Cresta vs PolyAI (2026)
Comparing Cresta and PolyAI? 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 |
 Cresta
|
 PolyAI
|
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Real-time agent assist and AI insights for contact centers, trained on your best performers. | 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 | 2017 | 2017 |
| Categories | Agent Assist & Copilots Contact Center & CCaaS QA & Conversation Analytics 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 | ✓ | ✓ |
| ISO 42001 | ✓ | — |
| Data residency | Not verified | US, UK, EU, APAC |
| Languages | 30+ languages | 75 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 | Free signup; build your first agent free |
| How you buy | Not verified | Self-serve signup |
| Minimum commitment | — | — |
| Company | Independent, venture-backed | Independent, venture-backed |
| Works with | Salesforce Five9 Genesys Amazon Connect NICE CXone Avaya | 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 Cresta or PolyAI?
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 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.
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 enterprise scale, security, and compliance
- you need a vendor that publicly claims ISO 27001
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 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 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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