Cognigy vs PolyAI (2026)
Comparing Cognigy and PolyAI? Both are Contact Center & CCaaS, Enterprise 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
|
 PolyAI
|
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Support your customers and agents with Cognigy.AI, powered by Generative AI on voice and chat | Voice AI agents that sound human and resolve calls for enterprises: no hold time, 24/7. |
| Pricing | Paid · Custom | Paid · Custom (per-minute) |
| 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 | Contact Center & CCaaS Enterprise Voice & Phone AI |
| Channels | ||
| Chat | ✓ | ✓ |
| Voice | ✓ | ✓ |
| SMS | — | ✓ |
| Compliance (vendor-claimed) | ||
| SOC 2 | ✓ | ✓ |
| HIPAA | ✓ | ✓ |
| GDPR | ✓ | ✓ |
| ISO 27001 | ✓ | ✓ |
| PCI DSS | ✓ | ✓ |
| Data residency | EU, US, UK, Australia (more via NiCE CXone regions) | US, UK, EU, APAC |
| Languages | 100+ languages | 75 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 | Free signup; build your first agent free |
| How you buy | Self-serve signup | Self-serve signup |
| Minimum commitment | — | — |
| Company | Acquired by NiCE (September 2025) | Independent, venture-backed |
| Works with | Genesys Amazon Connect Avaya 8x8 Twilio Salesforce Zendesk ServiceNow | Salesforce HubSpot Zendesk Microsoft Dynamics 365 OpenTable Zapier |
| 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 PolyAI?
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
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 PolyAI if
Best for: Enterprises in hospitality, banking, utilities and other high-call-volume sectors that want voice agents that sound human, survive interruptions and accents, and can take payments or health information on the phone, with SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI DSS, GDPR and ISO 27001 coverage, 75+ languages and a free build-your-first-agent signup.
- you need SMS coverage
Look elsewhere if your support is chat and email: PolyAI is voice-only. Pricing is per minute by quote, and its verified facts do not include a stated data residency.
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 PolyAI
PolyAI answers the phone. While most of this directory started with chat and added voice later, PolyAI has been voice-first since three Cambridge machine-learning PhDs, Nikola Mrkšić, Pei-Hao Su, and Tsung-Hsien Wen, founded it in London in 2017 out of the university's Machine Intelligence Lab. Its agents are known for sounding genuinely human and for surviving the things that break lesser systems: interruptions, accents, background noise, and callers who change their mind mid-sentence. Restaurants, hotels, banks, and utilities use it to answer every call instantly, day and night, with customers like PG&E, UniCredit, Golden Nugget, and Fogo de Chao on the roster.
The platform matured into what the company calls an agentic dialog platform: Dialog Studio (formerly Agent Studio) for building and managing agents without code, a developer kit for deeper work, and its own dialog models: the audio-native Dialog-RSN-1 for calls and Raven, trained on more than a billion enterprise conversations, for webchat and multilingual text. Inside Dialog Studio sits Wren, an agent that builds agents from a description, reviews production calls on a schedule, and drafts and tests fixes that wait for a person to approve them. Compliance boxes (SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI) are ticked, which matters because taking payments and health information over the phone is exactly where voice AI earns its keep.
Investors have noticed the wedge. In December 2025 PolyAI raised an $86 million Series D at a valuation around $750 million, with NVIDIA's venture arm participating, bringing total funding past $200 million. Commercially it bills on usage, priced per minute of conversation, with rates scoped to your call volume rather than published on the site.
Choose PolyAI when the phone is your problem. If most of your support pain is hold music, missed calls, and staffing the night shift, a voice-native specialist will beat a chat-first platform's bolted-on telephony, and PolyAI is one of the most proven voice specialists in the market.
Read the full PolyAI listing → · See PolyAI alternatives →
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