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 Skeptic
Has read "European AI" on a wrapper that sends every prompt to a US model, "agents" that are saved prompts, and "we never train on your data" with no word on the model provider behind it. Asks which model answers, where it runs, what it may do unsupervised, and what a thousand seats cost.
Parloa
This judge's pick
PolyAI
Criterion by criterion
Data use, training & retention
Parloa
We found no public information on whether conversations, transcripts, uploaded content or analytics train any model, on how long any of it is kept, or on whether a data processing agreement covers the product. The captured terms, privacy and security-governance pages yield no statement on this, and the certifications list names GDPR without describing data use or retention.
PolyAI
The privacy policy commits PolyAI to processing client conversation data only on the client's instructions and states one retention figure — administrator contact data kept six years after the agreement ends — but we found no public information on whether conversations, prompts or outputs are used for training, and the vendor advertises Raven as "trained on 1B+ enterprise conversations" without a word on whose. Zero-retention options, logs and abuse-monitoring retention are likewise undocumented.
Models & processing location
Parloa
Model hosting is attributed to OpenAI or Azure, the platform runs in regional Azure stamps including one hosted in Germany, and the regional deployment model keeps transcripts, personal data and analytics inside the chosen boundary with per-region model availability verified. We found no public information on which specific models sit behind the product, on admin-level pinning of processing to the EU, on excluding a provider, or on bring-your-own-key deployment.
PolyAI
Raven, a proprietary model, is named as what powers the agents, and the security page says infrastructure is "hosted on AWS" with no server region given — where inference actually runs is unstated. The "gated generative AI" the security page describes inside conversations is attributed to no provider, and we found no public information on an EU processing option, excludable providers, bring-your-own-key or own-cloud deployment.
Admin, identity & access controls
Parloa
Governance machinery is documented in pieces: an audit trail capturing every agent data query with field, customer and timestamp, column-level access policies that restrict what an agent may read per use case, data-residency enforcement across region-agnostic call routing, and a single place to manage every agent. We found no public information on single sign-on, user provisioning, roles and groups, or how staff usage is reported and scoped.
PolyAI
We found no public information on single sign-on, SCIM provisioning, roles, group-based permissions or audit logs. The closest documented evidence is an operator console showing latency and cost per agent in real time, a dashboard for integration sync status and errors, and the privacy policy's category of "client administrators".
Integrations, connectors & knowledge
Parloa
Connectors reach CRMs, knowledge sources, telephony and existing CCaaS platforms while keeping current contracts in place, with pre-conversation retrieval across CRM and data-lake fields and retrieval-augmented answers over an indexed knowledge base. We found no public information on a documented public API, webhooks, open protocols such as MCP, or how fast and how completely sources sync.
PolyAI
This is the strongest documented area: 130+ integrations across telephony, CRM and knowledge, productivity and vertical systems, named partners including Salesforce, Zendesk, NICE, Twilio and Five9, managed OAuth 2.0 with token refresh, custom objects and user-defined field mappings, a self-serve Connect Portal, open APIs, and an Agent Developer Kit to build custom functions against any enterprise system. We found no public information on MCP support, webhooks, or export of data and configuration when a customer leaves.
Agent capabilities & guardrails
Parloa
Agents are built from one blueprint without code, split into subtasks with deterministic routing, must authenticate a caller before acting on an account, and hand over to a human with transcript, intent, authentication state and CRM changes carried along. Simulation across dozens of failure scenarios and A/B testing precede live traffic, every conversation is traced with drift detection, and model changes pass a benchmark gate with calibrated judging and published known limits. We found no public information on scheduled triggers or configurable human approval per action.
PolyAI
Voice agents are documented acting in connected systems — billing and payments, order management, authentication, bookings — with test calls, simulated conversations and A/B tests on live traffic included at no charge, real-time latency and cost monitoring, automatic retry on integration errors, and SIP-header context passed to human agents at handoff. We found no public information on configurable human approval before consequential actions, scoped per-agent permissions or versioned rollout; the terms do at least state that AI Outputs "may contain inaccuracies".
European sovereignty
Parloa
The vendor is a German-registered company, hosting runs on Azure with a stamp hosted in Germany, and the regional deployment model keeps transcripts and personal data inside the chosen region even when the CCaaS routing is region-agnostic. But the models come from OpenAI or Azure, which are non-European providers, and we found no public information on a full subprocessor list with locations, a data processing agreement, or a committed EU inference path.
PolyAI
The contracting entity is named — PolyAI Limited, terms governed by the laws of England and Wales — and two subprocessors appear: AWS for hosting with no server region given, and Stripe for payments. We found no public information on where customer data is hosted, no published subprocessor list, and the privacy policy's supporting text mentions service providers with operations "including in the United States"; running an in-house model avoids an external model provider, but inference location is undocumented.
Pricing transparency
Parloa
We found no price figures on the captured pricing page, and the documented entry point is booking a demo. Nothing in the evidence lets a company estimate a per-seat, per-minute or per-agent cost, and we found no public information on tiers, usage limits, add-ons, minimum seats or term.
PolyAI
The pricing page publishes no figures — "Flexible pricing… Talk to our team" — and every route to a number is a demo or a sales contact; what is public is the shape of the bill: per-minute usage pricing billed per second of connected time, with no minimums and no rounding up to the minute, testing and 24/7 support included, plus $100 in free API credit for new accounts. We found no public information on per-minute rates, tiers, usage limits or minimum commitments.
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.