Amazon Connect vs Cresta (2026)
Comparing Amazon Connect and Cresta? Both are Contact Center & CCaaS and Voice & Phone AI tools in the directory, which is why buyers put them on the same shortlist. Below is a side-by-side look at pricing and an estimated monthly bill, channels, compliance claims, and integrations, plus when each is the better fit, so you can pick on the facts rather than either vendor's own sales page.
At a glance
| Attribute |
 Amazon Connect
|
 Cresta
|
|---|---|---|
| What it is | AWS's usage-priced cloud contact center with bundled agentic AI, agent assist, and analytics across voice, chat, email, and SMS. | Real-time agent assist and AI insights for contact centers, trained on your best performers. |
| Pricing | Paid · $0.038/min | Paid · Custom |
| Est. monthly cost | $456/mo $0.038 per minute; Voice usage; other channels priced separately | No published price to estimate |
| Founded | 2017 | 2017 |
| Categories | Contact Center & CCaaS Enterprise Voice & Phone AI | Agent Assist & Copilots Contact Center & CCaaS QA & Conversation Analytics Voice & Phone AI |
| Channels | ||
| Chat | ✓ | ✓ |
| ✓ | ✓ | |
| Voice | ✓ | ✓ |
| SMS | ✓ | ✓ |
| ✓ | — | |
| Compliance (vendor-claimed) | ||
| SOC 2 | ✓ | ✓ |
| HIPAA | ✓ | ✓ |
| GDPR | ✓ | ✓ |
| ISO 27001 | ✓ | — |
| PCI DSS | ✓ | ✓ |
| FedRAMP | ✓ | — |
| ISO 42001 | — | ✓ |
| Data residency | Customer-chosen AWS Region | Not verified |
| Languages | 50+ languages | 30+ languages |
| What the AI can do | ||
| Takes actions | ✓ | ✓ |
| Hands off to a human | ✓ | ✓ |
| Choice of LLM | Not verified | Not verified |
| Buying | ||
| Free trial | Free Tier: 90 minutes/month for the first 12 months | Not verified |
| How you buy | Self-serve signup | Not verified |
| Minimum commitment | No minimum commitment | — |
| Company | Product of Amazon (public, NASDAQ: AMZN) | Independent, venture-backed |
| Works with | Salesforce Zendesk ServiceNow Marketo Amazon Lex AWS Lambda Amazon S3 Amazon Kinesis | Salesforce Five9 Genesys Amazon Connect NICE CXone Avaya |
| Key features |
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| Next step |
Full listing Visit site → |
Full listing Visit site → |
Estimates assume 5,000 conversations a month, 60% handled by AI and 10 agent seats, at each vendor's published list price (the cost calculator's model); treat them as a floor, not a quote. Compliance rows are what vendors publicly claim, and “Not verified” means we have not confirmed that fact yet, not that the tool lacks it.
Choose Amazon Connect or Cresta?
Choose Amazon Connect if
Best for: Enterprises already on AWS that want a pay-as-you-go contact center with no seat licenses, published per-minute and per-message rates, agentic self-service bundled in, and compliance coverage up to FedRAMP, in whichever AWS Region they choose.
- you need enterprise scale, security, and compliance
- you need WhatsApp coverage
- you need a vendor that publicly claims ISO 27001 and FedRAMP
Look elsewhere if you want a finished product rather than a platform: Connect rewards teams with AWS engineering capacity, and small support teams without one will spend more on configuration than on the usage bill.
Choose Cresta if
Best for: Large contact centers on Five9, Genesys, Amazon Connect, NICE or Avaya that want real-time agent guidance learned from their own top performers, plus automated QA, a training simulator and autonomous agents, with SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI DSS and ISO 42001 coverage.
- you need agent-assist copilots for human reps
- you need QA scoring and conversation analytics
- you need a vendor that publicly claims ISO 42001
Look elsewhere if you run a small team or want a self-serve product: Cresta sells to serious operations with quote-based pricing and no free trial, and its value depends on having enough conversation volume to learn from.
About Amazon Connect
Amazon Connect is AWS's cloud contact center, rebranded Amazon Connect Customer in April 2026. It runs voice, chat, email, and SMS from a single agent workspace, with agentic self-service bots, prebuilt AI agents, real-time agent assist, and conversational analytics now bundled into the base channel rates. Everything is pay as you go: no per-seat licenses, no servers to manage, and capacity scales from a handful of agents to tens of thousands without a contract renegotiation.
The product launched in March 2017 as a productized version of the contact center technology Amazon built for its own retail business, with GE Appliances among the first customers, and 2017 is the launch year rather than a company founding. Since then it has become AWS's showcase for enterprise scale: Intuit scales TurboTax support from 6,000 to 11,000 agents in minutes, Capital One runs its direct bank and fraud operations on it, and Priceline leaned on it through pandemic call spikes. In April 2026 AWS acquired conversational AI vendor NLX and reorganized Connect into four solutions, with Connect Customer as the customer service arm; United Airlines used the NLX technology to ship a conversational AI agent in three months instead of twelve.
Pricing is unusually public for this market. Published US rates are $0.038 per voice minute plus telephony charges, $0.010 per chat message, $0.014 per SMS, and $0.080 per email, with the AI capabilities included rather than sold as add-ons. A cheaper non-AI Customer Basic tier exists but AWS does not publish its rates on the main pricing page, and a free tier covers 90 minutes of monthly usage. Real bills hinge on volume, so model your traffic before committing.
Choose Amazon Connect if you have builders on staff, live in the AWS ecosystem, and want usage-based pricing that scales to enormous volume. Skip it if you want a turnkey helpdesk with a fixed per-seat bill, since getting the most from it still means wiring up Lambda, Lex, and your CRM yourself.
Read the full Amazon Connect listing → · See Amazon Connect alternatives →
About Cresta
Cresta started from a simple observation: in every contact center, a handful of agents dramatically outperform the rest, and everything they do differently is sitting in the call recordings. Founded in 2017 by Zayd Enam, Tim Shi, and Sebastian Thrun, the Stanford professor behind Google X and Udacity, Cresta mines those conversations to learn what the best performers do, then coaches every agent in real time: suggested responses, knowledge, and guidance appearing on screen during live calls and chats.
That real-time layer is still the heart of the product, but the platform now spans the full loop. Conversation intelligence gives leaders visibility into every interaction, automated quality management replaces sampled QA scorecards, a training simulator lets agents rehearse against AI customers, and autonomous virtual agents take the high-volume calls that never needed a human. It plugs into the major contact-center stacks, including Five9, Genesys, Amazon Connect, NICE, and Avaya, so it layers onto what you run rather than replacing it.
Cresta sells to serious operations: United Airlines, Alaska Airlines, Cox Communications, Marriott, and Brinks Home are named customers, and investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, and Greylock have backed it to the tune of roughly $276 million, most recently a $125 million Series D in late 2024 that valued the company around $1.6 billion. Pricing is enterprise and quote-based, with no public numbers.
Cresta is the pick when your strategy is making human agents better rather than replacing them, especially in revenue-bearing conversations like sales and retention where a slightly better sentence is worth real money. If you want humans out of the loop entirely, look at the autonomous-agent specialists; if you want your hundred agents performing like your best ten, Cresta was built for exactly that.
Read the full Cresta listing → · See Cresta alternatives →
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