As of 28 Oct 2026, the panel rates Parloa 2.5/5 and PolyAI 2/5 in AI Agents & Assistants. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 6 of the 6 judges pick Parloa and 0 pick PolyAI. Parloa scores higher on 4 of 6 criteria (European sovereignty, Admin, identity & access controls, Models & processing location, plus 1 more). PolyAI scores higher on 2 of 6 criteria (Integrations, connectors & knowledge and Data use, training & retention). Provenance — Parloa: EU-Made; PolyAI: UK / wider Europe. Ratings are the AI panel’s opinion, formed from public evidence: how scores are made.
The bench splits along clean lines. Parloa leads four criteria with 6–0 leans: agent capabilities (8.0 vs 6.3), sovereignty (5.8 vs 3.2), processing and models (5.7 vs 3.8), and admin and access (4.0 vs 2.0). PolyAI leads integrations and knowledge (7.2 vs 5.3) and pricing transparency (1.8 vs 0.3), both 6–0, though both verdicts describe pricing pages with no published figures. Data use and training is the genuine split: PolyAI's mean is higher, 2.3 to 1.3, with 4 judges leaning PolyAI and 2 tying. Parloa leads the weighted totals in the five judge rows with figures — IT lead 4.6 to 4.1, data protection officer 4.5 to 3.3, automation lead 5.9 to 4.4, works council 4.8 to 3.2, skeptic 5.9 to 3.5. Both products list EU-optional data residency; PolyAI's legal jurisdiction is GB with subprocessor exposure recorded as US CLOUD Act, while Parloa's jurisdiction and subprocessor exposure are unknown.
Choose Parloa if
You need no-code agents built from SOPs with simulation and A/B testing before live traffic — agent capabilities leans 6–0 to Parloa (8.0 vs 6.3), and the verdict credits caller authentication before account actions, drift detection and warm handoffs.
Your team needs documented administration — admin and access leans 6–0 to Parloa (4.0 vs 2.0) on central agent management, column-level access policies and audited queries.
Your compliance review requires transcripts, PII and analytics to stay inside a chosen region — sovereignty leans 6–0 to Parloa (5.8 vs 3.2); the verdict records Azure with a Germany-hosted stamp, and the data residency attribute is EU-optional.
Your buying committee includes a data protection officer or a works council — their weighted totals favor Parloa, 4.5 to 3.3 and 4.8 to 3.2.
Your architecture review scores processing and models — that criterion leans 6–0 to Parloa, 5.7 to 3.8.
Choose PolyAI if
Your stack runs on connectors — integrations and knowledge leans 6–0 to PolyAI (7.2 vs 5.3), with 130+ integrations, named partners Salesforce, Zendesk and Twilio, OAuth 2.0, a self-serve Connect Portal and an Agent Developer Kit.
You want test calls, simulated conversations and A/B tests on live traffic at no extra charge — PolyAI's verdict documents these.
Your rubric scores data use and training — the lean there is 4–0 with 2 ties toward PolyAI, 2.3 to 1.3.
Your scorecard includes pricing transparency — PolyAI leads 6–0, 1.8 to 0.3, though its captured pricing page publishes no figures and routes buyers to "Talk to our team".
You want a vendor-owned model — PolyAI is powered by the vendor's proprietary Raven model.
Read this comparison as one judge. Each weighs the same scores by what they care about.
The Automation Lead
Builds the agents that file tickets, draft offers and chase approvals across the ERP, CRM and wiki. Wants tools and actions with scoped permissions, MCP and an API, approval steps before anything is sent, run logs, and a way to test an agent before the whole company uses it.
Parloa
This judge's pick
PolyAI
Criterion by criterion
Data use, training & retention
Parloa
We found no public information on whether prompts, transcripts or connected data train any model, on retention periods, or on a data processing agreement. What is documented is regional confinement of transcripts and PII and audit trails capturing every data-lake query with field, customer and timestamp — that covers logs and locality, but the training and retention picture is undocumented.
PolyAI
The privacy policy commits PolyAI to process client conversation data only on the client's instructions and states one retention period — six years after the agreement ends, for client administrator records — but I found no public information on whether conversations or outputs are used for training, on retention for call and chat content, or on a zero-retention option. SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certifications are published, yet they sit on top of a training and retention story the captured pages never tell, and the vendor's own Raven model is described as trained on 1B+ enterprise conversations.
Models & processing location
Parloa
Parloa runs on Microsoft Azure with a Germany-hosted regional stamp and a United States one, and Zones deployments keep transcripts, PII and analytics plus the services that process them inside the chosen regional boundary. Models come from OpenAI or Azure with availability verified per region, and a model must pass a benchmark gate before it can be built on; we found no public information on excluding specific providers, pinning processing per policy, or bringing your own model or key.
PolyAI
The model family is named — Raven, a proprietary model purpose-built for voice customer service — but the pages say nothing about where inference runs or which provider operates it, with hosting stated only as AWS and no server region given. I found no public information on EU processing, provider exclusion, bring-your-own-key or self-hosting, so I cannot pin processing for a European deployment.
Admin, identity & access controls
Parloa
Governance leans on a single central place to manage every agent, column-level access policies that restrict an agent to the fields a use case justifies, and audit trails for AI-initiated queries, with analytics computed and stored in the region. We found no public information on SSO, SCIM provisioning, role or group administration, exportable audit logs, or the scope of usage reporting on staff.
PolyAI
I found no public information on SSO, SCIM provisioning, roles, group-based permissions for models or connectors, or audit logs — for an agent platform that acts in CRM and ticketing systems, that is the gap that matters most to me. What is documented is operational rather than governance: a console showing latency and cost per agent in real time, a dashboard with sync status, error tracking and automatic retry, and managed OAuth 2.0 on connectors.
Integrations, connectors & knowledge
Parloa
Agent Skills connect CRMs, knowledge sources and telephony configured once for the whole fleet, integrations reach existing CCaaS platforms and backend systems via custom APIs while keeping current contracts in place, and retrieval runs over a pre-processed vector database of policy and knowledge content, with a BI export hub for sharing signals outward. We found no public information on MCP support, a documented public API with webhooks, sync cadence, or how answers cite their sources.
PolyAI
This is the strongest-documented area: 130+ pre-built integrations across telephony, CRM and knowledge, productivity and vertical systems, named partners like Salesforce, Zendesk, Twilio and NICE, open APIs, a self-serve Connect Portal with managed OAuth and custom field mapping, and an Agent Developer Kit as a CLI tool and Python package for custom functions into any enterprise system. Telephony is first-class — SIP or PSTN in, with custom SIP header information transferred back to the contact centre for handoff. I found no public information on MCP support, webhooks, or how answers cite their sources.
Agent capabilities & guardrails
Parloa
This is the strongest area: agents authenticate the caller before acting on an account, change CRM records, operate under scope limits and column-level permissions, and hand off with transcript, classified intent, authentication state and sentiment; Performance Lab simulates dozens of failure scenarios and A/B tests versions before live callers, Lens gives per-conversation tracing and drift detection, and every design edit carries change history with blueprint updates propagating fleet-wide. We found no public information on configurable human approval before consequential actions or on scheduled triggers.
PolyAI
Agents act in connected systems through the integration library and Agent Developer Kit custom functions, and the testing story is genuinely good: test calls, simulated conversations and A/B tests on live traffic at no extra charge, per-agent latency and cost monitoring on the console, and SIP-header handoff to human agents. The terms also state a limit plainly — AI outputs are provided as-is and may contain inaccuracies. What I found no public information on is human approval before consequential actions, per-action scoped permissions, versioning, and an auditable run log — the guardrails I need before an agent touches production systems.
European sovereignty
Parloa
The contracting entity is Parloa GmbH in Berlin, hosting runs on Microsoft Azure with a Germany-hosted stamp, and certifications include ISO 27001, SOC 2 and GDPR. The model layer is OpenAI or Azure — non-European providers — under signed contracts with per-region availability verification and Zones keeping processing services inside the regional boundary; we found no public information on a full subprocessor list with locations or a data processing agreement.
PolyAI
The contracting entity is named — PolyAI Limited, terms governed by the laws of England and Wales, the UK Information Commissioner's Office as the data protection authority — with hosting on AWS at no stated region and Stripe named for payments. I found no published subprocessor list, no EU inference or hosting commitment, and the privacy policy's own mention of service providers with operations including in the United States leaves the exposure question open; the model is the vendor's own Raven, but where it runs is not said.
Pricing transparency
Parloa
We found no public prices on the captured pages — no per-seat, per-conversation or usage figures, no tier inclusions, no limits, term or minimum seats — and the vendor's stated path is a book-a-demo conversation. A company cannot compute an annual cost from what is published here.
PolyAI
No public prices at all — the pricing page says "Talk to our team" and points to a demo form, so every customer is a sales call. The mechanics are described honestly — per-minute usage-based pricing, "billed on connected time, with no minimums and no rounding up to the minute", $100 in free API credit for new accounts for a limited time, with testing, model upgrades and 24/7 support included — but a buyer cannot compute an annual cost from any of it.
Sovereignty, side by side
Dimension
Parloa
PolyAI
Legal entity
Not determined
Not determined
Ownership
Not determined
Not determined
Data residency
Not determined
Not determined
Subprocessors
Not determined
US CLOUD Act reach
Facts, side by side
Only facts both products carry under the same definition — anything else would not be a fair row.
Compliance · Certifications
ISO 27001:2022 · ISO 17442:2020 · SOC 2 Type I & II · PCI DSS · HIPAA · GDPR · DORA1
As of 28 Oct 2026, the panel rates Parloa higher: 2.5/5 against 2/5. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 6 of the 6 judges pick Parloa and 0 pick PolyAI. Which one fits depends on the criteria that matter to you; the table on this page shows both side by side, and each judge’s reading has its own page. Both were scored by the same AI bench under the same rubric, from public evidence only, as the methodology describes.
Is Parloa or PolyAI European?
Parloa is European (EU-Made). PolyAI is European (UK / wider Europe). Provenance is read from each company’s own legal pages: who builds it and who owns it.