Relay.app announced on July 16, 2026 that it is winding down: free accounts lose access on August 15, 2026 and paying customers on September 14, 2026. So the useful version of this comparison is no longer which one you should choose — it is whether HitLai is where you should land when you leave. This is written by the makers of HitLai, so weigh it accordingly.
If approvals were what you valued in Relay.app, that is the part HitLai is built around. Approval workflows are their own resource rather than a step type: ordered and multi-step, each step routing to a named person, a role, or a group, with required flags, timeouts, and conditions per step. A reviewer approves, rejects, or delegates to someone else, with the reason recorded either way. Requests arrive over Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, or email, and reviewers approve or reject straight from Slack without opening the app.
Every decision lands in a timestamped, tamper-evident audit trail with a per-request timeline and a cross-flow log — tamper-evident meaning each decision is chained to the one before it with a SHA-256 hash, so an altered or deleted row stops reconciling, and ‘who approved this, and when’ still has an answer months later. The trust dial is not one global switch either: autonomy is set at the organization, department, workflow, or individual-agent level and resolved down that chain, so you can hold anything customer-facing to a hard stop while letting internal reporting run itself.
A pause is also not the only way a person enters a HitLai workflow. People and AI are peers in one model: a teammate is represented with a real capacity signal — current workload against how much concurrent work they take, their availability, and their track record — so when a run needs to hand something to a person, it routes to someone who can actually take it, ranks the alternatives, and tells you why it chose them. The work arrives as a task carrying its context — priority, due date, attachments, and a link back to the run and step that created it — rather than as a bare notification.
And integration is never the roadblock. Native connectors cover the tools you already run — Slack, Teams, Salesforce, HubSpot, Stripe, QuickBooks, Jira — and when no native connector exists, HitLai builds one on the fly against the API, or drives the browser directly. There is no catalogue to run out of. You also do not have to give up what you already run: Zapier, n8n, Make, Power Automate and IFTTT can each run as a node inside a HitLai workflow once you connect that platform's credential, which means leaving Relay.app does not have to mean rebuilding everything you had automated elsewhere.
What HitLai is built around is work that touches customers or money. The AI drafts the deliverable itself — quotes, invoices, customer replies, purchase orders — from your business's own data, and a trust dial sets what happens next: routine actions flow through, and the ones you designate wait for a person.
One difference in where editing happens: Relay.app let a reviewer edit the drafted result inline at the approval step, whereas in HitLai a reviewer who wants changes rejects with a reason and the work re-drafts — which keeps the edit attributable to the drafter rather than to the person approving it.
Either way, export your Relay.app data before your cut-off date: workflows, sequences and MCP servers as JSON, run history, tables as CSVs.