Which vendors have not been acquired by a bigger platform?

Decagon

Enterprise agent with deep configurability. Sales-led, so expect a procurement cycle rather than a signup form.

Sierra

Bespoke enterprise builds with unusually natural conversation, and the only one in this group that handles voice properly too.

Ada

Multi-channel agent that predates the current wave, with the enterprise footprint that implies.

eesel AI

Trains on your existing docs and tickets and works inside the help desk you already run, instead of replacing it.

Chatbase

Point it at your site and get an embeddable agent in an afternoon. The low-effort end of the category.

My AskAI

Deliberately cheap deflection layer that hands off to whatever live chat you already run.

Lorikeet

Built for support where being wrong is expensive — fintech, health, marketplaces. Follows written procedures rather than improvising.

Chatwoot

Open-source support platform you can self-host, increasingly paired with n8n for the AI layer.

Botpress

Visual studio for building agents with explicit flow control, for teams that want to see the logic.

Fini

Positions on accuracy benchmarking, and is unusually willing to publish comparative numbers.

IrisAgent

Leans on ticket triage and root-cause detection more than conversation quality.

Wonderchat

Flat-rate site agent with deliberately transparent pricing in a category that mostly hides it.

Quickchat AI

Multilingual-first agent aimed at teams supporting many languages without native speakers.

Netomi

Enterprise agent that markets heavily on brand-safe, sanctioned responses rather than open generation.

Certainly

Conversational AI with an e-commerce lean, though it sells across sectors.

Capacity

Bundles helpdesk, knowledge base and chatbot rather than being best at any one of them.

Duckie

Aimed at technical B2B support — reads logs and code rather than only help-centre articles.

Gemini Enterprise for CX

Google's contact-centre stack. Metered per session, and only sensible if you are already on Google Cloud.

HubSpot Breeze

Only worth evaluating if your CRM is already HubSpot. Then the context it has is hard to match.

MavenAGI

Publicly claims 93% autonomous resolution — the boldest number in the category, and the one most worth interrogating.

CoSupport AI

Multi-channel automation that publishes unusually candid material on when AI support starts failing.

Tidio Lyro

One of the few genuinely cheap autonomous agents, bundled with live chat and a basic help desk.

HappyFox

Offers a genuine unlimited-agent plan, which is rare in a category that mostly charges per seat.

Helpshift

Built for gaming and mobile apps, where support arrives in-app rather than by email.

Zendesk AI Agents

The default incumbent, now consolidating the category by acquisition. Strongest if you already live in Zendesk.

Freshdesk with Freddy AI

Cheaper than Zendesk with a comparable feature list. The trade shows up in depth rather than breadth.

Help Scout

Chosen for simplicity rather than power. AI drafts and summaries, not an autonomous agent.

Zoho Desk

The cheapest credible help desk with published per-agent pricing and a genuine free plan.

Pylon

Support system for B2B companies whose customers live in shared Slack channels rather than a ticket portal.

Plain

API-first support tooling for technical teams who want to build their own workflow around it.

Front

Treats support as team email rather than tickets, with AI on top as drafts and summaries.

Hiver

Turns Gmail into a help desk. Narrow by design, and cheap because of it.

Kustomer

CRM-shaped support platform organised around the customer record rather than the ticket.

Gladly Sidekick

Organises support around people instead of tickets, which is a genuine philosophical difference rather than marketing.

DevRev

Connects support tickets to the product backlog, aimed at teams where engineering fixes the ticket.

SupportLogic

Predicts which B2B accounts are about to escalate, rather than answering tickets itself.

Gorgias

The Shopify-native default, with the deepest order, return and refund actions in this category.

Zowie

Resolution-focused e-commerce agent that also pushes for revenue rather than deflection alone.

Richpanel

Leads with a self-service portal and puts the AI drafting behind it.

Yuma AI

Autonomous agent built only for Shopify brands, with no pretence of serving anyone else.

Siena AI

Sells on brand voice and empathy rather than raw deflection numbers.

Mavenoid

Product troubleshooting for hardware, which is a genuinely different problem from order support.

ChatBot by Text

Per-seat chatbot from the LiveChat family, mid-rebrand to Text. Reads live Shopify order data; changing a record needs a webhook you host. Auto-refills resolutions at $0.99 when you hit the cap.

ManyChat

Priced per active contact rather than per seat, with a real free tier at 25 contacts. The AI answers and captures; external writes run through an External Request block you author, not through the AI.

Chatfuel

Social-commerce chatbot whose AI books, reschedules and cancels appointments end to end — into its own calendar. Publishes two mutually incompatible price lists on two of its own properties.

WhatsApp Business Platform

Meta's own channel and, since July 2026, its own agent. The only platform here billing AI per token rather than per resolution, and the only one where the vendor is also the channel.

ElevenLabs Agents

Voice-first agents from the speech company, sold on bundled call minutes with a free tier and no sales call. Acting on your systems is a webhook you write.

PolyAI

Enterprise phone agents for brands with very high call volumes. No self-serve path.

Parloa

Contact-centre phone automation focused on sounding human rather than on channel breadth.

Replicant

Resolves routine calls end to end and hands the rest to a human. Narrow by design.

Hyro

Healthcare-only voice agents wired into Epic for scheduling and prescription refills.

interface.ai

Voice and chat purpose-built for credit unions and community banks, wired into core banking.

Posh AI

Another banking-only platform, competing with interface.ai on the same narrow ground.

Dialpad Ai

Business phone system with an autonomous AI agent attached. The seats are published; the agent is quoted.

Quiq

Agentic CX across voice and messaging, priced per conversation used.

Cresta

Real-time coaching trained on your own top performers rather than a generic playbook.

Balto

Tells the agent what to say while the call is still happening. Narrower than Cresta, faster to deploy.

Observe.AI

Conversation intelligence and real-time assist, strongest on the analytics side.

Assembled

Workforce management first, AI resolution second. Bought for scheduling as often as for AI.

MaestroQA

Custom scorecards and screen capture, for teams that want QA defined their own way.

Kaizo

Scores every conversation and turns each into per-agent coaching rather than another report.

Level AI

Analytics-first QA aimed at contact centres rather than software support teams.

EvaluAgent

One of the few QA vendors publishing per-seat pricing, plus per-conversation QA for AI agents.

NICE CXone

Full contact-centre suite. You are buying the platform, not the AI feature.

Genesys Cloud CX

The other default enterprise suite, with agentic features layered onto existing routing.

Salesforce Agentforce

Only worth evaluating if your customer data already lives in Salesforce. Then it is hard to beat on context.

Talkdesk

Contact centre with industry-specific packages, which is its main differentiator.

Five9

Established cloud contact centre with AI agents added to an existing telephony business.

Sprinklr Service

Strongest on social and messaging channels, which most competitors treat as an afterthought.

Verint

Workforce engagement heritage with specialised bots layered on top.

Kore.ai

Platform for building both customer and employee-facing assistants, broader than support alone.

LivePerson

Messaging-first enterprise platform, long-established and mid-transition to agentic AI.

boost.ai

Conversational AI focused on banks, insurers and public sector, where accuracy is audited.

Ushur

Customer experience automation for insurers and health plans, with compliance-grade governance.

Amazon Connect

Usage-priced contact centre from AWS with agentic AI bundled. Cheap to start, complex to run.

Zoom Contact Center

Contact centre bolted onto Zoom, with published per-agent pricing that most rivals hide.

Automation Anywhere

Process automation company that moved into support agents, now including Aisera's conversational AI.