8 Best Decagon AI Alternatives and Competitors in 2026
Decagon is on almost every enterprise AI support shortlist, and it’s sold like an enterprise platform. There’s no price list, and Decagon’s own pricing post says most customers pay a fixed rate for every incoming conversation, solved or not. If you want an AI agent answering your support line and texts this month, you’re shopping for something else.
The quick answer: The best Decagon AI alternative for support that comes in by phone and text is Carly. Carly Phone puts an AI agent on your business number that answers calls and texts from your own FAQs, documents and website, already knows a returning customer from their email thread and CRM history, books and reschedules appointments on a real calendar, and hands off to a person in one shared inbox. You connect your number and go live without an enterprise sales cycle. Try Carly on your own line. For a like-for-like enterprise bake-off, Sierra is the closest match. Fin (formerly Intercom, now part of Salesforce) and Salesforce Agentforce publish their prices, Zendesk builds AI agents (and now Forethought) into the help desk you may already run, and PolyAI is the voice specialist.
Decagon AI alternatives compared
Prices are in US dollars, checked against each vendor’s US site on October 1, 2026. Most enterprise AI agents don’t publish prices, and that’s part of the comparison.
| Tool | Pricing | Voice | How you buy | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Carly | AI agents from $35/mo | Answers calls and texts on your number, books appointments, transfers | Sign up and connect your number | Support that arrives by phone, text and email |
| Decagon (for reference) | Not published; per conversation or per resolution, by private offer | Decagon Voice, 70+ languages, plugs into platforms like Amazon Connect or RingCentral | Enterprise sales, demo first | Consumer brands with heavy chat, email and voice volume |
| Sierra | Not published; outcome-based | Inbound and outbound, 55+ languages | Enterprise sales, 12-month contract | The largest consumer brands |
| Fin (formerly Intercom) | $0.99 per outcome; Fin Voice $1.99 per voice outcome | Fin Voice, through sales | Trial on Intercom’s help desk, or sales | Chat and email teams that want a visible price |
| Salesforce Agentforce | $2 per conversation, or Flex Credits | Agentforce Voice | Salesforce sales; free starter edition | Service teams standardized on Salesforce |
| Zendesk AI Agents (with Forethought) | Suite Team $55/agent annually; extra resolutions $1.50 to $2.00; Forethought by quote | Telephony in Suite; generative AI for voice on Enterprise | Online or through sales | Teams already on Zendesk |
| Ada | Not published; annual contract metered by conversation | Ada Voice, plugs into your contact center | Enterprise sales | Global, multilingual support teams |
| PolyAI | Per minute; rate not published | Voice-first | Enterprise sales | Phone-heavy enterprises |
| Cresta | Not published; sales quote | AI Agent plus live agent assist | Enterprise sales | Contact centers that also coach human reps |
Want to hear the Carly row before your next Decagon call? Set up Carly on your support line and call it yourself.
Why teams leave Decagon
- No price until you’re deep in a sales cycle. Decagon has no pricing page, and its AWS Marketplace listing sells “Platform Access” with the quantity, term and total cost set by private offer. The most-quoted outside numbers come from competitor Fin: a $50,000 annual platform fee before usage and, citing Vendr data, a median contract of about $386,000 a year in a range of $95,000 to $590,000 or more. Those are a rival’s estimates, not a rate card.
- Most customers pay per conversation, solved or not. Decagon offers two models: a fixed rate for every incoming conversation, or a higher rate for each fully resolved one with no charge for escalations. Its Director of Product wrote that “the vast majority” of customers choose per-conversation, so an abandoned conversation costs the same as a fixed one. Pick per-resolution instead and Decagon’s own glossary warns that “gray areas can lead to billing disagreements.”
- The phone line is a contact-center project. Decagon Voice plugs into platforms like Amazon Connect or RingCentral, and email runs through help desks like Zendesk and Intercom. Decagon is the agent layer, so the help desk, phone platform and seats your human team uses stay separate bills.
- It’s tuned for big CX operations. Named customers include Chime, Duolingo, Notion, Hertz, ClassPass and Rippling. Agents are built from Agent Operating Procedures and tested in simulations and live A/B experiments. A regional business with a busy phone line pays for depth it won’t use.
- Edge cases still land on people. Decagon rates 4.7 on G2 across 32 reviews, and the recent complaints repeat: complex or unusual issues “may still require human intervention,” reviewers want “smoother handoffs to a human agent,” and one August 2026 reviewer found “the setup quite complex.”
Here’s the math for Megan, who runs member support for a 12-studio fitness chain handling about 5,000 contacts a month, roughly 2,000 of them calls and texts about class times, intro sessions, moving a training slot and freezing a membership. On Fin’s estimate, the $50,000 platform fee alone is about $0.83 per contact across 60,000 a year, before a single conversation is billed. At the $95,000 bottom of the range, it’s about $1.58 per contact, including the ones the agent couldn’t solve, plus the contact-center platform the voice agent plugs into. Megan needs the phone answered at 8 pm, the intro session booked on the real schedule, and membership-freeze calls handed to the front desk with a summary. If that’s your queue, get started with Carly.
1. Carly: best Decagon alternative for phone and text support
Carly is an AI assistant for businesses, and Carly Phone gives it a business line for calls and texts: a new local number or the one you already have, connected in Carly rather than through a contact-center integration. Give it what you’d load into Decagon (help-center articles, refund and shipping policies, documents, your website) and its voice agent answers the phone with it. A customer calls at 9 pm to move a Saturday appointment: Carly looks them up, finds an open slot on the real calendar, books it while they’re on the line and texts a confirmation link with their consent. A “where’s my refund” text gets your refund policy and timelines, and when someone needs to check the order or the account, Carly saves the details and hands the thread to your team. Photos customers text in, like a damaged delivery, get read and saved too. The same setup works as an AI receptionist or for SMS appointment booking.
Decagon sells cross-channel memory inside support. Carly’s memory runs across the business. It’s the same Carly that works your email, calendar and CRM, so when Josh calls about the quote your team emailed him on Tuesday, Carly already has that thread and his CRM history instead of meeting him as a new ticket. Try Carly and call your own number as a returning customer.
Handoff is built in, not bolted on. Calls and texts land in one shared inbox per number, with transcripts, summaries, outcomes and voicemail recordings. Conversations can be assigned, every thread has open, closed and unread states, and a “Carly replies / Human replies” switch lets a person take over the moment it matters. On a live call, Carly can transfer the caller to a teammate. Completed calls log to HubSpot, Salesforce or Dynamics 365, plus Carly’s built-in CRM.
What you set up in Carly:
- One number for calls and texts, with STOP and HELP opt-outs handled automatically.
- Call routing that rings your team all at once or in order, with business-hours and after-hours rules, phone menus and voicemail with transcripts.
- An email agent on your own domain, such as support@yourcompany.com, that answers from the same knowledge, with a draft-for-review mode while you build trust.
- Thousands of apps. Carly connects to thousands of apps, including Zendesk, Salesforce, Intercom, Freshdesk, Gorgias, Shopify, Stripe, HubSpot and Slack.
Best for: Support teams whose reschedules, policy questions and returning customers arrive by phone and text, and who want an AI agent live without an enterprise contract. Pricing: Free Zapier-style workflows; AI agents from $35/month. Setup: Connect your business number in Carly (the one you already have or a new one), then give it your knowledge, routing and handoff rules. The Carly team can help with setup. Set up Carly on your support line.
2. Sierra
Sierra, the Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor company, is Decagon’s closest rival: same buyer, same outcome-style pitch, and the head-to-head most Decagon evaluations end up running (see Decagon vs Sierra). It runs one agent across chat, SMS, WhatsApp, email and voice, speaks 55+ languages on the phone, and by its own count one in four of its customers has revenue over $10 billion. More in what is Sierra AI and our Sierra AI alternatives.
Best for: The largest consumer brands, as the second enterprise bid next to Decagon. Pricing: Not published. Outcome-based, sold on 12-month contracts priced by private offer. Competitor Fin estimates the platform fee at $150,000 or more a year. Watch out for: What counts as a billable outcome is negotiated per contract, so the unit price isn’t real until legal signs off.
3. Fin (formerly Intercom)
Fin is the published-price answer to Decagon. The company formerly called Intercom renamed itself Fin in May 2026 and joined Salesforce in a roughly $3.6 billion deal that closed in September. It runs on Intercom’s own help desk or on top of Salesforce, HubSpot, Freshworks and others. More in our Intercom pricing and Intercom alternatives guides.
Best for: Chat and email teams that want to see a price before signing anything. Pricing: $0.99 per outcome, charged at most once per conversation, plus help desk seats if you use Intercom’s. On another help desk there’s a 50-outcome monthly minimum. Fin Voice is sold through sales at $1.99 per voice outcome. Watch out for: Procedure handoffs and self-serve routings bill at the same $0.99 as resolutions, so an outcome isn’t always a solved problem.
4. Salesforce Agentforce
Agentforce puts the AI agent next to the customer record when Salesforce is your system of record, and Agentforce Voice takes it to the phone. Decagon reaches Salesforce data through an integration; Agentforce lives inside it. With Fin now part of Salesforce too, one company sells two of the agents on this list.
Best for: Service teams standardized on Salesforce. Pricing: $2 per conversation for customer-facing agents, or Flex Credits at $500 per 100,000, where an action uses 20 credits and an Agentforce Voice action uses 30. A free Salesforce Foundations edition lets you start building. Watch out for: Every action is metered individually, so a multi-step support call burns several.
5. Zendesk AI Agents (and Forethought)
If Decagon would sit on top of Zendesk anyway, Zendesk’s own AI agents take a vendor out of the stack. They’re included in every Suite and Support plan, and since buying Forethought in March 2026, Zendesk also sells Forethought AI Agents by Zendesk, which run on other help desks too. See our Zendesk alternatives and Forethought alternatives.
Best for: Support teams already running Zendesk. Pricing: Suite Team $55 an agent a month billed annually ($69 monthly), Suite Professional $115 ($149). Each plan includes a small allowance of automated resolutions per agent, then $1.50 each committed or $2.00 pay-as-you-go. Forethought is a sales quote. Watch out for: Seats and resolutions are two meters that both grow, and generative AI for voice sits on Suite Enterprise.
6. Ada
Ada, the Toronto company formerly known as Ada Support, has built AI customer service agents since 2016 and says more than 350 enterprises run on it, across chat, email, messaging apps and voice. Our Ada alternatives page covers the field around it.
Best for: Global support teams serving customers in many languages and messaging channels. Pricing: Not published. Vendr puts the median Ada contract at $72,000 a year across 116 purchases, with implementation usually billed separately. Watch out for: Ada’s standard terms renew automatically and add 10% at renewal, and its docs say voice may not be in your subscription package.
7. PolyAI
PolyAI is the voice specialist: enterprise “dialog agents” for businesses that live on the phone, with named customers including PG&E, Fogo de Chão and UniCredit and a 99.9% uptime SLA on phone lines.
Best for: Phone-heavy enterprises that want a voice-first platform rather than a chat platform with voice added. Pricing: Per minute of voice agent use, including maintenance, improvements and 24/7 support. The rate isn’t published. Watch out for: Per-minute billing means long calls cost more whether or not they end in a resolution.
8. Cresta
Cresta sells AI agents alongside Agent Assist, conversation intelligence and coaching for human reps, so it covers the bot and the people in one platform. Named customers include United Airlines, Alaska Airlines and Cox Communications.
Best for: Big contact centers that want AI agents plus real-time guidance for their human team. Pricing: Not published; sales quote. Watch out for: Much of the value is in coaching and QA for a large human workforce. A small team pays for depth it won’t use.
Matching the replacement to how your team uses Decagon
- Customers call and text, and you want them answered, booked and handed to a person cleanly: Carly. It runs on your number and knows the customer from your email and CRM. Try Carly, or compare it with other AI answering services and AI customer service tools.
- An enterprise bake-off with a Decagon-sized budget: Sierra, or Ada if you serve customers in dozens of languages.
- Most of your volume is website chat and email, and you want a published price: Fin.
- Salesforce is your system of record: Agentforce.
- You already run Zendesk: Zendesk AI Agents, or Forethought if you want it on another help desk.
- Regulated fintech support at high volume: Fini, which publishes its per-resolution rates. See our Fini AI alternatives.
- The phone is your main channel at contact-center scale: PolyAI, or Cresta if you also coach a large human team.
- Website chat on one tool, calls and texts uncovered: keep a chat-first pick for the site and put Carly on the business line.
Before you sign a per-conversation quote, pull last month’s contacts and count how many came in by phone or text, and how many of those were a reschedule, a policy question or a returning customer following up on an email thread. You’d pay Decagon for each one. If they’re a big share, get started with Carly and route those calls first. For the wider field, see the best AI agents for customer support and our AI customer service agent guide.
FAQ
What is the best Decagon AI alternative?
For support that comes in by phone and text, Carly: its AI agent answers your business line and texts from your own knowledge, knows returning customers from their email and CRM history, books appointments and hands off to a teammate in one shared inbox. For an enterprise chat, email and voice evaluation, Sierra is the closest match. Try Carly on your own number.
Is there a cheaper alternative to Decagon?
Decagon doesn’t publish prices, and competitor Fin puts its platform fee alone at around $50,000 a year. Several alternatives show theirs: Fin is $0.99 per outcome, Salesforce Agentforce is $2 per conversation, and Zendesk Suite Team is $55 an agent a month billed annually with a small allowance of AI resolutions included. Carly offers free Zapier-style workflows, with AI agents from $35/month. Get started with Carly.
How much does Decagon cost?
Decagon doesn’t publish pricing. It sells per-conversation or per-resolution pricing by private offer, and says most customers choose per-conversation. The only public dollar figures come from competitor Fin: a platform fee of about $50,000 a year and, citing Vendr, a median contract of about $386,000 in a range of $95,000 to $590,000 or more. Get a written quote before you plan around any of them.
Agentforce vs Decagon: which should we pick?
If Salesforce is already your system of record, Agentforce keeps the agent inside it and publishes its prices ($2 per conversation or Flex Credits). Decagon is an independent agent layer that connects to Salesforce, Zendesk and Intercom, priced by quote. If most of your contacts are calls and texts, try Carly on your business line first.
Does Decagon answer phone calls?
Yes. Decagon Voice answers calls in 70+ languages, makes outbound calls and transfers callers to human agents with a summary, plugging into platforms like Amazon Connect or RingCentral. Carly answers on the business number you already have, handles texts on the same number, and is set up in Carly rather than through a contact-center project. Set up Carly on your support line.
Ready to automate your busywork?
Carly schedules, researches, and briefs you—so you can focus on what matters.
See what people say
"Before Carly, I relied on a Calendly link, but the whole process felt impersonal and not very professional. Carly changed that by handling all the back-and-forth, so I'm no longer stuck in endless email threads trying to line up schedules.
Now Carly reaches out to candidates, shares my real-time availability, lets them pick a slot, then sends a Zoom link and drops it straight into my calendar. She sends reminders to both of us before each call, which has significantly reduced no-shows and last-minute confusion.
On top of scheduling, Carly acts like a full executive assistant, sending me my schedule the night before so I can prepare for each call. It reminds me of the old x.ai assistant, but Carly is noticeably smarter, faster, and better suited to my healthcare recruitment business."
