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 Customer-Service Director
Runs a contact centre with forty agents and wants half the routine calls and chats answered by an AI agent. Wants handover to a human with the full context, actions in the order and ticket systems, evaluation before go-live, and a price per conversation the CFO can forecast.
Parloa
This judge's pick
PolyAI
Criterion by criterion
Data use, training & retention
Parloa
Across the pages I read there is no statement on whether conversations train a model, how long transcripts and files are kept, or whether a data processing agreement covers the platform. The only related facts are that transcripts, personally identifiable information and analytics stay inside the chosen regional boundary and that every AI-initiated data-lake query is logged with field, customer and timestamp — my DPO still has nothing on retention or a DPA.
PolyAI
The privacy policy commits PolyAI to processing client conversations as a processor on the client's instructions, gives a six-year retention figure for client administrator records, and the security pages state SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certification. But we found no public information on whether recorded calls and transcripts are used for training, on retention of conversation data, or on zero-retention terms — and while Raven is advertised as "trained on 1B+ enterprise conversations", we found no public information on whether live client calls feed that training. That gap I would need closed before letting customer conversations flow.
Models & processing location
Parloa
The platform runs on Microsoft Azure with a Germany-hosted stamp, and regional deployment keeps transcripts, PII, analytics and the services that process them inside the chosen region, with model availability verified per region for models hosted by OpenAI or Azure. What I cannot see is a list of the individual models with their inference regions, whether I can exclude a provider, or any bring-your-own-key or on-premises option.
PolyAI
The model behind the product is named — Raven, a proprietary model the vendor runs itself, with AWS named as the host. We found no public information on which region inference and call data live in, whether processing can be pinned to the EU, or any bring-your-own-model or on-premises option, which is what I would need in writing before routing regulated conversations.
Admin, identity & access controls
Parloa
There is a single place to manage every agent, column-level access policies that restrict the agent to the fields a use case justifies, and audit trails capturing every data-lake query with field, customer and timestamp — genuine governance of what the agent may touch. On the IT side we found no public information on single sign-on, SCIM provisioning, roles and groups, or exportable audit logs and usage reporting for staff use.
PolyAI
A console showing latency and cost per agent in real time and a whitelabelled Connect Portal inside Agent Studio are documented. We found no public information on SSO, role-based access for supervisors, user provisioning, group permissions on agents and connectors, or exportable audit logs — controls I cannot run a forty-seat operation without.
Integrations, connectors & knowledge
Parloa
The integration story fits a contact centre: connectors to CRMs, knowledge sources and telephony, integration with CCaaS platforms and backend systems via custom APIs and integration-capable connectors that keep our existing contracts, plus retrieval-augmented answers over indexed policy content and CRM and data-lake fields pulled at call connect. We found no public information on a documented public API or webhooks, MCP support, sync frequencies, or how answers cite their sources.
PolyAI
This is where the product speaks my language: 130+ integrations across telephony, CRM and knowledge, productivity and collaboration, and vertical systems, with named partners including NICE, Five9, Salesforce, Twilio, Verizon Business and Zendesk, and a SIP or PSTN connection to route calls into my existing contact centre team. Managed OAuth 2.0 with automatic token refresh, custom fields, objects and user-defined filters, an Agent Developer Kit for custom functions into any enterprise system, and real-time sync status with error tracking and automatic retry visible from the dashboard make the order and ticket side credible.
Agent capabilities & guardrails
Parloa
This is close to what I buy for: agents built without code from existing SOPs, subtask routing, caller authentication before any account action, and a warm handoff that carries the transcript, classified intent, CRM record changes, authentication state and a sentiment read to my human agent. The Performance Lab runs simulations and A/B tests before anything reaches live callers and per-conversation tracing catches drift afterwards; we found no public information on configurable human approval per action or the vendor's own statement of what agents must not be trusted with.
PolyAI
The pieces I need for a controlled launch are documented: agents built from a plain-language description with no code, custom functions into back-end systems, test calls, simulated conversations and A/B tests on live traffic at no extra charge, real-time latency and cost per agent, and custom header information in the SIP header transferred back to the contact centre to assist agents with handoff. We found no public information on configurable human approval before consequential actions, on triggers and schedules, or on per-run logs, and the terms state AI Outputs "may contain inaccuracies" — a caution I take at face value for a voice channel.
European sovereignty
Parloa
Parloa is a Berlin-registered company running on named Azure infrastructure with a Germany-hosted stamp, and it publishes ISO 27001:2022, SOC 2 Type I & II, PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR and DORA among its certifications. Model providers appear only as OpenAI or Azure, available in the platform only from subprocessors under signed contracts, but no subprocessor list with locations and no data processing agreement were captured on the pages I read.
PolyAI
The contracting entity is PolyAI Limited under the exclusive jurisdiction of England and Wales, AWS is named as host, and SOC 2, ISO 27001 and NCSC guideline alignment are stated. But no server region is given, the only named subprocessor is Stripe for payments, the policy refers to service providers with operations "including in the United States", and we found no public information on EU data residency or an EU inference option.
Pricing transparency
Parloa
We found no public information on any price — no per-seat, per-conversation or usage figure, no tiers, no minimums or term — and the captured pricing page shows nothing to compute from. The only route offered is 'Book a demo', so my CFO cannot forecast a cost per conversation from public pages alone.
PolyAI
The pricing page shows no figures — "Flexible pricing... Talk to our team" — so my CFO cannot forecast an annual cost at all. The shape is public and genuinely useful: use is "priced on a per-minute basis", "Billed on connected time, with no minimums and no rounding up to the minute", including support, maintenance and model upgrades, and new API accounts get "$100 in free credit" — but no per-minute rate itself is published.
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.