from Hacker News

Launch HN: SIM Studio (YC X25) – Figma-Like Canvas for Agent Workflows

by waleedlatif1 on 5/21/25, 3:49 PM with 32 comments

Hey HN! We're Emir and Waleed from Sim Studio (https://simstudio.ai). We did a Show HN a few weeks ago about our open-source project (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43823096). Today, we’re launching our hosted platform—a collaborative interface to build and deploy agent workflows. We just removed the waitlist (with 5,000+ people) and you can sign up and access it at: https://simstudio.ai

Sim Studio lets you build agents with different models, tools, and custom functions. In minutes, you can deploy a research agent. Demo here - https://youtu.be/F6MqNvnfxbI

We started working on Sim Studio because we were frustrated with agent frameworks that required excessive boilerplate code and unhelpful abstractions (like agent roles and backstories). We also tried other visual interfaces, but found them difficult to set up and too limited for production use cases. Specifically, we wanted the ability to write custom functions, force tool calls, and run parallel execution.

We’re taking a different approach. Our visual canvas lets you explicitly define how agents interact, use external tools, and handle complex logic like branching, loops, and conditional execution. You can seamlessly integrate with popular tools like Supabase, Pinecone, Mem0, and Exa without obscure abstractions.

You can simulate workflow runs, deploy workflows as APIs or standalone chat interfaces, and trigger them via webhooks. We offer built-in observability, detailed trace spans, and logs that make debugging straightforward. Try searching yourself below:

Example message for https://hn.simstudio.ai:

- Search [person] from [company] - "Search Emir Karabeg from Sim Studio"

Check out our Apache 2.0 licensed repo at https://github.com/simstudioai/sim, explore our docs at https://docs.simstudio.ai, or try out our deployed chat from the demo video here: https://hn.simstudio.ai.

We’d love to hear your feedback! Do you think our visual solution is a good approach to building agents?

  • by matt3D on 5/21/25, 4:55 PM

    The one thing I find a bit odd about a lot of these orchestration tools is that they aren't AI first on their own UX.

    Surely the first thing I should be presented with is a prompt window that can help be scaffold out the orchestration.

  • by jasongill on 5/21/25, 4:16 PM

    It would be great to see how this compares (why it's better, or what it does differently) to the myriad of competitors in this space - from established players like n8n adding 'AI' features, to AI-specific workflow tools like Rivet, to AI libraries adding visual designers like Langflow.

    Site looks great!

  • by srameshc on 5/21/25, 5:03 PM

    I like the product. But I have a feedback: Your homepage doesn't exactly help understand your product. Your github has a GIF that describes your product better, so you should consider having something like that describes your product better on your website.

  • by primitivesuave on 5/21/25, 7:26 PM

    Congratulations on the public launch!

    I had the honor of meeting these founders in person, and was pretty inspired by how fast these guys ship features and iterate on the product with their customers. Definitely the best React Flow work I've ever seen!

  • by flaviuspopan on 5/21/25, 6:13 PM

    Lovely! I’ll give this a shot soon. Two questions: 1. Pricing - I presume y’all will eventually charge for hosting like n8n? I’m feeling a bit sheepish trying a new service without any mention of price. Even mentioning a free tier would be nice to see.

    2. Any plans for integrating MCP servers? I’m looking to build a WhatsApp based Text to SQL service and this seems like a solid fit, but I’d like to use an MCP server that groks the business domain to query supabase. Any suggestions on how to pull this off?

  • by worldsayshi on 5/21/25, 5:02 PM

    I think that "Figma/Excalidraw-like" canvas for <insert interesting problem domain here> is an underrated solution space. At least in terms of variation on the problem domain.

  • by barbazoo on 5/21/25, 5:03 PM

    It would be nice to see the examples populated with real life examples.

  • by manish_sg on 5/23/25, 7:48 AM

    Does SimStudio support embedding within a SaaS under the hosted version? Or is it not meant for multi tenanted deployments?

  • by efitz on 5/21/25, 6:00 PM

    Looks like IFTTT for LLM agents :-)

  • by Geep5 on 5/21/25, 4:56 PM

    I love this space, been really enjoying Rivet which is open source and free. It's made coding a joy.