Comparing NICE CXone 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 how they price, what they integrate with, and when each is the better fit, so you can pick on the facts rather than either vendor's own sales page.
| Attribute | NICE CXone | PolyAI |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Paid · $110/agent/mo | Per resolution · Custom (per-minute) |
| Founded | 1986 | 2017 |
| Categories | Contact Center & CCaaS Enterprise Voice & Phone AI | Contact Center & CCaaS Enterprise Voice & Phone AI |
| Integrations | Salesforce Microsoft Dynamics Oracle ServiceNow Zendesk Kustomer Pega Snowflake | Salesforce HubSpot Zendesk Microsoft Dynamics OpenTable Zapier |
NICE CXone is an enterprise cloud contact center platform covering the full span of customer service work: omnichannel routing across voice, chat, email, and social, IVR and self-service AI agents, copilots that assist human agents and supervisors in real time, plus workforce management, quality management, and interaction analytics. The AI layer runs on Enlighten, NICE's family of models trained on billions of customer interactions, and the platform powers more than 25 billion interactions a year.
The company story stretches back to 1986, when NICE was founded in Israel as Neptune Intelligence Computer Engineering. It trades on Nasdaq and the Tel Aviv exchange under the ticker NICE, and spent decades in call recording and analytics before buying cloud contact center pioneer inContact in 2016, the deal that created CXone. In June 2024 it bundled Copilot, Autopilot, and Actions into a rebranded platform called CXone Mpower. In 2025 came a new CEO, Scott Russell, a lowercase rebrand to NiCE, and the roughly 955 million dollar acquisition of German conversational AI firm Cognigy, announced in July and closed in September.
Pricing is refreshingly public for an enterprise vendor. The current page lists five suites billed per agent per month: Omnichannel at 110 dollars, Essential at 135, Core at 169, Complete at 209, and Ultimate at 249 plus 25 cents per session. Industry packages for banking, insurance, healthcare, and retail sit at the top tier. Many AI capabilities are add-ons or consumption based, so a realistic AI-heavy rollout still ends in a custom quote.
Choose NICE if you run a large or regulated contact center and want routing, workforce management, quality, and AI from a single vendor with decades of compliance pedigree. The Cognigy deal also makes it a credible bet for enterprises going all in on agentic AI. Look elsewhere if you run a small support team: the packaging and implementation lift assume hundreds or thousands of seats, and a lighter helpdesk with a bolt-on AI agent will get you live much faster.
Read the full NICE CXone listing → · See NICE CXone alternatives →
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: Agent Studio for building and managing agents without code, a developer kit for deeper work, and Raven, a proprietary conversation model trained on more than a billion enterprise conversations. 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.
Submit your AI customer support software to get listed alongside these tools and show up in head-to-head comparisons.