Crestavs
NICE CXone
NICE CXone: If you would rather buy real-time assist and quality management natively from the platform that already runs your telephony
Cresta
Real-time AI coaching and autonomous agents that sit on top of an existing contact centre platform
As of 31 August 2026, Cresta's pricing is not published; the vendor quotes on request. Cresta layers real-time agent guidance, conversation intelligence and autonomous AI agents over whichever contact centre platform you already run. Softwr lists it under Customer Support. Cresta is made by Cresta Intelligence, Inc., available on Web, API.
Overview
What Cresta does
Cresta is an AI layer for contact centres. It listens to live voice and digital conversations, prompts human agents mid-call with suggested wording, objection handling and next steps, scores every conversation for quality automatically, and increasingly resolves conversations end to end with autonomous agents. Four modules are sold: AI Agent, Agent Assist, Conversation Intelligence and Quality Management. The commercially important design decision is that Cresta is deliberately not a contact centre platform. It integrates with NICE, Genesys, Five9, Amazon Connect, Cisco, Avaya, Twilio, RingCentral and 8x8 rather than competing with them. That means a large enterprise can add real-time AI without ripping out telephony that took two years to deploy, and it means Cresta wins deals where a full CCaaS migration is politically impossible. It also means Cresta is exposed: the platforms it sits on are all shipping their own native AI, and a customer renewing NICE or Genesys will be offered the same capability as a bundle discount. Buyers are enterprise contact centres, usually several hundred to several thousand seats, in sales-heavy verticals such as telecommunications, insurance, retail and financial services where a measurable lift in conversion or average handle time pays for the licence. Cresta has raised roughly 282 million USD, including a 125 million USD Series D in November 2024, at a reported 1.6 billion USD valuation, and it prices accordingly: contracts are seat-based, annual, and typically six figures. It does not suit a support team of fifty.
What people use it for
- A 1,500-seat telecommunications sales centre that wants conversion lift from live agent prompting without migrating off an incumbent Genesys deployment
- An insurance contact centre replacing manual QA sampling of two per cent of calls with automated scoring of every call for regulatory evidence
- A retail support operation deploying autonomous voice agents on high-volume order status calls while keeping humans on complex claims
- A contact centre director who needs to prove which specific agent behaviours drive outcome differences, rather than relying on post-call survey scores
The honest half
Where it falls short
Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Cresta.
- Cresta depends on the CCaaS platforms it integrates with, and NICE, Genesys and Five9 are all shipping native real-time assist and auto-QA of their own, so at renewal you may be paying twice for capability your platform vendor will bundle at a discount.
- Pricing is not published and contracts are seat-based and annual at enterprise scale, which in practice means six-figure commitments and a procurement cycle measured in months rather than weeks.
- Real-time guidance only pays back where conversation outcomes are measurable and repeatable, so support teams handling long, varied, low-volume cases rarely recover the licence cost.
- Deploying real-time assist requires agents to accept on-screen prompting mid-call, and contact centres with strong union representation or experienced tenured agents frequently see adoption resistance that no amount of model quality fixes.
- Automated quality scoring changes what agents are measured on, and organisations that switch from human QA without rewriting their evaluation rubric and appeals process create industrial-relations problems that surface months after go-live.
Cross-shopped
What people choose instead of Cresta
Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.
- CrestavsGenesys Cloud
Genesys Cloud: If you want the AI layer bundled into your CCaaS renewal instead of as a separate seat-based contract
- CrestavsGong
Gong: If your priority is post-call revenue coaching for a sales team rather than live guidance for a contact centre
Pricing
What Cresta costs
Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.
Cresta
On request
- AI Agent
- Agent Assist
- Conversation Intelligence
- Quality Management
- CCaaS platform integration
- SOC 2, HIPAA and GDPR compliance
Capabilities
Features
Real-time agent assist
Suggests wording, objection handling and next-best-action to agents during live calls
Autonomous AI Agent
Resolves voice and digital conversations end to end without a human agent
Conversation intelligence
Analyses every conversation rather than a sampled subset to surface behaviour patterns
Automated quality management
Scores calls against a rubric automatically instead of manual QA sampling
Behavioural coaching
Identifies which agent behaviours correlate with won outcomes and coaches to them
Knowledge surfacing
Pulls relevant knowledge base answers into the agent view mid-conversation
Multilingual deployment
Runs guidance and automation across multiple languages
Supervisor dashboards
Gives team leads live visibility of in-progress conversations and intervention points
Compliance monitoring
Flags required disclosures and prohibited language in real time
Platform-agnostic integration
Connects to fifteen or more CCaaS and CRM platforms rather than replacing them
Answered, with sources
Questions people ask
Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
Does Cresta replace my contact centre platform?
No. It is designed to sit on top of NICE, Genesys, Five9, Amazon Connect and similar platforms, which is why it is chosen where a full CCaaS migration is not feasible.
What does it cost?
Cresta does not publish pricing. Contracts are seat-based and annual, and at the enterprise scale it sells into they are typically six figures per year.
Is it viable for a contact centre under 100 seats?
Rarely. The commercial model, implementation effort and required outcome measurement all assume several hundred seats or more.
Who owns Cresta?
It is an independent venture-backed company, having raised roughly 282 million USD in total including a 125 million USD Series D in November 2024 co-led by World Innovation Lab and the Qatar Investment Authority.
Keep looking
Where to go from Cresta
- Cresta alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- Cresta pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- Cresta badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All Customer Support softwareThe full category
- Best Customer Support softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Cresta, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.
More on Cresta
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