Dust vs Notion Agents

Dust and Notion both sell AI agents to every team in a company, and both shipped major agent releases in 2026. Buyers compare them because they promise the same thing: agents that do recurring knowledge work in the background. The real difference is where they start. Notion starts from your workspace. Dust starts from your whole tool stack.

Dust vs Notion Agents at a glance

Dust is a standalone platform for building and running AI agents across a company. Agents combine instructions, knowledge, skills, and tools, connect to more than 70 systems including Slack, Notion, Google Drive, GitHub, Salesforce, and Zendesk, and can call any tool through MCP. Each agent can use one of more than 20 models. Dust says 3,000+ organizations, including Datadog, 1Password, Vanta, and Clay, have deployed 300,000+ agents.

Notion Agents live inside Notion. Notion Agent is a personal assistant for Business and Enterprise users. Custom Agents, released February 24, 2026, are team agents that run on their own from schedules, Notion page and database changes, Slack messages, email, and calendar events. They read and write Notion, post to Slack, browse the web, and call tools through MCP. Notion says customers created more than a million Custom Agents in the two-month beta.

Product scope

Dust. A dedicated agent platform. It suits companies that want a central place where "AI Operators" build agents for sales, support, engineering, legal, and people teams, pulling from whatever tools those teams use. Multi-agent workflows and webhook triggers from tools like Zendesk, Jira, and GitHub make it a good fit for agents that react to events outside any one workspace.

Notion Agents. Agents as a feature of the workspace. Their sweet spot is internal Q&A, ticket triage, standups, status reports, and inbox management, especially when the source of truth is already a Notion database. Notion Workers, a beta serverless runtime for custom code, extends agents with data syncs and custom tools.

Models, connectors, and data

Dust. Model choice per agent across OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, and others. Data never trains models and model providers retain nothing. Business includes US and EU data residency; Enterprise adds single-tenant deployment.

Notion Agents. Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Grok models, with Auto as the default, and admins can restrict which models agents use. Built-in MCP partners include Linear, HubSpot, Stripe, Ramp, GitHub, and Intercom, and you can add custom MCP servers. Zero data retention with LLM providers is an Enterprise feature.

Governance and admin controls

Dust. Spaces restrict sensitive data, roles separate users, builders, and admins, and agent access is managed separately from user access. SSO is on Business; SCIM, audit logs, and custom data retention are on Enterprise. Dust is SOC 2 Type II certified and GDPR compliant.

Notion Agents. Each Custom Agent gets its own permissions with Full Access, Can Edit, and Can View levels, and only reaches the pages, databases, and channels it's granted. Admins control who can create agents, set per-agent and workspace credit limits, and pause agents. Every run appears in an activity log; configuration and access changes go to the audit log on Enterprise.

Pricing

Dust publishes seat pricing on its Business plan (up to 100 people): Free ($0, 500 credits one time), Pro ($24 per seat per month billed yearly or $30 monthly, 8,000 credits per seat per month) and Max ($120 billed yearly or $150 monthly, 40,000 credits). API usage is $0.01 per credit. Enterprise is custom.

Notion requires a Business plan (from $20 per member per month) or Enterprise for Custom Agents. Since May 4, 2026, agents run on Notion credits at $10 per 1,000 credits, with usage based on task complexity.

Where Runtime fits

Dust and Notion both make knowledge work faster for every team. Neither is built for the operational work at the center of a payment company. A single stuck payment touches four teams: support gets the ticket, payment ops traces it, finance sees a recon break, risk or compliance may review it. Resolving it means querying the ledger and processor, reading bank files, logging into portals with no API, and getting a person to approve before money moves.

Runtime is the AI agent harness for that work. Payment ops, risk, compliance, finance, underwriting, and support build agents from their SOPs. Each agent works on its own isolated computer in your AWS, GCP, or Azure account, or a fully self-hosted deployment, with any model, including open-weight models served in your cloud for PCI and PII work. Agents start read-only, stop for approval before releasing a payout or booking a ledger entry, and record every run end to end, so the record your sponsor bank asks for stays with you. A forward-deployed AI engineer with a payments background builds the first agents with your team.

Many fintechs will use Dust or Notion for knowledge and Runtime for operations.

Which should you choose

Choose Dust if:

• You want a dedicated agent platform for every department
• Context lives across many tools, not one workspace
• You want per-agent model choice and EU or US data residency

Choose Notion Agents if:

• Your company already runs its docs and projects in Notion
• The work is triage, Q&A, standups, and status reporting
• You want agents with no new vendor or seat type

Choose Runtime if:

• The queue is payment exceptions, recon breaks, disputes, alerts, or bank RFIs
• Card data or PII must stay in your cloud, with models you choose
• You need approvals on money movement and an audit trail for your sponsor bank

Frequently asked questions

Is Dust or Notion better for AI agents?

If your team already works in Notion and the agents mostly read and write Notion pages, Slack, mail, and calendar, Notion Custom Agents are the simplest choice. If you want a dedicated agent platform that pulls context from many tools and lets you choose among 20+ models per agent, Dust is the stronger fit.

Does Dust connect to Notion?

Yes. Notion is one of Dust's connectors, so Dust agents can use Notion content alongside Slack, Google Drive, GitHub, Salesforce, Zendesk, and other tools.

How are Dust and Notion agents priced?

Dust sells seats: Pro at $24 per seat per month billed yearly with 8,000 credits, and Max at $120 with 40,000 credits, plus a free seat and custom Enterprise. Notion Custom Agents require a Business or Enterprise plan and consume Notion credits, sold at $10 per 1,000 credits.

Which is more secure?

Both offer enterprise controls. Dust is SOC 2 Type II certified, offers US and EU data residency, and adds SCIM, audit logs, and single-tenant deployment on Enterprise. Notion Enterprise adds zero data retention with LLM providers, SCIM, audit logging, and DLP and SIEM connections. Neither publishes an option to run agents inside your own cloud account.

Can either run payment operations?

Both can support payment teams with knowledge, triage, and reporting. Investigating payment exceptions across a ledger, processor, and bank portals, with approvals before money moves and a run-level audit trail for a sponsor bank, is the job Runtime is built for.