Parloa vs PolyAI (2026)
Comparing Parloa 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 |
 Parloa
|
 PolyAI
|
|---|---|---|
| What it is | AI Agent Management Platform focused on natural, human-sounding phone automation for contact centers. | Voice AI agents that sound human and resolve calls for enterprises: no hold time, 24/7. |
| Pricing | Paid · Custom (per-minute) | Paid · Custom (per-minute) |
| Est. monthly cost | No published price to estimate | No published price to estimate |
| Founded | 2018 | 2017 |
| Categories | 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 | ✓ | ✓ |
| EU AI Act | ✓ | — |
| Data residency | North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific | US, UK, EU, APAC |
| Languages | 130+ 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 | Sales-led (demo first) | Self-serve signup |
| Minimum commitment | Volume package commitment (custom) | — |
| Company | Independent, venture-backed | Independent, venture-backed |
| Works with | Genesys Amazon Connect 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 Parloa or PolyAI?
Choose Parloa if
Best for: High-volume enterprise contact centers whose hardest channel is the phone and want natural-sounding voice agents in 130+ languages, with tooling to simulate, test and release agent fleets, consumption-based pricing, hosting in North America, Europe or Asia-Pacific and SOC 2, GDPR and ISO 27001 coverage.
- you need a vendor that publicly claims EU AI Act
Look elsewhere if you are a small team or want published pricing: Parloa is enterprise-only and quote-priced with a volume commitment, and its verified channels are voice and chat, not email.
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 Parloa
Parloa is an enterprise platform built for the hardest support channel of them all: the phone. It focuses on natural-sounding, low-latency voice agents that can actually hold a conversation, and it wraps them in what it calls an AI Agent Management Platform, tooling to build, simulate, test, and safely release fleets of agents at contact-center scale. Though voice is its heart, Parloa has grown multimodal, extending the same agents to chat, WhatsApp, and Microsoft Teams, always aimed at high-volume enterprise contact centers rather than small teams.
The founders come by their voice obsession honestly. Parloa was started in 2018 in Berlin by Malte Kosub and Stefan Ostwald, who had previously built voice experiences and were among the first developers in Germany to create applications for Amazon's Alexa. That head start on talking machines shows up in a product designed to make phone automation feel human instead of robotic.
Investors have noticed in a big way. Parloa became one of Germany's newest unicorns in 2025 and then roughly tripled its valuation to around three billion dollars in early 2026, all while surpassing fifty million dollars in annual recurring revenue, a remarkable clip for a company automating something as unglamorous as inbound calls. Its commercial model is consumption-based: voice is billed per minute and chat per interaction, at rates scoped to each use case under one volume commitment, with outcome-based pricing available where it fits.
Enterprises like Allianz, Booking.com, HealthEquity, SAP, and Decathlon trust it with serious call volumes across insurance, travel, and well beyond. Pricing is sales-led and geared toward large organizations handling hundreds of thousands of calls a year. If your support pain is concentrated squarely on the phone and you want AI that sounds genuinely natural even at massive scale, Parloa is a specialist built precisely for that particular fight.
Read the full Parloa listing → · See Parloa 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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