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 Data Protection Officer
Signs the DPA and gets asked where a prompt goes. Wants every model provider named as a subprocessor with its region, training excluded for all of them, retention the company controls, and an EU-only switch that also covers agents and connectors — not just the chat window.
Parloa
This judge's pick
PolyAI
Criterion by criterion
Data use, training & retention
Parloa
Across the captured pages I found no statement on whether prompts, transcripts or outputs are used to train any model, and no retention period for conversations, files or logs — a trust center and a terms-and-policies page exist, but nothing captured from them covers this. The only data-use facts are audit trails that capture every AI query with field, customer and timestamp for GDPR accountability, which is logging, not a training or retention commitment.
PolyAI
The privacy policy commits the company to processing client personal data only on the client's instructions as processor and states that client administrator records are kept "for as long as we have an agreement with the relevant client and for 6 years thereafter", but we found no public information on whether conversations, transcripts or recordings train any model, on retention for call logs, or on zero-data-retention terms with model providers. SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certifications are published, which is welcome but does not answer the training and retention questions a data processing agreement review needs.
Models & processing location
Parloa
The platform runs on Microsoft Azure with a stamp hosted in Germany, and the Zones deployment keeps transcripts, personally identifiable information, analytics and the services that process them inside the chosen regional boundary, with model availability verified per region; models are hosted by OpenAI or Azure, and only models from subprocessors under signed contracts may enter the platform. We found no public information on a per-model list with inference regions, on excluding a provider, or on bring-your-own-key or own-cloud deployment.
PolyAI
The product runs on Raven, the vendor's proprietary model trained on enterprise customer service conversations, on infrastructure the security page describes as hosted on AWS; we found no public information on the inference region, an EU-only processing option, excluding providers, or bring-your-own-key and own-cloud deployment. As a data protection officer I cannot sign a DPA for processing whose location is unverified.
Admin, identity & access controls
Parloa
Documented governance is a single central place to manage every agent, column-level access policies that restrict an agent to the fields a given use case justifies, and audit trails capturing every AI-initiated query with field, customer and timestamp for accountability requests. We found no public information on single sign-on, SCIM provisioning, roles, or group-based permissions governing which models, agents and connectors each group may use.
PolyAI
A console with "Latency and cost per agent on the console, in real time" and integration dashboards showing real-time sync status, error tracking and automatic retry are documented. We found no public information on single sign-on, SCIM provisioning, roles and group permissions for models or connectors, audit logs, or how reporting on staff use is scoped.
Integrations, connectors & knowledge
Parloa
Agent Skills connect CRMs, knowledge sources, telephony and other enterprise systems, configured once for the whole fleet, with governed integration across CCaaS platforms and backend systems via custom APIs, and retrieval against a pre-processed vector database of embedded policy content. We found no public information on source citations on answers, a documented product API or webhooks, support for open protocols such as MCP, or how often connectors sync.
PolyAI
More than 130 integrations span telephony, CRM and knowledge, productivity and collaboration, and vertical systems, with a self-serve Connect Portal, managed OAuth 2.0 with token refresh, custom field and object mapping, and an Agent Developer Kit for programmatic control of custom functions and conversation flows. We found no public information on MCP support, webhooks, or incremental sync cadence.
Agent capabilities & guardrails
Parloa
Agents act in connected systems with column-scoped permissions, must authenticate a caller before acting on an account, and hand over to a human with the transcript, classified intent, CRM record changes, authentication state and a sentiment read. They are tested before release in a simulation lab across dozens of failure scenarios with A/B comparison, monitored per conversation with drift detection, and held to scope limits with warm transfer; we found no public information on configurable human approval per action, on schedules or triggers, or on per-agent cost monitoring.
PolyAI
Agents are built from plain-language descriptions with no code, act in connected systems for use cases such as billing and payments and account management, and "Test calls, simulated conversations and A/B tests on live traffic, at no extra charge" are documented alongside real-time cost and latency monitoring per agent and SIP-header context transferred back to contact-centre agents at handoff. We found no public information on human approval before consequential actions, triggers and schedules, or attribution and run-level audit of who deployed which agent.
European sovereignty
Parloa
The contracting entity is a Berlin-registered German company with a German imprint, hosting is on Microsoft Azure including a Germany-hosted stamp where transcripts, personal data and analytics stay inside the regional boundary, and the model providers are named — OpenAI or Azure — under signed contracts with per-region availability verification. For an AI product the model provider is a subprocessor that must be listed with its region, and we found no public information on a published subprocessor register, a data processing agreement, or the company's ownership.
PolyAI
The contracting entity is PolyAI Limited under the exclusive jurisdiction of England and Wales, the infrastructure is described as hosted on AWS, and Stripe is named as payment processor; the privacy policy's mention of service providers with operations "including in the United States" gives no regional control. We found no public information on the hosting region, data residency, ownership, or a published subprocessor list naming model providers with their regions — for an AI product that list is where my review starts.
Pricing transparency
Parloa
We found no price, tier, seat, usage-unit or term figure in any captured page, including the pricing page; the only documented commercial step is booking a demo. A company cannot compute an annual cost from what is public here.
PolyAI
The captured pages describe the pricing model — "priced on a per-minute basis" and "Billed on connected time, with no minimums and no rounding up to the minute" — plus "$100 in free credit for a limited time" for new API accounts, but no public price figures; the pricing page shows "Flexible pricing" and "Talk to our team". A company cannot compute an annual cost from these pages.
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.