Forethought vs Lorikeet (2026)
Comparing Forethought and Lorikeet? Both are AI Agents & Chatbots and Enterprise 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 |
 Forethought
|
 Lorikeet
|
|---|---|---|
| What it is | The most powerful AI Agent for customer support. Deliver natural conversations, improve resolution rates and lower costs across every interaction. | AI concierge for high-stakes support in fintech, healthcare, and marketplaces that follows your procedures exactly. |
| Pricing | Per resolution · Custom | Per resolution · $2,100/mo + $0.99/resolution |
| Est. monthly cost | No published price to estimate | $5,070/mo $2,100/mo + $0.99 per resolution; Start plan, paid annually; voice resolutions $1.50 |
| Founded | 2017 | 2023 |
| Categories | Agent Assist & Copilots AI Agents & Chatbots Enterprise | AI Agents & Chatbots Enterprise |
| Channels | ||
| Chat | ✓ | ✓ |
| ✓ | ✓ | |
| Voice | ✓ | ✓ |
| SMS | — | ✓ |
| — | ✓ | |
| Compliance (vendor-claimed) | ||
| SOC 2 | ✓ | ✓ |
| HIPAA | ✓ | ✓ |
| GDPR | ✓ | ✓ |
| ISO 27001 | ✓ | ✓ |
| Data residency | US (AWS Oregon; N. Virginia backup) | US (custom residency on Signature plan) |
| Languages | 100+ languages | Not verified |
| What the AI can do | ||
| Takes actions | ✓ | ✓ |
| Hands off to a human | ✓ | ✓ |
| Choice of LLM | Not verified | Not verified |
| Buying | ||
| Free trial | Proof of Value (POV) instead of a traditional free trial | Free trial (length not stated) |
| How you buy | Sales-led (demo first) | Self-serve signup |
| Minimum commitment | — | Billed annually |
| Company | Acquired by Zendesk (March 2026) | Independent, venture-backed |
| Works with | Zendesk Salesforce Freshdesk Intercom Slack Shopify | Zendesk Intercom Salesforce HubSpot Front Help Scout Kustomer Slack Genesys Cloud Amazon Connect Twilio Five9 Talkdesk Stripe |
| 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 Forethought or Lorikeet?
Choose Forethought if
Best for: SaaS, e-commerce and fintech support teams on Zendesk, Salesforce, Freshdesk or Intercom that want autonomous resolution, triage and agent assist across email, chat and voice in 100+ languages without replacing their ticketing system.
- you need agent-assist copilots for human reps
Look elsewhere if you want published pricing, a free trial or a vendor with an independent roadmap: Forethought is quote-priced, demo-led, and since March 2026 part of Zendesk, which matters most if you run a competing help desk.
Choose Lorikeet if
Best for: Fintech, healthcare and marketplace companies where a wrong answer costs real money and want an agent that follows their procedures step by step across chat, email, voice, SMS and WhatsApp, with published outcome-based pricing, a trial, a self-serve start and SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR and ISO 27001 coverage.
- you need SMS and WhatsApp coverage
Look elsewhere if you are a small team: the Start plan is $2,100 a month plus $0.99 per resolution, billed annually, which is a real floor. Residency is US unless you are on the Signature plan.
About Forethought
Forethought is an agentic AI platform that tries to cover the entire support workflow rather than just one slice of it. Solve resolves tickets autonomously using your knowledge and past cases, Triage classifies and routes whatever is left to the right place, and Assist rides along with human agents, drafting replies and summarizing threads so nobody starts from a blank page. Tying it together is Autoflows, a reasoning engine that follows natural-language instructions instead of rigid decision trees, and in 2025 the company added Forethought Voice to bring the same brain to the phone.
The backstory is a good one. Forethought was founded in 2017 by Deon Nicholas and Sami Ghoche, and it announced itself by winning TechCrunch's Startup Battlefield in 2018, betting big on AI for support well before generative models were cool. The gamble paid off: the platform now powers a billion-plus customer interactions a month, and its investor list even includes Gwyneth Paltrow alongside a crowd of AI founders. Zendesk completed its acquisition of Forethought in March 2026 and plans to fold the technology into its own Resolution Platform, so the product's future sits inside Zendesk.
Forethought plugs into the help desks teams already run, including Zendesk, Salesforce, and Freshdesk, and it is a particularly good fit for SaaS, e-commerce, and fintech companies that want autonomous resolution without ripping out their ticketing system. Customers like Upwork, Grammarly, Airtable, Datadog, and Instacart have used it to deflect large shares of routine tickets while keeping quality high, with Grammarly reporting resolution rates north of eighty percent.
Pricing is enterprise and quote-based, oriented around usage and outcomes rather than a public per-seat sticker, so expect a conversation with sales rather than a checkout page. For support leaders who want one AI layer that can resolve, triage, and assist all at once, and who would rather quietly enhance the existing stack they already own than tear it all out and start over from scratch, Forethought is a strong and well-proven contender.
Read the full Forethought listing → · See Forethought alternatives →
About Lorikeet
Lorikeet builds AI agents for companies where a wrong answer costs real money, or worse. Founded in Sydney in mid-2023 by Steve Hind, formerly of Stripe, and Jamie Hall, a former Google AI engineer, it deliberately courts the customers most vendors disclaim: fintechs, healthcare companies, and marketplaces whose support conversations involve moving money and medical questions. Its answer to that risk is workflow-first design. The agent follows your standard operating procedures step by step, takes real actions through integrations, and escalates precisely where the procedure says to, rather than improvising when a conversation gets unusual.
The platform pairs the customer-facing Concierge agent, which keeps a memory of each customer, with a Coach agent that scores tickets, and orchestrates multi-agent workflows across voice, chat, and email. Customers include Airwallex, Linktree, Eucalyptus, Magic Eden, and Flex, and the investor story is remarkable for a two-year-old company: a $35 million Series A led by QED in 2025 brought funding past $75 million, with backing from all three of Australia's biggest venture firms plus Canva's co-founders, reportedly the first startup since Canva to manage that.
Pricing is published, rare at this tier, and outcome-based with a twist: Start is $1,500 a month plus $0.95 per resolution, Scale is $4,000 plus $0.80, there are no implementation fees, and you can refuse to pay for resolutions you are unhappy with.
Choose Lorikeet when your support is high-stakes and process-bound: if your team works from runbooks and a compliance officer reviews the transcripts, an agent built to follow procedures exactly is worth paying for. Teams with simple FAQ queues will find cheaper fits elsewhere.
Read the full Lorikeet listing → · See Lorikeet alternatives →
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