Cresta vs Decagon (2026)

As a single intelligent layer over telephony, chat, CRM and knowledge systems, Cresta also takes action in them. Agents connect to CRM, billing and scheduling systems through secure API based function calling, for example disputing a fraudulent charge, replacing a lost card and shipping it to a new address. Integrations are a product area of their own, and Cresta states it does not require ripping out existing telephony.

Sourcecresta.com/integrationsread 2026-09-05

Connectors span CRM, helpdesk and ticketing (Salesforce, Intercom, Zendesk), knowledge bases (Confluence, Contentful, Kustomer), and CPaaS and telephony (Amazon Connect, RingCentral, SIP trunking), plus custom endpoints and MCP connectivity for any other system. Agents both retrieve data and take action.

Sourcedecagon.ai/product/integrationsread 2026-09-05

Opera, the no-code orchestration layer, runs multi-step work, and the AI Agent lifecycle has its own set of surfaces, Discover, Build, Test and Deploy, Optimize and Omnichannel, with an Agent Operations Center for production. In one example an agent runs a complete chain in one conversation, disputing a fraudulent charge, replacing a lost card and shipping it to a new address, and guided workflows route an interaction through an approved procedure step by step.

Sourcecresta.com/operaread 2026-09-05

Agent Operating Procedures turn natural language inbound and outbound workflows into executable agent logic that pulls live data and triggers actions across connected systems. Versions are tracked in Git, and rollout is staged across agent versions.

Sourcedecagon.ai/product/aopread 2026-09-05

Work reaches Cresta from the customer's existing CCaaS and telephony estate as well as from surfaces Cresta owns. Omnichannel, under AI Agent, covers voice, chat, SMS and email, each optimized for the channel's demands, the AI Receptionist handles inbound calls, and Cresta states it does not require ripping out existing telephony. Knowledge Agent also listens continuously through a live conversation.

Sourcecresta.com/ai-agent-omnichannelread 2026-09-05

Chat, voice and email run on one intelligence layer. Inbound calls route over SIP and CPaaS platforms, email comes in through Zendesk and Intercom, live chat escalates through Zendesk Sunshine and Salesforce, and outbound and proactive agents are supported as a core feature.

Sourcedecagon.ai/product/overviewread 2026-09-05

Knowledge lives in a store Cresta maintains itself. Content is consolidated and synced from multiple systems into a single source of truth with centralized management and real-time delivery, and the same store serves both human and AI agents. Answers are cited and grounded in approved knowledge rather than open-ended generation, with guarded output and custom redaction applied on top.

Sourcecresta.com/knowledge-agentread 2026-09-05

Decagon maintains the agent's own knowledge base, filled by sync from customer systems including Confluence, Contentful and Kustomer. Suggestions keeps it current by finding gaps from conversations, ranking their impact on coverage and issuing monthly content updates. Traces name the knowledge articles the agent referenced. The knowledge base persists between conversations.

Sourcedecagon.ai/product/suggestionsread 2026-09-05

Shared memory keeps critical context across channels, handoffs and between human and AI agents, and customer history and preferences personalize each interaction into one continuous conversation. That names a scope, the customer journey, but no lifetime, retention or deletion path is published.

Sourcecresta.com/ai-agentread 2026-09-30

Memory is a named part of the agent engine. It holds customer context across sessions and channels alongside the customer's systems of record, with stated data portability and control, so a conversation started in chat continues by voice without repetition. Decagon does not publish how long memory is kept or how to delete it for one customer.

Sourcedecagon.ai/product/overviewread 2026-09-05

Cresta's controls apply before and during the action. Agents run inside an approved scope of intents and actions with blocks on commitments they should not make, advanced guardrails against hallucination, guided workflows that hold an interaction to approved playbooks, and custom PII redaction. There are also built-in quality and risk controls, which subject every model to post-processing, double-checks and live performance tracking.

Sourcecresta.com/trustread 2026-09-05

Guardrails can be configured for brand voice, escalation and hallucination. A supervisor model revises ungrounded responses before they are sent, bad actor detection escalates to a human, and Watchtower flags conversations for triage against criteria the customer sets. Oversight is automated gating and quality review after the fact, with no customer facing approval queue that holds an agent action until someone signs off.

Sourcedecagon.ai/product/aopread 2026-09-05

Cresta publishes both its compliance posture and its access controls on a live SafeBase trust center. It holds ISO/IEC 27001, 27701 and 42001:2023, plus SOC 2 and SOC 3, and covers HIPAA, PCI DSS and TISAX, with GDPR, CCPA and CPRA for privacy. Audit reports and certificates are available through a request path, alongside a published red teaming report, a HIPAA report, a network diagram, and SIG Lite and VSA Core self-assessments.

Access control covers logical access control, multi-factor authentication under product security, and separate databases per customer with no data commingling. Supporting practices include a secure development lifecycle, third-party penetration testing scored with CVSS, a responsible disclosure program triaged within 24 hours, and active subprocessor and vulnerability notification feeds.

Sourcetrust.cresta.comread 2026-09-05

Access controls include role based access control, SSO with Okta and Microsoft Entra, tamper protected audit logs and short lived scoped JWTs for agent access. Data is encrypted with AES-256 at rest and TLS 1.2+ in transit, DLP based redaction removes PII, and model providers are held to zero-day retention. Decagon shows SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, HIPAA, CCPA and Data Privacy Framework marks and runs a live trust portal.

SourceDecagon security page and trust.decagon.ai; decagon.ai/securityread 2026-09-05

Explainability is built into Cresta's models, using Chain-of-Thought and Model-based Critique to make AI outputs interpretable and accountable, with every model subject to post-processing, double-checks and live performance tracking. Conversation Intelligence, Insights, AI Analyst, Quality Management and Coach are named products that analyze every conversation rather than a sample, and an Agent Operations Center monitors agents in production.

Sourcecresta.com/trustread 2026-09-05

Traces explain how and why the agent decided as it did at any point in a conversation, covering model calls, workflow triggers, the knowledge articles referenced, and runtime and latency figures. Watchtower reviews every conversation against criteria the customer defines and flags outliers for triage.

Sourcedecagon.ai/product/overviewread 2026-09-05

No residency, regional hosting, VPC, single-tenant or self-hosted option is published. The trust center names Amazon Web Services for infrastructure and lists OpenAI, Deepgram, Datadog, Cloudflare and Google Cloud as subprocessors. Its sections on data security, access control, network security, legal and infrastructure include no residency entry, and there is no region menu. Cresta says the platform is available on Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services.

Sourcetrust.cresta.comread 2026-09-05

The platform runs on multi region infrastructure with autoscaling and automatic failover for resilience. There is no customer selectable region, VPC, single tenant or on premises option, so where data sits depends on Decagon's architecture, not the customer's choice. The product is delivered only as SaaS hosted by Decagon.

Sourcedecagon.ai/securityread 2026-09-05

Cresta sells a named set of prebuilt agents and assistants the customer adopts as units, each a product of its own. AI Agent comes with Discover, Build, Test and Deploy, Optimize, Omnichannel, Agent Operations Center and AI Receptionist, Agent Assist with Knowledge Agent, AI Summaries, Behavioral Guidance and Typing Efficiency, and Conversation Intelligence with Insights, AI Analyst, Automation Discovery, Coach, Quality Management and Training Simulator. There is no browsable marketplace of cloneable agents.

Sourcecresta.com/trustread 2026-09-05

Customers build agents by writing Agent Operating Procedures in natural language, or Duet generates them from the customer's own conversation transcripts, applying Decagon's deployment learnings behind the scenes. The seven industry pages are positioning and case studies, not solutions to adopt. There is no template gallery, named prebuilt agent set, blueprint library or industry pack.

Sourcedecagon.ai/product/aopread 2026-09-05

Several model providers sit behind the product: Cresta's subprocessor list names OpenAI and, in a later notification, Anthropic as natural language API providers, Fireworks.ai for LLM model inference, and Deepgram, ElevenLabs and Cartesia AI for speech. Routing is internal to Cresta, and no model selection, override or bring your own model control is offered to the customer. Google Cloud, Cloudflare and Datadog on the same list provide infrastructure.

Sourcetrust.cresta.comread 2026-09-05

The agent engine runs on a network of frontier and specialized models, with OpenAI and Anthropic named as providers held to zero-day retention, and model redundancy is a platform property. Routing happens inside Decagon, and customers and admins cannot select the model that powers the product.

Sourcedecagon.ai/product/overviewread 2026-09-05

Model Context Protocol support is stated, but whether it exposes Cresta as an MCP server a customer can build on or connects Cresta to the customer's own servers is not published. API based function calling links Cresta to the customer's CRM, billing and scheduling systems. There is no public API reference or SDK for Cresta's own platform, and the Help Center sits at docs.cresta.com.

Sourcecresta.com/integrationsread 2026-09-05

A REST API for the platform sits at api.decagon.ai, authenticated with a customer issued key passed as a bearer token, and rate limited. An API key can be generated from the Developer page of the Decagon dashboard. The documentation at docs.decagon.ai sits behind a customer login, nothing on the public site links to it, and the public Integrations page describes only connections into the customer's own systems.

SourceDecagon developer documentation at docs.decagon.airead 2026-09-05

Testing ships as named product surfaces. Synthetic Customers sits beside a Test and Deploy stage in the AI Agent lifecycle, which runs Discover, Build, Test and Deploy, then Optimize, with a Training Simulator under Conversation Intelligence and an Agent Operations Center for production. Agents run against edge cases, adversarial scenarios and synthetic customers built from historical conversation data before deployment, and optimization continues afterwards. What gets tested is the customer's own agent.

Sourcecresta.com/synthetic-customersread 2026-09-05

Testing & QA and Experiments are customer facing products. Agents are validated before launch with end to end simulated conversations and unit tests. Live traffic is then routed across agent versions to A/B test changes and measure their effect on CSAT, deflection rate and other metrics at scale, with readable results the customer can compare.

Sourcedecagon.ai/product/overviewread 2026-09-05

Knowledge Agent reads the browser the human agent is working in. It runs as a persistent browser-based panel that follows the human agent, incorporates real-time browser context such as account status, order history or loyalty tier, and surfaces cited answers and step-by-step guided workflows so the agent sticks to approved playbooks. The person takes every action, and the agent does not operate an interface itself.

Sourcecresta.com/knowledge-agentread 2026-09-05

The agent acts only through API and MCP connectors, CRM and ticketing integrations, CPaaS platforms and SIP telephony. It does not control a browser or virtual desktop or operate software that lacks a programmatic interface.

Sourcedecagon.ai/product/integrationsread 2026-09-05