reviewer wrote on September 18, 2026 that Albato "canceled an automation in my free account after spending much time learning the tool".

Copilot, AI agents and where development is going

Copilot is a chat panel in the app that builds automations from a text description, edits existing ones and maps fields. Albato's own example turns "send my Gmail notifications to Slack" into a two-step flow. The AI Agent step goes further: it takes data from earlier steps, a set of instructions and optional guardrails, and fields in later steps can be set to "Let the AI agent decide". Both are Pro features, and both spend transactions at the 2,000-tokens rate.

The newer launches are aimed at other companies, not at you. Albato MCP, documented on September 3, 2026, is a white-label MCP server that gives AI agents access to 1,000+ apps through one endpoint. Albato Embedded sells the whole integration layer to SaaS vendors from $3,000 a month. Neither changes the self-serve product today. They do tell you where the engineering hours go - and explain why the Teams plan has waited so long.

Moving out, security and support

There is no automation export. The help centre has no JSON download and no Zapier importer; the only way to move a flow is a share link that copies it into another Albato account, without its app connections. "Data migration" on Pro moves historical records between apps, not your automations. Leaving means rebuilding every flow by hand in the next tool - with 30 automations, that is days of work. n8n exports workflows as JSON files you can keep in git.

On security, Albato runs on AWS across two availability zones, encrypts data at rest with AES-256 and in transit with TLS 1.2 and 1.3, and deletes log data after 60 days. The privacy policy says personal data is processed in the EEA and the United States. SOC 2 Type II appears only on the Embedded marketing pages, with the report available on request - not on the general security page. The contract is with Albato Limited in Cyprus under Cypriot law, while the site footer lists an office in Setúbal, Portugal. The billing screen offers YooKassa for ruble payments next to Stripe and bank transfer.

Support is the part reviewers praise most. G2 shows 4.6 from 505 reviews, Capterra 4.8 from 389 and Trustpilot 4.7 from 80, with support named again and again; Capterra reviewers also mention gaps with niche apps. Live chat comes with paid plans only, and no response time is published for self-serve customers.

Albato vs Zapier and Make

Competitor prices checked on each vendor's pricing page on September 26, 2026. Albato beats Zapier on entry price and gives multi-step flows on its cheapest paid plan. Make gives ten times the volume for less money and polls five times as often, at the cost of a steeper editor. For a full field, see our workflow automation roundup.

Verdict

Buy Albato if you are a solo operator or a small team running CRM and marketing flows at a few thousand runs a month, you want multi-step automations below Zapier's price, and you value a support chat that answers. For that buyer, $15 a month is honest value.

Skip it if you need more than one seat now - Zapier's Team plan or Make exist today, Albato Teams does not. Skip it at high volume, where Make's credit pricing is far cheaper per step. And skip it if you want flows you can take with you or write in code: n8n and Pipedream export what you build. Albato counts every step and lets you keep none of them, so go in knowing both.

Try Albato