Tines

What it is

Tines is a workflow automation platform for teams that have to prove what their automation did. It grew out of security operations — early buyers were SOC teams at Coinbase, Databricks, Mars, Reddit and SAP — and now sells into IT, legal, people and revenue ops on one premise: an AI agent may plan and draft the work, but a versioned, conventional workflow executes it, and every step lands in an audit record.

That split is the product. In January 2026 Tines shipped “AI in Tines,” an interaction layer with four named surfaces: chat and copilots, AI agents, MCP servers you build inside Tines to scope what a model may touch, and MCP clients that connect existing servers in. In June 2026 it shipped its own MCP server, so Claude, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot or Cursor can drive the platform directly. Tines raised a $125M Series C at a $1.125B valuation led by Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, taking total funding to $272M.

The audit story n8n and Zapier can’t tell

Most ops automation platforms log that a run happened. Tines logs who authorized it. Its own guidance for agent builds is specific: enforce tool allow lists “at execution time, not just at configuration time,” and write an audit record carrying the agent identity, the human authorizer identity, the operation and the timestamp. The principle it states out loud — match autonomy to blast radius — is the one an ops leader has to defend in a review, and it is written into the product rather than left to the builder.

The certification set backs it. Tines holds ISO 42001:2023, the AI management system standard, alongside SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001:2022, ISO 27701:2019 and CSA STAR Level 1. For Workbench, its chat surface, Tines states that your data “never leaves the stack, does not travel on the open internet, is not logged, and is never used for training.” You can bring your own model licence and provider or use the default, and since June 2026 a REST API reports AI token counts and cost by model and provider — which is how you answer the finance question before it is asked.

A use case worth buying it for

Employee offboarding across HRIS, identity, and the app layer. The trigger is deterministic: a status change in the HRIS starts a workflow that revokes identity provider access, transfers file ownership, and closes out licences in a fixed order. The agent handles only the unbounded part — reading the manager’s Slack thread and drafting the handover summary — and the irreversible steps sit behind an approval gate. What you hand the auditor afterwards is one record per terminated account naming the human who approved it. Assembling that from n8n execution logs is a project; here it is the default output.

Pricing

The free edition gives you 3 live workflows, unlimited users, spaces and connectors, and a one-time $50 AI allowance. Paid editions are quote-only — Tines publishes no list price above free.

Real transaction data is the better guide. Vendr’s tracking of 62 Tines purchases through February 2026 puts the median buyer at $52,228 per year, with the full range running $26,750 to $157,499 and buyers saving 17% on average off first quote. By size: roughly $18K–$36K for small teams, $36K–$96K mid-market, and $100K–$180K+ at enterprise. Budget a floor near $30K/year, not the free tier.

Best for

IT, security and ops leaders at 200-plus-person companies who are automating processes that touch identity, money or personal data, and who will be asked to evidence the controls. If your automation has a compliance reader, Tines is the default.

Alternatives, and when to pick them instead

• n8n — self-host free, 9,000+ community templates, no per-run fee. Pick it when the audit reader is internal-only and you have infrastructure people to run Postgres and a queue worker. It is roughly an order of magnitude cheaper at the entry point.
• Zapier — the widest SaaS connector library and non-technical owners. Pick it when workflows are simple app-to-app moves that nobody will ever have to reconstruct.
• Torq — the fastest-growing direct rival, at roughly 300% revenue growth in 2025 and a $140M Series D at a $1.2B valuation in January 2026. Pick it when the buyer is the SOC itself and alert triage volume, not cross-department governance, is the problem you are solving.

Watch-outs

• No published paid pricing means your first quote is a starting position. Guard: run a real competitive evaluation and get a written Torq or Swimlane quote before you negotiate. Vendr’s data shows 20–35% off list for multi-year terms and 25–40% when levers are combined — none of which you get by accepting the initial number.
• The connector library and templates carry security-ops DNA. Guard: before signing, list your ten highest-volume ops workflows and confirm each has a native connector or a clean HTTP path. If more than three need custom HTTP work, add builder time to the business case rather than discovering it in month two.
• The free edition is not a pilot for a real ops team. Three live workflows and a one-time $50 AI allowance run out fast once an agent is in the loop. Guard: scope the trial to one workflow taken fully end-to-end, including the approval gate, instead of three half-built ones.