Agentic Index
Khoros vs Nectar Social (2026)
Both put AI agents in front of a brand's customers, and they work in different places. That verdict is the Agentic Index coverage score, graded from each vendor's own published materials.
Khoros runs brand communities and social care for large companies. Its Aurora AI agents answer the community questions members leave unanswered, posting a cited answer from the community's own content after a wait the admin sets, and they moderate posts by approving or blocking clear cases and holding the rest for people. On social channels, Iris AI publishes, listens in 187 languages and drafts replies that an agent sends. Nectar Social works the open social feed. Its agent replies one on one in the brand's voice across DMs, comments and creator conversations on Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, Reddit and X, runs giveaways and product drops, and ties each conversation back to sales. Choose Khoros when your support volume already lives in an owned community, and Nectar Social when the conversations that sell happen in DMs and comments and you want an agent answering them.
This comparison is published by Agentic Index, an independent agentic AI vendor research platform. Khoros and Nectar Social 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 955 researched vendors. No vendor pays for placement and no vendor has reviewed this page. How this evidence is graded
Choose Khoros if
- Your brand community already carries real support volume, and unanswered questions should get a cited answer without waiting for an expert.
- Moderation is a daily burden, and clear cases should be approved or blocked automatically while gray areas wait for your team and members can appeal.
- Your team wants to pick its own LLM providers and bring its own keys, with primary and fallback models.
- Data has to stay in a chosen region, with hosting in the US, Ireland or Australia.
- Bots should answer on Apple Messages for Business, WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram alongside the community.
Choose Nectar Social if
- Purchase decisions happen in your Instagram and TikTok DMs and comments, and an agent should reply in your brand voice around the clock.
- You want to decide channel by channel and topic by topic where the agent acts unattended and where a person stays in the loop.
- New agent settings should be replayed against your own message history and scored for accuracy before they go live.
- Listening should catch conversations that never tag the brand, down to the product, and feed profiles of your super fans.
- Attribution from a single conversation through to sales and lifetime value matters, with audiences carried into Klaviyo and Attentive.
| Feature | K Khoros |
N Nectar Social |
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| Action & orchestration | ||
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Integrations & Tool Calling Ability to connect agents to real systems through native integrations, OAuth-authenticated actions, custom tools, APIs, webhooks, or MCP-compatible tools. |
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KhorosIntegrations & Tool Calling Aurora AI connects a community to Salesforce natively and to HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics, ServiceNow, Zendesk and Freshdesk, and streams engagement data to Google Analytics, Amplitude and Mixpanel. Iris AI names Salesforce, Dynamics 365 and HubSpot for CRM and Brandwatch, NetBase and Talkwalker for listening, and it publishes, replies, hides and deletes on Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube and Pinterest. Khoros Flow bots reach other systems through webhook actions and code actions that call an API or query a database, take payments through Stripe, and connect to Dialogflow CX and Zapier. Sourcekhoros.ai/aurora/technical-overviewread 2026-10-09 |
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Nectar SocialIntegrations & Tool Calling The agents take authenticated action inside systems Nectar does not own. They reply one on one in DMs, comments and stories on the connected platforms, moderate and triage those conversations, and run giveaways, product drops and opt in capture that turn engagement into subscribers. Official data partnerships across Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, Reddit and X carry comments, DMs, stories, video frames and audio into one engine, and deep integrations with Klaviyo and Attentive handle retargeting downstream. CRM and revenue attribution sync ties conversations to sales and lifetime value, so the reach extends beyond the social channel into email and SMS marketing and into CRM. Sourcenectarsocial.com Engage, Deploy and platform sectionsread 2026-09-01 |
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Workflow Orchestration Ability to sequence, branch, retry, route, and combine deterministic workflow nodes with autonomous agent steps. |
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KhorosWorkflow Orchestration An unanswered community question runs through a chain of steps. Answer Assist waits out the admin's window so members can reply first, retrieves from the community's knowledge and posts a cited answer when it is confident enough, while Answer Requests routes questions to subject experts, skipping experts who opted out of that topic. Orchestrator, the no code rules engine, chains conditions and actions into welcome sequences, onboarding prompts, milestone recognition and expert invitations. In Iris AI, label, priority and queue rules written in plain language decide where each conversation goes. Flow bots follow designed flows with conditions and branches, and pass the conversation to a care agent when they cannot finish. Sourcekhoros.ai/auroraread 2026-10-09 |
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Nectar SocialWorkflow Orchestration The brand configures a flow across several agents and people. Teams adjust workflows with the AI Assistant and set autopilot modes for specific channels and topics, and Collaborative AI Routing hands conversations between agents and people with the reason for each hand off. Agents run engagement, moderation, campaigns and giveaways side by side. Sourcenectarsocial.comread 2026-10-01 |
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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. |
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KhorosTriggers & Channel Coverage Events start the work. A post left unanswered past the admin's waiting period wakes Answer Assist, and every new post, reply, poll and clarification answer enters AI Moderation as it arrives. Orchestrator rules fire on registrations, first posts, accepted solutions, granted roles and expert identification, and scheduled rules run daily, weekly or monthly against audience conditions such as rank, kudos or last visit. On the care side, the Automation Framework pushes message and conversation events to registered bots by webhook across Apple Messages for Business, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, SMS, Google Business Messages, LinkedIn DMs and Khoros Messaging, with Khoros Communities in beta. Sourcecommunity.khoros.com/blog/release-notes/khoros-communities-26-5-release-notes/775218read 2026-10-09 |
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Nectar SocialTriggers & Channel Coverage Inbound messages from the brand's audience start the agents. They answer DMs and comments one on one in real time across the connected social platforms, and campaign automation runs giveaways and product drops without a person starting each one. Sourcenectarsocial.comread 2026-10-01 |
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| Knowledge & context | ||
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Knowledge Grounding & RAG Ability to ground agent behavior in company data through document ingestion, retrieval, external knowledge APIs, semantic search, or RAG layers. |
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KhorosKnowledge Grounding & RAG Answers come from the Community Language Model, built over each community's own content. It ingests posts and articles, retrieves with hybrid semantic and keyword search ranked by author authority, scores candidates on several trust signals and learns from feedback. Admins choose the boards it draws on, it favors knowledge base articles and blog posts over forum replies, and each answer cites the authors and posts behind it. Flow bots answer from a separate knowledge project of Q&A pairs, community pages, web pages and terminology, through personas that set the prompt template and sources. Answers drawn from federated outside knowledge bases are announced as the next step. Sourcekhoros.ai/aurora/technical-overviewread 2026-10-09 |
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Nectar SocialKnowledge Grounding & RAG Replies are grounded in maintained structures the brand curates, not assembled for each request. A brand voice studio with tone calibration holds the voice the agent writes in, custom topic classification and auto tagging give it the brand's own taxonomy instead of a generic one, and customer history and prior conversation records are read at reply time. Feeding all of it is a real time engine that takes in every comment, message, story, video frame and audio clip across the connected platforms, including untagged mentions, so the agent answers from what is actually being said about the brand, down to the SKU, not from tagged content alone. Nectar says its agents are trained on tone, content and customer history, which reads as fine tuning, not retrieval. There is no public knowledge base, ingestion or retrieval configuration, since the product documentation needs a login. Sourcenectarsocial.com Engage and listening sectionsread 2026-09-01 |
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Memory & State Persistence Ability to persist context across a run, conversation, workflow, user, team, or longer-term memory layer. |
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KhorosMemory & State Persistence Khoros Flow keeps conversation state in sessions that close after 15 minutes without a message, and the next message opens a fresh one. Inside a flow, code actions save parameters such as an email address for later steps and can update profile attributes for an anonymous visitor. There is no agent memory with its own scope and lifetime that a team can inspect or clear for one customer. What the Community Language Model learns becomes part of the community's knowledge, and care conversations carry the customer record held in Khoros Care. Sourcedeveloper.khoros.com/khoros-flow/docs/sessionsread 2026-10-09 |
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Nectar SocialMemory & State Persistence Agents read the platform's own data at reply time, meaning customer history, community profiles and conversation records, along with the brand voice configuration. Real time learning appears as a single bullet under the Train stage with no mechanism, scope or retention attached, and elsewhere Nectar says agents are trained on tone, content and customer history, which is training, not memory at run time. Apart from that data, the public product material describes no memory feature with its own scope and lifetime, and the product documentation needs a login. Sourcenectarsocial.com Engage sectionread 2026-09-01 |
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| Control & trust | ||
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Human Oversight & Guardrails Approval steps, consent checkpoints, escalation rules, structured guardrails, policy constraints, and pause/resume controls. |
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KhorosHuman Oversight & Guardrails Community teams decide how far the AI goes. Answer Assist waits an admin set period before replying, and its confidence threshold is set per community and board as Moderate, High or Extreme. AI Moderation approves or blocks only clear cases and holds gray area content for human review; it runs board by board under a global kill switch, admins can exempt roles, and members can appeal any rejection. In Iris AI, generated replies stay drafts until an agent sends them, publishing passes through multilevel approval chains with a one click pause on all publishing, and admins switch each AI feature on or off by team or channel. Sourcecommunity.khoros.com/blog/release-notes/khoros-communities-26-3-release-notes/774978read 2026-10-09 |
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Nectar SocialHuman Oversight & Guardrails Autonomy is configurable per channel and per topic as a setting in the shipped product. Autopilot modes for specific channels and topics let a brand decide where the agent may act unattended and where it may not, and that decision rests on accuracy scoring and confidence thresholds set during the Test stage. Around it sit validation by people before deployment, a Copilot that drafts replies and translations in the brand's voice for a person to send, brand safety guardrails on all automated interactions, and Collaborative AI Routing that hands off to a named person with the reason attached. Sourcenectarsocial.com Engage section, Train, Test and Deploy stagesread 2026-09-01 |
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Security, Identity & Governance RBAC, SSO, auditability, encryption, least-privilege tool access, compliance posture, and data handling policy. |
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KhorosSecurity, Identity & Governance Access runs through single sign on and roles. Aurora AI supports several identity providers on one community, and role based permissions decide which teams can deploy, modify or override AI behavior. Iris AI has granular roles for marketing, service and administration, a unified user directory with provisioning and separation of duties across regions, and Khoros Care supports SAML SSO. The trust center shows SOC, ISO 27001, ISO 27701, ISO 22301 and PCI DSS badges, and the Aurora overview names SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 for the product, while the trust center's written SOC 2 Type II line describes AWS, the host. Reports come through the account team, and data is encrypted at rest and in transit. Sourcekhoros.ai/trust-centerread 2026-10-09 |
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Nectar SocialSecurity, Identity & Governance Nectar states SOC II Type 2 compliance as its attestation and names single sign on and role based access control as controls for customers, and elsewhere describes the platform as built with compliance, data integrity and role based access controls. These claims sit in a badge row on the marketing homepage. There is no trust center, security page, named audit firm, report request path or sub-processor list, and the SOC 2 Type 2 report itself is not public. Sourcenectarsocial.com security sectionread 2026-09-01 |
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Observability & Auditability Traces, logs, execution histories, metrics, audit events, and debugging detail for production agent behavior. |
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KhorosObservability & Auditability Aurora AI keeps an audit trail of AI actions, decisions and escalations. Each moderated item carries the AI's verdict and confidence, which moderators filter on in the queue, and boards show when AI moderation was disabled or skipped. Orchestrator Run Logs record each execution as success, failure, skipped or stopped, filterable by date, trigger and action. Iris AI keeps audit trails of every user action for investigations and regulatory reporting. In care, bot health reads healthy, degraded or down from the last two minutes of deliveries, and every bot to agent handoff is tagged standard, automatic or maintenance. Sourcecommunity.khoros.com/blog/release-notes/khoros-communities-26-5-release-notes/775218read 2026-10-09 |
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Nectar SocialObservability & Auditability Routing explanations are the one real view into the agents, and the rest is reporting. Collaborative AI Routing explains every hand off, so when an agent passes a conversation to a person or another queue the reason is shown. Everything else is campaign measurement, covering sentiment shifts, emerging topics, community health, share of voice, virality, earned media value, unified KPI and revenue dashboards and attribution from conversation to purchase. There is no audit log, agent run history, action trail for each conversation or record of what an agent did and when, and the product documentation needs a login. Sourcenectarsocial.com Engage and Performance sectionsread 2026-09-01 |
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Deployment & Data Residency Deployment modes and options, including SaaS, dedicated cloud, VPC, on-prem, hybrid, local runtime, and self-hosting. |
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KhorosDeployment & Data Residency Khoros runs on AWS, with the region set by where the customer is. Communities and Khoros Care sit in AWS US for US and Canadian customers, AWS Ireland for EMEA and AWS Australia for APAC; APAC communities created before July 2024 stay in the US unless the customer pays to move. The optional Vertex AI service behind Flow bots and Agent Assist follows the same split across Oregon, the UK and Australia. Care keeps login data in the US for every region, the older marketing product runs only in the US, and Iris AI lists regional residency without naming regions. There is no on premises or customer cloud option. Sourcecommunity.khoros.com/kb/supportinformation/what-companies-are-subprocessors-to-khoros/207777read 2026-10-09 |
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Nectar SocialDeployment & Data Residency Nectar is cloud SaaS with nothing the customer selects. There is no region choice, residency commitment, data center disclosure, sub-processor list, VPC, private tenancy, self hosted or on premises option, and the privacy policy covers sharing, cookies and children's privacy without saying where processing happens. Nectar does not publish where conversation data is processed and stored. Sourcenectarsocial.com and nectarsocial.com/privacy-policyread 2026-09-01 |
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| Solution readiness | ||
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Prebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs Ready-made workflows, packaged employees, templates, blueprints, industry solutions, and role-specific agents that reduce time-to-value. |
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KhorosPrebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs Aurora AI ships agents that each do their own job and switch on board by board, as early access features a customer success manager enables. Answer Assist answers questions members leave unanswered, AI Moderation screens posts, replies, polls and images against guidelines in plain language, Clarification Questions asks a member up to six optional follow up questions, and Orchestrator runs community automations from branded templates. CommunityGuard screens AI crawlers and scrapers before they reach the community, free for 60 days. Member Growth Agents, AI Brand Watch and an AI data analyst are on the roadmap. Sourcekhoros.ai/auroraread 2026-10-09 |
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Nectar SocialPrebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs Capability is ready to use, but there are no packaged assets to adopt. The Nectar Agent, the Copilot and the Community Hub ship working, and Campaigns and Opt-Ins provides automated replies, giveaways and product drops as named capabilities, so a brand gets agent output without building anything. There is no library of prebuilt agents, template gallery, importable starting configurations or browsable catalog, and the customization Nectar emphasizes is a brand voice studio with tone calibration and custom topic classification the customer defines. Sourcenectarsocial.com Engage section and platform overviewread 2026-09-01 |
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| Platform extensibility | ||
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Model Flexibility & Routing Ability to work across multiple foundation models, route tasks to different models, or let buyers bring their own providers and keys. |
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KhorosModel Flexibility & Routing Teams choose the models behind the AI. Aurora AI works across several LLM providers so a community can swap foundation models without rearchitecting, and its AI Settings hold model selection, API keys and configurable vision models for image moderation. A community can bring its own keys or run on keys Khoros manages, which hides the model choice. Iris AI runs multiple providers with a primary and a fallback model and supports bring your own key. Google's Vertex AI is the optional model service for Flow bots and Agent Assist. Sourcekhoros.ai/iris/capabilitiesread 2026-10-09 |
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Nectar SocialModel Flexibility & Routing Customers get no choice of underlying model or routing across outside model providers, since Nectar runs on its own multimodal AI stack. Sourcenectarsocial.comread 2026-10-01 |
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APIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility Composability layer: stable APIs, SDKs, MCP tool consumption/serving, custom tools, and integration into internal systems. |
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KhorosAPIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility The developer portal publishes the Khoros Care API reference with Basic and JWT authentication and rate limits, plus an Analytics Reports API for warehouse exports. Bot API v3 lets an outside bot register a webhook, respond in a conversation, pass control to an agent, change priority, tag, move work queues, resolve and update CRM attributes. Marketing has Conversations, Publishing and Notifications APIs, Flow has a Socket API, and Brand Messenger SDKs cover web and mobile. Aurora AI adds a self documenting GraphQL API, an SDK and a CLI, and Iris AI lists a REST API, webhooks and OAuth 2.0. Community API guides sit behind a sign in, and no MCP server is documented. Sourcedeveloper.khoros.com/khoroscaredevdocs/docsread 2026-10-09 |
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Nectar SocialAPIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility An MCP server from Nectar publishes its discovery document. The RFC 9728 protected resource metadata on mcp.nectarsocial.com declares the endpoint https://mcp.nectarsocial.com/mcp, an OAuth authorization server at beta-api.nectarsocial.com, bearer authentication by header and two scopes, content:read and analytics:read. No tool list is published, and the declared scopes are read only, so no tool is shown creating or changing the platform's own objects. The product documentation needs a login, and there is no public API reference. Sourcemcp.nectarsocial.com/.well-known/oauth-protected-resourceread 2026-10-01 |
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Testing, Debugging & Optimization Testing, debugging, scoring, retries, fallbacks, quality gates, and optimization loops for improving agent workflows before and after deployment. |
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KhorosTesting, Debugging & Optimization Admin Review Mode lets a community try Answer Assist on live questions before members see anything. Switched on per board, it sends generated answers to the Answer Queue marked REVIEW MODE instead of posting them, with each answer's cited titles, snippets and links shown so admins can judge quality before going live. Aurora AI also runs staging environments with Git based workflows, so AI features can run in staging while staying off in production. Flow bots are tested by chatting with them in a Try it out panel. No scored test set or accuracy measure for agent answers is offered. Sourcecommunity.khoros.com/blog/release-notes/khoros-communities-26-4-release-notes/775173read 2026-10-09 |
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Nectar SocialTesting, Debugging & Optimization Customers can evaluate a change before deployment. A dedicated Test stage sits between Train and Deploy, and historical message replay validates training, so a candidate configuration runs against the brand's own real message history before it goes live. Accuracy scoring and confidence thresholds apply to the result, and autopilot modes for specific channels and topics then decide where the agent may act unattended. What is replayed and scored is the agent's own responses, so the check covers the agent, not the campaign. Nectar frames it as validating response quality and building confidence with people in the loop before deployment. Sourcenectarsocial.com Engage section, Test stageread 2026-09-01 |
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| Specialist automation | ||
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Browser & Computer Use Browser, desktop, or remote/local computer control for workflows that cannot be handled through stable APIs alone. |
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KhorosBrowser & Computer Use The agents work through the community platform and the messaging and social channel connections Khoros runs, not by driving a browser or a desktop. CommunityGuard works the other way, screening the AI crawlers, scrapers and agents that visit a community with allow, rate limit and block policies per named AI service. Sourcekhoros.ai/aurora/communityguardread 2026-10-09 |
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Nectar SocialBrowser & Computer Use The agents engage through social platform integrations, not by driving a browser or operating a computer interface. Sourcenectarsocial.comread 2026-10-01 |
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Pricing snapshot
Sourced from the Index pricing dataset · open each vendor's profile for full detail.
| Pricing | K Khoros |
N Nectar Social |
|---|---|---|
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Entry price Lowest public entry point |
Quoted by request · Switchers from another community platform get 50% off year one and 25% off years two and three on a three year term | Not public; enterprise pricing quoted through sales, scoped to brand, channels, and conversation volume |
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Pricing confidence How public the numbers are |
Public, partial | Contact only |
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Billing Primary billing axis |
Annual contract sized on committed community volume such as total visits; usage above commitment, professional services and third party pass through costs are quoted separately | enterprise subscription scoped to brands, channels, and conversation volume |
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Variable cost Workload / overage exposure |
Medium variable cost | Medium variable cost |
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Free tier / trial Try before you buy |
No free tier
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No free tierTrial
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Buying motion Self-serve vs sales call |
Mixed | Sales call |
IgniteTech acquired Khoros in May 2025. The products are still sold under the Khoros name at khoros.ai, Iris AI replaces the older Care and social media products, and the Aurora AI agents ship as early access features a customer success manager switches on. Both companies quote prices through sales, and Khoros publishes a switching offer of 50 percent off year one and 25 percent off years two and three on a three year term.
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