Parloa vs PolyAI
A side-by-side comparison of Parloa and PolyAI on what each one charges, what it meters, and which plan every capability actually sits on.
Capability by capability
Nothing we track differs between them.
Channels
| Capability | Parloa | PolyAI |
|---|---|---|
| Live chat | IncludedPublished as a first-class channel alongside voice: "Deploy to voice, chat, messaging, and more", with chat, messaging, phone, click-to-call and multimodal listed on the platform architecture diagram. | Not published |
| Voice | IncludedThe primary channel and the origin of the product, voice-first since 2018. Calls arrive over SIP into the customer's CCaaS or VOIP infrastructure, and Parloa runs its own carrier-grade telephony underneath rather than a third party's. | IncludedThe only channel. Calls arrive over a SIP or PSTN integration into the customer's existing CCaaS platform or telephony provider. |
AI resolution
| Capability | Parloa | PolyAI |
|---|---|---|
| Autonomous resolution agent | IncludedPublished outcomes include a global furniture brand where "AI agents handle 100% of calls", GESOBAU at 66% of qualified calls resolved automatically, and MEG at 42% of customer calls automated. No accuracy SLA accompanies any of them. | Not published |
| Action-taking (API calls) | IncludedAuthenticated connectors to Salesforce, ServiceNow, Zendesk and Microsoft Dynamics 365, pre-configured Knowledge, Routing and Custom Skills attached directly to an agent, REST APIs for custom services, and MCP Skills released in June 2026. | Included"Other systems can be integrated via APIs", with an Agent Developer Kit for custom functions and flow control, and a Connect Portal handling OAuth 2.0 and field mapping. Card payments are taken through a documented PCI Pal integration. |
| Handoff to human | IncludedSummaries carrying intent, actions attempted, escalation reason and accessed account context are pushed into CCaaS or CRM before the human picks up. The SAP Service Cloud integration passes conversational context into the Agent Desktop at handoff. | Not published |
| Guardrails & citations | IncludedPer-agent safety controls that "block harmful content, detect jailbreak attempts, and restrict off-topic conversations", topic enforcement, social-engineering and PII-extraction detection analysing full conversation history each turn, and LLM Guardrails shipped July 2026. Checks run in parallel with the response "for no added latency". | Not published |
| Multilingual AI | IncludedGenuinely central to the product and genuinely inconsistent in the numbers. Published counts run 130+, 140+ and 100+ on different pages, with Real-Time Translation quoted separately at 30+. The one auditable deployment figure is BER Airport running four languages. | IncludedPublished counts conflict: 75 languages on the about page, 45 as standard on the technology page FAQ, and 43 individually named on the languages page under a 75+ title. |
AI voice
| Capability | Parloa | PolyAI |
|---|---|---|
| Voice agent | IncludedThe product. Parloa calls it an AI Agent Management Platform, managing the lifecycle of AI agents across Design, Test, Scale and Optimize for enterprise contact centres. | IncludedThe entire product. PolyAI describes itself as an Agentic Dialog Platform answering inbound calls for enterprise contact centres. |
| IVR replacement | IncludedPublished as a named use case with a customer story titled "1.5 million interactions handled by AI agents annually: The telecommunications IVR replacement playbook", and routing is one of the pre-built Skills shipped with the platform. | Not published |
| Call summarization | IncludedAI-generated summaries "capture customer intent, actions taken, and conversation outcomes", derived from transcript data in the Conversation Store and retrievable through the Transcripts API. | Not published |
Reporting
| Capability | Parloa | PolyAI |
|---|---|---|
| Raw data export | Included"Export data to in-house dashboards or business intelligence tools for deep analysis", with a Data Hub and Sharing component and a Conversation Store in the published architecture. No format, destination or connector is named, and Transcripts API access is enabled per organisation on request. | Not published |
Enterprise
| Capability | Parloa | PolyAI |
|---|---|---|
| SAML SSO | IncludedListed in the Trust Center under Product Security as SSO Support. The protocol, the identity providers and any plan gate are not stated, and there are no plans to gate it against. | Not publishedNot addressed anywhere on poly.ai or docs.poly.ai. Consistent with a product that has no seat model, but not stated either way. |
| Role-based access control | Included"Granular access control with role-based permissions" on the security page, listed again in the Trust Center under Product Security as Role-Based Access Control alongside Multi-Factor Authentication. | Not published |
| Audit logs | Included"Audit-ready architecture with traceable logs" and "Every conversation is logged, searchable, and fully auditable", with version control over agent changes. Whether the trail can be exported is not published. | Not publishedNot addressed on the security or compliance pages. Built-in monitoring is described for the Connect Portal, which is operational rather than an audit trail. |
| Sandbox environment | IncludedStaging and production environments with promotion between them, plus simulation against thousands of synthetic and historical conversations, LLM-based and rule-based scoring, and regression testing before release. | Not published |
| SOC 2 | IncludedNone stated. No plans are published, so plan gating cannot be assessed either way. | IncludedNone stated. No plans are published, so plan gating cannot be assessed either way. |
| ISO 27001 | IncludedNone stated. No plans are published. | IncludedNone stated. No plans are published. |
| GDPR | IncludedNone stated. No plans are published. | IncludedNone stated. No plans are published. |
| Data residency | Included"Data residency controls and regional hosting options aligned with local jurisdictional requirements", on Azure regions across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. No named region, no EU-only inference guarantee and no statement of which regions come with which contract. | Not publishedAWS is named as the host with no region, no residency option and no EU-only inference. No VPC, dedicated or on-premises tier is published. |
Developer
| Capability | Parloa | PolyAI |
|---|---|---|
| REST API | IncludedREST APIs for custom services and external data sources, plus the Transcripts API for conversation data. The AMP documentation at docs.amp.parloa.com is behind a login and access is granted by a Parloa representative, so no public API reference exists to check rate limits or schemas against. | IncludedOpen APIs and an Agent Developer Kit are published as product surfaces. No public API reference and no data-export endpoint is documented, so what the API can read out is Unknown. |
| SDKs | Not published | IncludedThe Agent Developer Kit is published as the programmatic control surface, documented at docs.poly.ai. |
Both entries last checked Sep 9, 2026.
What Parloa costs
- Billing unit
Consumption-based - Free tier
Not published - AI pricing
Not published - Vendor calls it
Consumption-based enterprise SaaS - Human handoff
Not published - Reopened chat
Not published - AI billing window
Not published - Data export
Support ticket required - Automation export
Not published
6 of 9 not published by Parloa, checked
What PolyAI costs
- Billing unit
Per minute of voice agent use - Free tier
Not published - AI pricing
Not published - Vendor calls it
minute - Human handoff
Not published - Reopened chat
Not published - AI billing window
Not published - Data export
Not published - Automation export
Not published
7 of 9 not published by PolyAI, checked