Agentic Index
Dust vs Ema (2026)
Build them or hire them. That verdict is the Agentic Index coverage score, graded from each vendor's own published materials.
Dust is a workspace platform where your teams build agents grounded on company data across Notion, Slack and Drive, self serve at 30 dollars per user a month with a free option. Ema ships prebuilt AI employees for HR, finance and operations, quoted through sales. Both document strong coverage, 10 and 11 of 14, so this is not a capability decision: it is whether you want a surface your people build on or roles that arrive already defined.
This comparison is published by Agentic Index, an independent agentic AI vendor research platform. Dust and Ema are each graded against the same 14 capability Agentic Index taxonomy, from the vendor's own public materials under the Agentic Index verification standard, alongside 969 researched vendors. No vendor pays for placement and no vendor has reviewed this page. How this evidence is graded
Choose Dust if
- You want your own teams building agents, and the knowledge is spread across your workspace tools.
- Published pricing and a free option let you start without a procurement cycle.
- Model flexibility and observability matter for agents your organization will keep changing.
Choose Ema if
- You want defined roles delivered rather than a platform to build them on.
- HR, finance and operations are the target functions and prebuilt depth there saves you months.
- Human oversight coverage is stronger, which matters when agents act inside those functions.
| At a glance | Dust | Ema |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Enterprise operations agent | Enterprise operations agent |
| Entry price | Free seat at 0€ with 500 lifetime credits; paid entry is Pro at 24€ per seat per month billed yearly (30€ monthly), and Max at 120€ yearly (150€ monthly). All excluding VAT. Enterprise on application. Figures are euros, not dollars. | Contact sales for paid access; a free trial is available self-serve at try.ema.ai. Pricing is outcome-based rather than per seat. No figure, unit or minimum is published. |
| Free / trial | Free option (no card, up to 5 users) + 15-day Pro trial | n/p |
| Pricing confidence | public exact | contact only |
| Feature | D Dust |
E Ema |
|---|---|---|
| Action & orchestration | ||
|
Integrations & Tool Calling Ability to connect agents to real systems through native integrations, OAuth-authenticated actions, custom tools, APIs, webhooks, or MCP-compatible tools. |
Full / Explicit | Full / Explicit |
|
Workflow Orchestration Ability to sequence, branch, retry, route, and combine deterministic workflow nodes with autonomous agent steps. |
Full / Explicit | Full / Explicit |
|
Triggers & Channel Coverage How agents wake up and where they work: schedules, webhooks, message events, CRM events, inbox events, chat, email, voice, and collaboration tools. |
Full / Explicit | Partial |
| Knowledge & context | ||
|
Knowledge Grounding & RAG Ability to ground agent behavior in company data through document ingestion, retrieval, external knowledge APIs, semantic search, or RAG layers. |
Full / Explicit | Full / Explicit |
|
Memory & State Persistence Ability to persist context across a run, conversation, workflow, user, team, or longer-term memory layer. |
Partial | Partial |
| Control & trust | ||
|
Human Oversight & Guardrails Approval steps, consent checkpoints, escalation rules, structured guardrails, policy constraints, and pause/resume controls. |
Partial | Full / Explicit |
|
Security, Identity & Governance RBAC, SSO, auditability, encryption, least-privilege tool access, compliance posture, and data handling policy. |
Full / Explicit | Full / Explicit |
|
Observability & Auditability Traces, logs, execution histories, metrics, audit events, and debugging detail for production agent behavior. |
Partial | Full / Explicit |
|
Deployment & Data Residency Deployment modes and options, including SaaS, dedicated cloud, VPC, on-prem, hybrid, local runtime, and self-hosting. |
Full / Explicit | Full / Explicit |
| Solution readiness | ||
|
Prebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs Ready-made workflows, packaged employees, templates, blueprints, industry solutions, and role-specific agents that reduce time-to-value. |
Partial | Full / Explicit |
| Platform extensibility | ||
|
Model Flexibility & Routing Ability to work across multiple foundation models, route tasks to different models, or let buyers bring their own providers and keys. |
Full / Explicit | Full / Explicit |
|
APIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility Composability layer: stable APIs, SDKs, MCP tool consumption/serving, custom tools, and integration into internal systems. |
Full / Explicit | Partial |
|
Testing, Debugging & Optimization Testing, debugging, scoring, retries, fallbacks, quality gates, and optimization loops for improving agent workflows before and after deployment. |
No / Not documented | Partial |
| Specialist automation | ||
|
Browser & Computer Use Browser, desktop, or remote/local computer control for workflows that cannot be handled through stable APIs alone. |
No / Not documented | No / Not documented |
Pricing snapshot
Sourced from the Index pricing dataset · open each vendor's profile for full detail.
| Pricing | D Dust |
E Ema |
|---|---|---|
|
Entry price Lowest public entry point |
Free seat at 0€ with 500 lifetime credits; paid entry is Pro at 24€ per seat per month billed yearly (30€ monthly), and Max at 120€ yearly (150€ monthly). All excluding VAT. Enterprise on application. Figures are euros, not dollars. | Contact sales for paid access; a free trial is available self-serve at try.ema.ai. Pricing is outcome-based rather than per seat. No figure, unit or minimum is published. |
|
Pricing confidence How public the numbers are |
Public, exact | Contact only |
|
Billing Primary billing axis |
Per seat per month with a monthly credit allocation attached to each seat, across three seat types inside one self-serve Business plan, plus a sales-led Enterprise plan. Seats are priced in EUROS excluding VAT; programmatic API usage is priced in US dollars at $0.01 per credit. Admins assign a seat type per user and can mix and reassign them at any time. | Outcome-based rather than per seat, stated first-party on the homepage as part of the commercial pitch: "Consolidate SaaS, Outcome-based pricing, No unused module, No tokenmaxxing." Ema sells AI Employees as headcount substitutes, so the unit is work delivered rather than users licensed. No rate, unit definition or minimum is published, and nothing states what an outcome is measured as — a resolved ticket, a completed workflow, a filled role. |
|
Variable cost Workload / overage exposure |
Medium variable cost | High variable cost |
|
Free tier / trial Try before you buy |
Free tierTrial
|
No free tierTrial
|
|
Buying motion Self-serve vs sales call |
Mixed | Mixed |
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