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 Head of IT
Has to roll an AI assistant out to eight hundred staff without a second shadow-IT wave. Wants SSO and SCIM, groups that decide who gets which model, agent and connector, answers that respect SharePoint permissions, audit logs for the SIEM, and a deployment option that is not "trust us".
Parloa
This judge's pick
PolyAI
Criterion by criterion
Data use, training & retention
Parloa
Before I can put this in front of staff, I need to tell them what happens to their conversations, and we found no public statement on whether conversation data trains a model, on retention periods, or on a data processing agreement. What is documented is that transcripts, personally identifiable information and analytics stay inside the chosen regional deployment, and GDPR appears in the certification list — that is where the evidence stops.
PolyAI
The privacy policy does cover the product and records that the vendor is contractually committed to processing client personal data only on the client's instructions, with six-year retention stated for client administrator records, and SOC 2 and ISO 27001 are advertised. But we found no public information on whether conversations train the Raven model, how long call content is kept, zero-retention terms, or abuse-monitoring retention — and Raven is advertised as trained on 1B+ enterprise conversations, which makes that silence a real problem for me.
Models & processing location
Parloa
The platform runs on Microsoft Azure with a Germany-hosted deployment and regional choice through its Zones architecture, and the model hosts are named as OpenAI or Azure, with model availability verified per region and only models from contracted subprocessors admitted. We found no public information listing the individual models with their inference regions, on an admin-enforced EU-only setting across models, or on bring-your-own-key or own-cloud deployment.
PolyAI
The product is powered by the vendor's own Raven model — versions, training method and latency claims are documented — on AWS infrastructure, so I at least know who runs inference. But we found no public information on server region, an EU processing option, provider pinning or exclusion, or any bring-your-own-key, own-cloud or on-premises deployment, so residency rests on trust rather than documentation.
Admin, identity & access controls
Parloa
There is real governance here: a single central place to manage every agent, audit trails that capture each AI-initiated data query with the field, customer and timestamp for GDPR accountability, and column-level access policies limiting what an agent may read. But the identity plane my eight-hundred-seat deployment hinges on is where the pages go quiet — we found no public information on single sign-on, SCIM provisioning, admin and member roles, or exporting audit logs to our SIEM.
PolyAI
We found no public information on single sign-on, SCIM provisioning, roles, group-based access to models, agents or connectors, audit logs, or data-loss-prevention policies. The evidence stops at the existence of client administrators, a console showing real-time latency and cost per agent, and a self-serve whitelabelled Connect Portal for configuring integrations — not enough for me to govern a rollout to eight hundred staff or feed a SIEM.
Integrations, connectors & knowledge
Parloa
The connector story covers the contact-centre stack: CRMs, knowledge sources and telephony, integration with existing CCaaS platforms and backend systems via custom APIs and integration-capable connectors, retrieval over an indexed policy and knowledge base, and CRM plus data-lake queries. We found no public information on source citations on grounded answers, sync behaviour, a documented public API and webhooks, or open protocols such as MCP.
PolyAI
This is the strongest area: more than 130 integrations across telephony, CRM and knowledge, productivity and vertical systems, with named partners such as Salesforce, Zendesk, NICE, Five9 and Twilio, open APIs, an Agent Developer Kit for custom integrations, managed OAuth 2.0, and real-time sync status with error tracking and automatic retry. We found no public information on MCP support, webhooks, incremental sync, or how answers cite the sources they are grounded in.
Agent capabilities & guardrails
Parloa
This is the strongest area: no-code agents built from SOPs with change history on every edit, subtask splitting with deterministic routing, simulations and A/B testing across dozens of failure scenarios before anything reaches live callers, always-on per-conversation tracing with drift detection, caller authentication before account actions, scope limits, column-level data restrictions, and a warm handoff carrying transcript, intent, CRM changes and authentication state. We found no public information on configurable human approval per action, scheduled triggers, or per-agent quality and cost monitoring.
PolyAI
Agents can be built without code from a plain-language description or programmatically via the CLI and Python package, they act in connected systems, and test calls, simulated conversations and A/B tests on live traffic are included at no extra charge, with SIP-header context handed to human agents at handover. We found no public information on per-action human approval, scheduled triggers, or per-run logs, though the terms state plainly that AI outputs are informational only and "may contain inaccuracies".
European sovereignty
Parloa
The legal notice gives a German contact and refuses consumer arbitration board proceedings, and the platform runs on Azure with a Germany-hosted regional deployment where transcripts, personal data, analytics and the services that process them stay inside the regional boundary. The models are hosted by OpenAI or Azure — non-European companies — and we found no public information on a subprocessor list with locations, a data processing agreement, or an explicit commitment that model inference happens in the EU.
PolyAI
The contracting entity is PolyAI Limited under the exclusive jurisdiction and law of England and Wales, the UK Information Commissioner's Office is named as the complaints authority, and AWS (hosting) and Stripe (payments) appear as named service providers, with SOC 2 and ISO 27001 published. But we found no public information on hosting region or model-processing location, and no published subprocessor list, while the privacy policy mentions service providers with operations "including in the United States".
Pricing transparency
Parloa
A pricing page was captured alongside a book-a-demo path, but we found no public price information in the captured pages — no tier figures, seat or usage rates, included features, minimums or term. I cannot compute the annual cost for my eight hundred seats from this material.
PolyAI
The pricing page publishes no figures and routes every buyer to "Talk to our team" or a demo. It does disclose the metering model — per-minute pricing billed per second of connected time, with no minimums and no rounding up to the minute, including maintenance and 24/7 support — and $100 in free credit for new Dialog-RSN-1 API accounts, but no rate, tier structure or enterprise add-on prices are public, so I cannot compute an annual cost.
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.