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 Works Council Member
Has a co-determination right the moment a tool can monitor staff, and an AI assistant logs every prompt. Wants usage reports that can be aggregated or pseudonymised, prompt logging rules set out in writing, a human approving what agents do to colleagues, and no training on staff input.
Parloa
This judge's pick
PolyAI
Criterion by criterion
Data use, training & retention
Parloa
We found no public statement that prompts, transcripts or connected data are kept out of model training, no retention periods and no data processing agreement; what is documented is that transcripts, personal data and analytics stay inside a chosen regional boundary, that every AI query against the data lake is logged, and that models come only from subcontractors under signed contract.
PolyAI
The privacy policy commits the vendor to process client-conversation data "only on the instructions of the relevant client" and gives one concrete retention period — administrator data kept six years after the agreement ends — but we found no public information on whether conversations or staff input are used to train models, on transcript retention, or on zero-retention terms. The vendor's own pages say Raven was "trained on 1B+ enterprise conversations", and without a written exclusion that is precisely the training-on-input question a works council needs answered in writing before any rollout.
Models & processing location
Parloa
OpenAI and Azure are named as the model hosts, the platform runs on Azure with a German regional instance, and regional deployments keep conversation data and the services that process it inside the chosen boundary with model availability verified per region; a per-model list with inference regions, provider exclusion or bring-your-own-key is not documented.
PolyAI
Raven, the vendor's own proprietary model, is named as what powers the agents, and hosting is stated as AWS, but we found no public information on the inference region, an EU processing option, provider exclusions, or bring-your-own-key deployment. The "gated generative AI" used selectively in conversations is described without naming the provider behind it.
Admin, identity & access controls
Parloa
Agent management is centralised, agent data access is restricted by column-level policies, and every AI query is captured with field, customer and timestamp for accountability requests; we found no public information on single sign-on, user provisioning, admin roles, or how any reporting on staff use is scoped and documented.
PolyAI
The captured pages document operational dashboards — real-time sync status and error tracking, and "latency and cost per agent on the console, in real time" — but we found no public information on single sign-on, SCIM provisioning, roles, group-based permissions or exportable audit logs. Likewise we found no public information on whether usage reporting on staff can be scoped, aggregated or pseudonymised for a works-council agreement.
Integrations, connectors & knowledge
Parloa
Governed connectors to contact-centre platforms, CRMs and backend systems, telephony and chat channels, and retrieval over a pre-processed knowledge index plus CRM and data-lake fields, configured once for the whole agent fleet; incremental sync behaviour, open protocols such as MCP, and source citations on grounded answers are not documented.
PolyAI
This is a broad documented library — 130+ integrations across telephony, CRM, productivity and vertical systems, managed OAuth 2.0 with token refresh, custom field and object mapping, a self-serve Connect Portal, and an Agent Developer Kit (a CLI tool and Python package) for custom connections, with SIP or PSTN enough to route calls. We found no public information on MCP support, webhooks, or how answers cite their sources, which keeps it short of the top level.
Agent capabilities & guardrails
Parloa
Agents are built without code from blueprints, tested in simulations across dozens of failure scenarios and A/B runs before live callers, monitored per conversation with drift detection, scoped to the data fields a use case justifies, and handed to a human with the transcript, intent, authentication state and CRM changes; what we did not find is a configurable human approval before consequential actions or the vendor's own statement of what agents must not be trusted with.
PolyAI
Agents act in connected systems — billing and payments, bookings, authentication — are built without code, and the vendor documents both pre-release testing ("test calls, simulated conversations and A/B tests on live traffic, at no extra charge") and real-time per-agent cost and latency monitoring, with a SIP-header handover carrying context back to contact-centre colleagues. We found no public information on a configurable human-approval step before consequential actions or on agent versioning and run logs, and the only stated limit we found is the terms' warning that AI Outputs "may contain inaccuracies".
European sovereignty
Parloa
The vendor is a German company publishing a German legal notice, hosting runs on Azure with a German regional instance where transcripts and personal data stay inside the regional boundary, and OpenAI and Azure are named as model hosts under signed contracts, with certifications including ISO 27001 and SOC 2 published; a subprocessor list with locations and a data processing agreement are not documented in the captured pages.
PolyAI
The contracting entity is the UK company PolyAI Limited, governed by the laws of England and Wales with exclusive jurisdiction there; hosting is stated only as AWS with no region, and the privacy policy's service providers include operations "in the United States", with Stripe named as payment processor. We found no public information on data residency for customer conversations or on a published subprocessor list.
Pricing transparency
Parloa
The captured pricing page gave no figures we could confirm, and the documented route to the product is booking a demo; we found no public information on price per seat or usage unit, tier inclusions, usage limits or contract term.
PolyAI
The billing model is public — the voice agent is "priced on a per-minute basis" including support, maintenance and model upgrades, billed per second of connected time with no minimums and no rounding up to the minute — but the captured pricing page shows no public prices and routes buyers to "Talk to our team". The only public figure is the time-limited "$100 in free credit" for new API accounts, so a real annual cost cannot be computed from public 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.