Cognigy vs Cresta (2026)
Comparing Cognigy 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 |
 Cognigy
|
 Cresta
|
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Support your customers and agents with Cognigy.AI, powered by Generative AI on voice and chat | Real-time agent assist and AI insights for contact centers, trained on your best performers. |
| Pricing | Paid · Custom | Paid · Custom |
| Est. monthly cost | No published price to estimate | No published price to estimate |
| Founded | 2016 | 2017 |
| Categories | AI Agents & Chatbots 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 | ✓ | ✓ |
| ISO 42001 | — | ✓ |
| Data residency | EU, US, UK, Australia (more via NiCE CXone regions) | Not verified |
| Languages | 100+ languages | 30+ languages |
| What the AI can do | ||
| Takes actions | ✓ | ✓ |
| Hands off to a human | ✓ | ✓ |
| Choice of LLM | ✓ | Not verified |
| Buying | ||
| Free trial | Free trial (length not stated), no credit card | Not verified |
| How you buy | Self-serve signup | Not verified |
| Minimum commitment | — | — |
| Company | Acquired by NiCE (September 2025) | Independent, venture-backed |
| Works with | Genesys Amazon Connect Avaya 8x8 Twilio Salesforce Zendesk ServiceNow | 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 Cognigy or Cresta?
Choose Cognigy if
Best for: Large enterprises, especially in Europe, that want voice-first conversational AI in 100+ languages with a low-code builder, their own choice of LLM, residency in the EU, US, UK or Australia, and tight integration with Genesys, Amazon Connect, Avaya or NiCE CXone.
- you need autonomous AI agents
- you need enterprise scale, security, and compliance
- you need a vendor that publicly claims ISO 27001
Look elsewhere if you are a small or mid-size team or want published pricing: Cognigy is enterprise and custom-priced, and since the 2025 NiCE acquisition its roadmap sits inside a larger contact-center vendor.
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 Email and SMS coverage
- 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 Cognigy
Cognigy, now part of contact-center giant NiCE, builds AI agents for the enterprise, with a particular strength in voice. Its flagship Cognigy.AI platform deploys autonomous agents that reason, adapt, and take action across voice and digital channels in more than a hundred languages, and it pairs them with an Agent Copilot that assists human reps and a Knowledge AI layer that grounds answers in your content. A no-code conversation builder lets teams design and orchestrate sophisticated flows without heavy engineering, and the platform integrates tightly with contact-center systems like Genesys and Amazon Connect.
The company has serious enterprise credibility. Founded in 2016 in Dusseldorf, Germany, by Philipp Heltewig and Sascha Poggemann, Cognigy grew into a repeat leader in analyst rankings for conversational and agentic AI, and in 2025 it was acquired by NiCE in a cash-and-stock deal reported around nine hundred and fifty million dollars, described as one of Europe's largest AI acquisitions. It now runs both inside NiCE's broader platform and as a standalone product, so existing customers were not left stranded.
The client roster is a roll call of household names, including Lufthansa Group, Bosch, Toyota, Mercedes-Benz, Nestle, and DHL, with well over a thousand brands relying on it to automate conversations at genuinely large scale. Pricing is enterprise and custom, with no public price list or self-serve tier, and voice, chat, and add-ons like Agent Copilot are typically quoted separately, so this is a considered purchase rather than an impulse buy.
For big organizations that need to automate high call volumes across many languages, keep human agents in the loop, and slot AI into an existing contact-center stack rather than replacing it, Cognigy is one of the most established and well-regarded choices on the market today, and the deep-pocketed NiCE backing only extends its already-broad enterprise reach.
Read the full Cognigy listing → · See Cognigy 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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