Cresta vs Decagon (2026)
Comparing Cresta and Decagon? They sit in different corners of the AI support market, which is exactly why buyers ask how the two stack up. 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 |
 Cresta
|
 Decagon
|
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Real-time agent assist and AI insights for contact centers, trained on your best performers. | Hire our generative AI agents to give customers a mind-blowing experience. Trusted by massive enterprises and high-growth startups. |
| Pricing | Paid · Custom | Per resolution · Custom |
| Est. monthly cost | No published price to estimate | No published price to estimate |
| Founded | 2017 | 2023 |
| Categories | Agent Assist & Copilots Contact Center & CCaaS QA & Conversation Analytics Voice & Phone AI | AI Agents & Chatbots Enterprise |
| Channels | ||
| Chat | ✓ | ✓ |
| ✓ | ✓ | |
| Voice | ✓ | ✓ |
| SMS | ✓ | — |
| Compliance (vendor-claimed) | ||
| SOC 2 | ✓ | ✓ |
| HIPAA | ✓ | ✓ |
| GDPR | ✓ | — |
| PCI DSS | ✓ | ✓ |
| ISO 42001 | ✓ | — |
| EU AI Act | — | ✓ |
| Data residency | Not verified | Not verified |
| Languages | 30+ languages | 70+ languages |
| What the AI can do | ||
| Takes actions | ✓ | ✓ |
| Hands off to a human | ✓ | ✓ |
| Choice of LLM | Not verified | Not verified |
| Buying | ||
| Free trial | Not verified | Not verified |
| How you buy | Not verified | Not verified |
| Minimum commitment | — | — |
| Company | Independent, venture-backed | Independent, venture-backed |
| Works with | Salesforce Five9 Genesys Amazon Connect NICE CXone Avaya | Zendesk Salesforce Intercom Shopify Stripe Kustomer |
| 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 Cresta or Decagon?
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 SMS coverage
- you need a vendor that publicly claims GDPR and 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.
Choose Decagon if
Best for: High-growth and enterprise consumer companies that want a concierge-grade AI agent across chat, email and voice, with refunds and billing changes executed through Zendesk, Salesforce, Stripe or Shopify, usage-based pricing with no seat fees, and HIPAA, PCI DSS and EU AI Act coverage.
- you need autonomous AI agents
- you need enterprise scale, security, and compliance
- you need a vendor that publicly claims EU AI Act
- you would rather pay per resolved ticket than per seat
Look elsewhere if you want published prices, a free trial or a self-serve start: Decagon is white-glove and quote-based, and its verified facts do not include a stated data residency.
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 →
About Decagon
Decagon builds what it calls an AI concierge: autonomous agents that resolve customer issues across chat, email, voice, and SMS, all sharing one brain and one memory of your customer. Instead of trapping your logic in brittle decision trees, Decagon uses Agent Operating Procedures, plain-language playbooks that describe how you want issues handled. Its voice agents answer with sub-second latency, handle interruptions gracefully, and can dial out as well as pick up, which makes them feel far closer to a competent human than to a phone tree.
The company's rise has been ridiculous in the best possible way. Founded in 2023 by Jesse Zhang and Ashwin Sreenivas, alumni of Google, Palantir, Citadel, and Scale AI, Decagon went from a standing start to a multi-billion-dollar valuation in roughly two and a half years, with its worth reportedly tripling in a single seven-month stretch as investors piled in. The name itself is a quiet math joke, nodding to the ten-sided polygon.
What keeps the logos coming is deployment quality. Decagon leans into white-glove onboarding, exposes full conversation logs so teams can audit and improve every answer, and routes genuinely hard cases to humans cleanly rather than bluffing. Its customer roster reads like a tour of the modern internet: Notion, Duolingo, Rippling, Eventbrite, Substack, Chime, and Affirm among them, plus larger enterprises adopting its outbound and proactive agents.
Pricing is sales-led and usage-based, offered per conversation or per resolution with volume discounts, so it is squarely an enterprise purchase rather than a quick self-serve signup you try on a whim. For teams that want an AI agent that feels concierge-grade, keeps a persistent memory of each customer, and can be tuned in the plain language a support manager actually speaks day to day, Decagon has become one of the most talked-about names in the category.
Read the full Decagon listing → · See Decagon alternatives →
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