Cresta vs Decagon
Cresta and Decagon are both enterprise-only, sales-led, cloud-only support agents with no published self-serve tier, so the access-model split that separates most of this category separates nothing here — what separates them is where the agent attaches and who is allowed to change it after go-live. Cresta attaches to the phone system, naming Five9, Genesys, NICE, Avaya, Cisco, Amazon Connect, Twilio, LivePerson and SIPREC on its own integrations page, and publishes one verifiable price. Decagon publishes no integrations page and no price at all, and publishes instead the loop by which a support team rewrites the agent and proves the change worked before it ships: plain-English AOPs, Duet, Simulations, Experiments, Watchtower and Trace View.
On this page
Cresta and Decagon both sell an autonomous AI agent to large enterprises, both are cloud-only and closed-source, and neither will let you buy without a sales call. The question that decides between them is not which agent is smarter. It is where the agent attaches to your business, and who is allowed to change it after go-live.
Cresta attaches to your phone system: its integrations page, read on 2026-08-17, files its partners under a heading that reads "Telephony | Chat" and names Five9, Genesys, NICE, Avaya, Cisco, Amazon Connect, Twilio, LivePerson, Salesforce and SIPREC — that last one a call-recording protocol, which is how Cresta gets at live call audio rather than a transcript after the fact. Decagon publishes no integrations page at all: decagon.ai/integrations returned HTTP 404 on 2026-08-17, and its home page names no integration partner, only "Support for tool connectors."
What Decagon publishes instead is the loop for changing the agent, and it is the most differentiated thing either company sells. Behaviour is authored as Agent Operating Procedures in plain English by the support team rather than in a configuration language; Duet reads real conversations, finds the gaps and drafts the fix; Simulations test a change against simulated conversations at scale; Experiments A/B it against real traffic before a full rollout; Watchtower monitors around the clock; and Trace View walks a single answer back to the knowledge article, workflow step or model call that produced it. Decagon states the point of this in one line on its home page: teams refine behaviour and optimize performance "without an engineering sprint or vendor ticket."
Cresta splits the same job across two tools aimed at two audiences, and one of those audiences is explicitly not your support team. Opera is a no-code orchestration engine for CX and Ops teams to build, configure, test and govern agent behaviour; Conductor, launched June 2026, takes a natural-language description of a use case and generates a blueprint, prompt logic, subagent orchestration and code for a developer to review. Cresta's Agent Operations Center supervises hundreds of simultaneous AI and human conversations from one surface — a supervisor's console, which is a different thing from a change-and-verify loop.
On money, one side hands procurement a number and the other hands it nothing. Cresta's AWS Marketplace listing — vendor Cresta Intelligence, product "Contact Center AI Platform," read live on 2026-08-17 — prices Agent Assist for Chat at $150,000 for twelve months against a cap of 125,000 chats with $1.20 per chat beyond it, and Agent Assist for Voice at $150,000 against 100,000 calls with $1.50 per call beyond it. Both channels is $300,000 a year, the autonomous AI Agent is not in that SKU at all, and the listing's own terms read "all subscriptions are non-cancellable and non-refundable for the period subscribed." Decagon publishes no price anywhere: decagon.ai/pricing returned HTTP 404 on 2026-08-17.
Both do publish customer outcomes with numbers attached on their own home pages, and the two rosters read like two different businesses. Cresta names Snap Finance at 5.5x higher containment and 23% higher CSAT, Cox Communications at a 20% revenue increase and 40% more span of control, Brinks Home at a 30-point NPS gain and 50% lower quality-management cost, and Xanterra at 74% containment and a $3.3M revenue lift, alongside United Airlines, Marriott, CVS, Hilton, Porsche and Alaska Airlines. Decagon names Chime at 70% chat-and-voice resolution, Duolingo at 80% deflection, ClassPass at a 95% cost reduction, Curology at 65% lower costs, Rippling at a 32% deflection increase, Oura at 3x CSAT and Valon at over 50% deflection on voice.
Cresta's numbers are about a contact center getting more out of its people; Decagon's are about conversations never reaching one. On scale, Decagon is the better-capitalised of the two despite being six years younger: it closed a $250M Series D on 2026-01-28 led by Coatue and Index at a $4.5B valuation, announcing more than 100 new enterprise customers in the prior year including Avis Budget Group, Block and Deutsche Telekom. Cresta has raised roughly $276M across five rounds, including a $125M Series D in November 2024, and employs about 500 people.
How Cresta and Decagon compare
| Feature | CrestaVisit Cresta ↗ | Decagon★ Our pickVisit Decagon ↗ |
|---|---|---|
| Description | Unifies an autonomous AI Agent, real-time human Agent Assist and Conversation Intelligence on one contact-center platform, enterprise, custom-quoted, no self-serve tier. | Enterprise AI customer service agents for chat, voice and email. $4.5B valuation, custom contracts, no public price. |
| Pricing | $150,000 / year (12-month contract) | Custom |
| API | Yes | No |
| Tags | ||
| Pricing model | usage-based | usage-based |
| Free tier | No | No |
| Model / LLM | Not publicly disclosed (managed, multi-model stack) | Proprietary (managed, multi-model) |
| Interface | Web | Web |
| Public API | Yes | No |
| Open source | No | No |
| Deployment | Cloud | Cloud |
| Limitations |
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Who each one is for
Decagon
Large enterprises in retail, travel, fintech, health and telecom that want a heavily-funded, actively-improving AI agent to handle high-volume customer conversations across chat, voice and email, and that can run a multi-week, engineering-supported implementation.
From Custom
Verdict: Cresta or Decagon?
Pick Decagon if your support volume lives in chat, email and your own app, and the agent's behaviour will have to change more often than your engineering roadmap allows. That is the case Decagon is built for and the one Cresta answers worst. Policies change, products ship, a promotion goes wrong on a Tuesday. Decagon is the only one of these two that publishes a complete path from "the agent got that wrong" to a verified fix in production with no developer in it: write the AOP in English, let Duet draft it off real transcripts, test it in Simulations, prove it in an Experiment against live traffic, watch it in Watchtower, and trace any single answer back to its source. Cresta's Opera covers the authoring half of that for a non-technical team, and Cresta publishes nothing that covers the proving half. Its other configuration tool, Conductor, ends by handing code to a developer. If the people who know your refund policy sit in support rather than in engineering, that difference is the whole purchase.
Pick Cresta in four cases, and the first is a hard stop. First, if your volume is voice on an existing contact-center stack: Cresta names Five9, Genesys, NICE, Avaya, Cisco, Amazon Connect, Twilio and SIPREC on its own integrations page, and Decagon publishes no integrations page at all. If "does it tap our Genesys audio" has to be answered before anything else matters, only one of these two has answered it in public. Second, if you will still have a floor of human agents in two years: Cresta sells Agent Assist, Coach, Quality Management, Conversation Intelligence, Knowledge Agent and real-time translation on the same conversation record as the AI, and Decagon sells a human rep nothing whatsoever. Third, if procurement needs a budget figure before it will open a requisition: Cresta's AWS Marketplace SKU is a real, checkable $150,000 per year per channel, and Decagon has no published number of any kind, so the first Decagon meeting is the pricing meeting. Fourth, if your buying process needs published compliance evidence up front: Cresta lists SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA and PCI-DSS on its own site, whereas Decagon's trust center at trust.decagon.ai returned nothing readable to us on 2026-08-17 and its API documentation redirects to a login. That last one is an absence of published evidence and not evidence of absence — a vendor selling to Chime and Deutsche Telekom is being audited by somebody — but it does mean a Decagon compliance review starts with a sales call where a Cresta one starts with a web page.
Stated as the two mistakes. Buying Decagon for a 2,000-seat voice operation running on Genesys means discovering during implementation how your call audio is supposed to reach it, and then buying a second vendor for everything the 1,500 remaining agents need. Buying Cresta because it is the broader platform, when your volume is chat and email and the person who knows the policy sits in support ops, means paying for an assist-and-coaching suite you will not use and routing every behaviour change through someone else's sprint.
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Frequently asked questions
- Which is cheaper, Cresta or Decagon?
- Neither publishes enough to answer that, and only one publishes anything at all. Cresta's AWS Marketplace listing (vendor Cresta Intelligence, read 2026-08-17) sells Agent Assist for Chat at $150,000 for twelve months up to 125,000 chats then $1.20 per chat, or Agent Assist for Voice at $150,000 up to 100,000 calls then $1.50 per call, non-cancellable and non-refundable. The sting in that number is what it does not include: the autonomous AI Agent is a separate, custom-quoted product, so Cresta's one public price is for the half of the platform Decagon does not sell. Decagon publishes no price at all — decagon.ai/pricing returned HTTP 404 on 2026-08-17 — and bills on a mix of platform fee, conversation and resolution that you will only see under NDA.
- Do Cresta and Decagon both handle voice?
- Both do, and the difference is how they get the audio rather than whether they support the channel. Cresta AI Agent runs voice, chat and SMS in more than 30 languages and its integrations page names the telephony platforms it sits inside — Five9, Genesys, NICE, Avaya, Cisco, Amazon Connect, Twilio — plus SIPREC, the protocol that forks a live call to a recorder, which is what lets Cresta act during the call rather than after it. Decagon sells voice as one of chat, voice, email and SMS handled from a single agent definition, and publishes Valon at over 50% deflection on voice and Chime at 70% chat-and-voice resolution, but names no telephony partner on its site. If your calls arrive through an incumbent CCaaS, that is a question to put to Decagon in writing.
- Who changes the agent's behaviour after launch?
- This is the real difference between the two. Decagon's answer is your support team: Agent Operating Procedures are written in plain English, Duet drafts them from real conversations, and Simulations and Experiments let you prove a change before it reaches customers — Decagon's home page promises this happens “without an engineering sprint or vendor ticket.” Cresta's answer is two different people: Opera is a no-code engine for CX and Ops teams, while Conductor (June 2026) generates a blueprint, prompt logic, subagent orchestration and code for a developer to review. Cresta publishes an authoring tool for non-technical teams; it does not publish a simulate-and-A/B path for them, which is the part Decagon built its platform around.
- Which is the safer enterprise bet?
- They are safe in different directions and the honest answer is that it depends on what your risk committee asks about. Cresta is the older company — founded 2017 out of the Stanford AI Lab, about 500 employees, roughly $276M raised across five rounds including a $125M Series D in November 2024 — and it publishes SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA and PCI-DSS on its own site, so a compliance review can start before a sales call. Decagon, founded 2023, is the better capitalised: a $250M Series D on 2026-01-28 led by Coatue and Index at a $4.5B valuation, with more than 100 new enterprise customers announced in the prior year including Avis Budget Group, Block and Deutsche Telekom. We could not read a single Decagon certification from a public page on 2026-08-17 — its trust center rendered nothing without JavaScript and its API docs sit behind a login — which is an absence of published evidence, not evidence that the certifications are missing.
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