Fin vs Sierra (2026)

Fin runs on the customer's existing helpdesk across Intercom, Salesforce, HubSpot, Freshworks, Dixa, Front, Zoho, Sprinklr and Gorgias, adds Data Connectors for live external data, takes action to update external systems, and spans messaging and telephony channels.

Sourcefin.ai/pricingread 2026-09-05

Agents reach the customer's systems of record to carry out end to end transactions, including card and ACH payments, returns, authentication and cancellation saves, and those system interactions are held deterministic and bound by policy. Agent Studio offers ready integrations and an integration framework for proprietary systems, and the Agent SDK builds the rest, so the range of connected systems depends on what each team sets up. Integrations also route a conversation to the customer's care team with its full context.

Sourcesierra.ai/product/agent-sdkread 2026-09-05

Procedures are configured multi-step workflows the agent runs end to end, including branches that end in a handoff to a human or into a workflow. Workflow automations on the Intercom helpdesk and Operator, a separate agent for customer operations work, sit alongside.

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Agents are put together from skills such as triage, respond and confirm, combined into multistep workflows for a specific use case. In Agent Studio a team defines those journeys step by step or has AI generate them from its existing operating procedures, and Ghostwriter builds or changes an agent from a description of how it should behave. Flexibility is set per workflow, so a team can move between deterministic execution and open ended reasoning on the same agent.

Sourcesierra.ai/product/agent-sdkread 2026-09-05

Channels include Voice, Email, Messenger, Slack, WhatsApp, SMS, Instagram, Facebook Messenger and Fin over API. Tickets, cases and emails come in from the connected helpdesk, and a proactive outbound suite runs on the Intercom helpdesk.

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An agent is built once and deployed across chat, phone, email, SMS and messaging, with the same skills and policies applying on each. A single agent working across every channel is the core idea of the platform.

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Fin is trained on Knowledge Sources, Data Connectors, Procedures, Guidance and Categories, ingesting help center content from Intercom, Zendesk or Salesforce plus any public URL. The ingested content re-syncs every 24 hours for connected help centers and weekly for external web content.

Sourcefin.ai/help/en/articles/13975777-pricing-and-usage-limitsread 2026-09-05

Agents ground answers in the customer's own content through retrieval built into Agent OS, and the Agent Data Platform joins that knowledge with customer context from other systems. In Agent Studio a team connects its knowledge sources and views and edits help center content, FAQs and policies. Sierra spots common themes missing from the knowledge base and drafts new articles from how care representatives resolved edge cases, so the store grows without manual updates.

Sourcesierra.ai/product/agent-sdkread 2026-09-05

Context carries within a conversation and across a voice call, and Fin passes full customer context to a human on escalation. No memory layer with a stated scope or lifetime is named, and the persistence Fin advertises is a learning flywheel that feeds conversations into model improvement, not a memory store that can be located or deleted for a given customer.

Sourcefin.ai/capabilitiesread 2026-09-05

Agents personalize each conversation from agent memory and the customer's profile, and the Agent Data Platform brings together what the agent knows about a specific customer across sessions, channels and systems, so context carries from one conversation to the next. How long that memory lasts, and whether a customer's record of it can be viewed or cleared, is not public.

Sourcesierra.ai/product/insightsread 2026-09-05

Procedures carry deterministic controls and cross-team approvals, with multi-stage validation and approval workflows running before any action is taken, and Fin performs only actions the customer has explicitly configured and approved. Refund paths enforce eligibility windows, value thresholds and approval requirements, and Guidance bounds tone, scope and escalation.

Sourcefin.ai/trainread 2026-09-05

Sierra wraps its models in supervisory layers that check outputs against scope and policy before the agent responds, to reduce hallucination and prevent abuse. Access to systems of record is deterministic and controlled, and the customer's policies and security procedures are enforced outside the model. Flexibility settings on each workflow limit how far the agent may improvise.

Sourcesierra.ai/product/trust-and-reliabilityread 2026-09-05

Intercom supports SSO with Okta, Azure AD and OneLogin, plus 2FA, SCIM provisioning and IP restrictions, and holds SOC 2, ISO 27001, ISO 42001, ISO 27701, AIUC-1 and HIPAA.

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Sierra holds ISO/IEC 27001:2022 and ISO/IEC 42001:2023 certificates, a SOC 2 Type II report, a HIPAA attestation for 2026 and PCI DSS Level 1 service provider certification. Its trust center also covers the European and California privacy laws, the CSA STAR registry and FedRAMP High, with controls and policies shared on request.

Personal information shared with an agent is encrypted and masked automatically, filters block topics and keywords a company puts off limits, and cardholder data runs on dedicated PCI infrastructure that never touches Sierra's core platform, models or storage. Customer data is never used to train models or shared with other customers. Who inside a customer's own organization can build, edit or publish an agent, through single sign on, roles or permissions, is not public.

Sourcesierra.ai/product/trust-and-reliabilityread 2026-09-05

The Analyze stage includes Topics Explorer, CX Score quality scoring across every conversation, an Optimize Dashboard and configurable alerts, which measure what happened. No production trace showing why the agent acted as it did is described, and the view of Fin's reasoning sits inside Simulations, a test surface used before launch.

Sourcefin.ai/analyzeread 2026-09-05

Every agent action can be traced to its reasoning, with the knowledge sources and systems it used, and developers inspect API calls and logic traces while Agent Studio shows a live trace of each decision, tool call and response during a build.

Insights reports on CSAT, resolution and other metrics with custom reports, tags and categorizes conversations automatically, flags the ones that need a person's attention and sends alerts on abuse attempts or performance drops to a team's existing tools.

Explorer answers questions about thousands of conversations with themes, data and links to the conversations behind each finding, and delivers a weekly briefing on its own.

Sourcesierra.ai/product/insightsread 2026-09-05

Customer data is hosted in the United States, the European Union or Australia, chosen to meet the customer's residency requirement, with redundancy across regions behind a 99.8% uptime SLA.

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Sierra hosts the platform as SaaS. Each subprocessor carries its own processing location on the trust center, and customers do not pick a region. There is no VPC, single tenant or on premises option. The FedRAMP High commitment points to separate government infrastructure, though no choice of residency regions is offered.

Sourcesierra.ai/product/trust-and-reliabilityread 2026-09-05

Fin ships named role-specific agents that customers adopt as units, Fin for Service, Fin for Sales and Fin for Ecommerce, each with pre-trained skills, alongside packaged helpdesk editions for Salesforce, Freshdesk and HubSpot, a Simulation library and the AI Agent Blueprint.

Sourcefin.ai/capabilitiesread 2026-09-05

The Agent SDK ships with a range of AI skills and systems integrations to help customers go live faster, and skills such as triage, respond and confirm work as reusable building blocks. Customers assemble these pieces themselves. There are no named prebuilt agents, templates, library or marketplace.

Sourcesierra.ai/product/agent-sdkread 2026-09-05

Answers come from Fin's own proprietary model family, the Apex model built for customer support and Apex Flash for low latency voice, under the patented Fin AI Engine. No customer or admin model selection is described.

Sourcefin.ai/pricingread 2026-09-05

Agents draw on more than fifteen frontier, open weight and proprietary models chosen per job, and Sierra switches between LLM providers automatically to optimize performance and keep running during a provider outage. Model serving runs through subprocessors that include Anthropic, Google, AWS, Baseten, Fireworks AI, Together AI and Modal. Routing happens inside Sierra, and neither customers nor admins choose the model.

Sourcesierra.ai/blog/constellation-of-modelsread 2026-09-05

The Fin API Platform exposes the Apex generative, Retrieval and Reranker models individually or as a complete RAG pipeline for building custom agents, and the Fin Agent API embeds Fin in a customer's own product without the Intercom messenger. API is a first-class deployment channel, and the versioned REST API comes with an OpenAPI specification, interactive reference and changelog. A help center note says Fin cannot serve conversations created through the API, but it predates the API Platform and covers only that one path.

Sourcefin.ai/api-platformread 2026-09-05

Developers build, customize and deploy agents with the Agent SDK, which comes with documentation, interactive training and a development pipeline. Agent OS adds ready made tooling for building, deploying and managing agents. There is no public API reference or MCP server for the platform itself, so developers work through the SDK.

Sourcesierra.ai/product/agent-sdkread 2026-09-05

Customers get a test suite covering Simulations, Regression Tests, Previews and Audience Testing, run against their own configured agent, with results readable before deployment.

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Agent Studio simulates conversations and scores the agent against defined outcomes, and a team builds a regression test suite that runs before each new version of the agent is released.

Voice agents are tested for transcription, background noise and speaker variation before going live, and the Agent SDK checks behavior across a wide range of scenarios in a development pipeline, so definitions are not edited live.

After launch, Insights runs experiments on variations of agent behavior such as handoff rules or levels of determinism, and Explorer compares performance before and after a change Ghostwriter has made.

Sourcesierra.ai/product/agent-studioread 2026-09-05

Every deployment surface is a messaging, voice or API channel, and actions on external systems run through helpdesk connectors and Data Connectors. No browser control, virtual desktop or operation of software without a programmatic interface is described.

Sourcefin.ai/pricingread 2026-09-05

Agents act on the customer's systems through API integrations built with the SDK, kept deterministic and bound by policy, and deploy across chat, phone, email, SMS and messaging. Browser control, a virtual desktop and operation of software without a programmatic interface are not part of the platform.

Sourcesierra.ai/product/agent-sdkread 2026-09-05