The main Cognigy alternatives after the NICE acquisition are Kore.ai, Lorikeet, PolyAI, Parloa, Sierra, Decagon and Amazon Connect's AI agents. Voice-first contact centres usually shortlist PolyAI, Parloa and Kore.ai; teams that want an agent to resolve complex chat, email and phone cases inside their existing helpdesk and telephony look at Lorikeet, Sierra and Decagon; AWS shops can stay inside Amazon Connect.

NICE closed its purchase of Cognigy on 8 September 2025, and Cognigy is now sold as NiCE Cognigy, both inside the CXone Mpower platform and on its own. Nothing about the deal forces a move. This guide is for teams reviewing a renewal, or running a contact centre that is not on NICE, who want to compare the options with checkable facts.

Key takeaways

• Cognigy still sells standalone. NICE says Cognigy is available as part of CXone Mpower and as a standalone offering. Ask for that commitment, and the roadmap for your contact-centre platform, in writing.

• Decide what you are replacing. A voice IVR replacement, a digital AI agent and a full contact-centre platform are three different purchases. Most alternatives here plug into the telephony you already run.

• Only three of the seven publish rates. Lorikeet publishes plan and per-resolution prices, Amazon Connect publishes per-minute and per-message usage prices, and PolyAI publishes a per-minute price for model-only API access. The rest quote.

• Analysts expect more automation and more failures. Gartner predicts agentic AI will resolve 80% of common service issues by 2029, and also that over 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027. Pilot on your own tickets before you commit.

How we chose and checked these tools

We included platforms that sell AI agents for customer service (not only agent assist), cover voice or chat at enterprise scale, and are evaluated by the same buyers who evaluate Cognigy. We compared them on what the agent can do on its own, voice and channel coverage, how they connect to an existing contact centre, published pricing, and trial access. The order is not a ranking; each entry says who it fits.

Every vendor fact was checked on the vendor's own public pages on 23 October 2026, and the acquisition facts come from NICE's announcement, NICE's closing release and Cognigy's own newsroom. Where a vendor does not publish something, the table says "Not published". Lorikeet publishes this guide and is one of the tools listed. We have tried to describe every product, including our own, using only what each vendor publishes, and we link to the source for each claim.

Why teams look for Cognigy alternatives after the NICE acquisition

The deal is straightforward on paper. On 28 July 2025 NICE agreed to buy Cognigy in a transaction that valued it at approximately $955 million, including a holdback of about $50 million, and said it expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2025. It closed earlier: NICE announced completion on 8 September 2025 after receiving all required regulatory approvals. Cognigy co-founder Philipp Heltewig became General Manager of NiCE Cognigy and NICE's Chief AI Officer.

NICE describes Cognigy.AI as agents available in over 100 languages on any channel, trusted by more than 1,000 brands including Mercedes-Benz, Nestlé and Lufthansa Group. Cognigy's site still lists contact-centre integrations for Avaya, AWS, Genesys, NiCE, Microsoft and 8x8, so a non-NICE contact centre is not cut off today.

Buyers still reopen the decision for practical reasons: a renewal falls due, the contact centre runs on Genesys or Amazon Connect rather than CXone, procurement wants pricing tied to outcomes rather than licences, or the team wants an agent that completes account changes and refunds end to end. None of those are verdicts on Cognigy's product. They are reasons to compare.

Cognigy alternatives compared

1. Kore.ai: large enterprises that want one platform for service and employee agents

Kore.ai is the closest like-for-like alternative to Cognigy: an enterprise platform for building AI agents across voice and digital channels, plus agent assist, quality management and employee-facing agents. Its homepage says its agents "resolve customer cases from start to finish, across every channel and system", and that it takes customers "from proof to production in weeks". It also says Kore.ai was named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Conversational AI Platforms.

For regulated teams, the useful detail is on its AI for Service page: compliance rules are "enforced at the engine level, outside the LLM", every agent action is traced, and AI quality management reviews 100% of calls. Kore.ai notes that fewer than 8% of interactions are ever reviewed, because of cost and time.

Trade-offs: it is a broad platform with its own agent language (ABL) and optimisation engine, so plan for a build team. We found no public price list; pricing is by quote.

2. Lorikeet: regulated teams that need complex cases resolved end to end

Lorikeet is an AI customer support platform for complex and regulated businesses. One agent works across chat, email, voice, SMS and WhatsApp, with voice live in the US, UK and Australia, and it acts in your systems through APIs, webhooks and MCP servers. Its how it works page explains that sensitive steps such as payments and identity checks run as deterministic code the agent can invoke but never alter, and that you test on replays of your own historical tickets before going live.

It does not replace your contact centre. Voice connects to Amazon Connect, Twilio, Vonage, Five9, AirCall and Dialpad on the Start and Scale plans, and the Genesys Cloud integration uses Genesys Audio Connector so you add AI voice "without replacing your telephony stack". UK car finance lender Carmoola went from about 30% of inbound resolved by its earlier automation to 60% end to end across WhatsApp, chat and email (Carmoola story).

Pricing: Start is $2,100 a month and Scale $5,100 a month, paid annually, plus $0.99 or $0.90 per resolved chat, email or SMS and $1.50 or $1.20 per voice resolution (3 minute average). Escalations are not charged, and there is a 30-day free trial. Time to first live ticket is "as little as hours, average under 29 days" (pricing).

Limits: Lorikeet does not hold PCI DSS, so card capture should stay in your own payment flow, and Start and Scale use US data residency (custom regions are on Signature).

3. PolyAI: voice-first enterprises replacing phone menus

PolyAI builds what it calls dialog agents for enterprise phone conversations, "resolving them without escalation". Its homepage says agents are built in Dialog Studio and run on PolyAI's own models, including Dialog-RSN-1, which reasons directly over raw call audio. It lists deployment regions in the US, UK, EU and APAC with no cross-region transfer, 99.994% uptime and more than 100 million calls a year. Its integrations page lists 130+ connectors across telephony, CRM and vertical systems.

Pricing: the pricing page says ongoing use of the voice agent is priced per minute, including maintenance and 24/7 support, without publishing the platform rate. Model-only API access is listed at 2 cents per connected minute, billed per second, with $100 of free credit for new sign-ups.

Trade-offs: PolyAI is strongest on the phone. If most of your volume is email or messaging, check how much of the platform you would use.

4. Parloa: enterprise voice automation with consumption pricing

Parloa sells AI agents for enterprise customer service, with a strong base in European insurance: its homepage quotes Münchener Verein and Swiss Life, and says Parloa is the only customer-facing agentic AI platform to earn SAP's endorsed app premium certification. It positions itself as one platform across the agent lifecycle, so teams close to customers can build and improve agents.

Its pricing page is unusually clear about the model, if not the numbers: consumption-based, per minute for voice and per interaction for chat, with rates set by use-case complexity and a volume package you can apply across use cases. Outcome-based pricing "is supported when it makes sense".

Trade-offs: no published rates or trial, and the platform is built for enterprise contact centres rather than small teams.

5. Sierra: large consumer brands wanting a partner-built agent

Sierra builds AI agents for large brands and says 40% of the Fortune 50 partner with it. Its product page covers voice, chat, email and WhatsApp in 59 languages, connecting to systems of record to finish tasks such as processing an insurance claim or originating a mortgage. On the phone, its voice page says it replaces rigid IVR menus and collects card and ACH payments over DTMF through Level 1 PCI compliant infrastructure.

Its trust page lists SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, PCI, FedRAMP High, ISO 27001 and ISO 42001 among its compliance standards. That breadth matters if card payments on calls are in scope.

Pricing: outcome-based, with rates not published. Trade-offs: Sierra works through its own agent development team, so you buy a partnership rather than a self-serve tool.

6. Decagon: teams that want agent logic in plain language

Decagon's homepage centres on Agent Operating Procedures (AOPs), which define agent workflows in natural language, plus testing, observability and an analytics suite. It unifies chat, voice and email in one intelligence layer. Its voice page says voice runs on Chord, Decagon's own speech model, supports 70+ languages with automatic switching, places outbound calls and transfers to human agents with a summary.

Trade-offs: no public pricing or trial; buying is through sales. Teams that want a published rate card to compare against Cognigy's quote will need to request one.

7. Amazon Connect: teams already building on AWS

If your contact centre runs on AWS, Amazon Connect's own AI agents are the shortest path. AWS says they "can actually take action, handling everything from returns to account updates", can coordinate with agents you have built elsewhere through the open Agent-to-Agent (A2A) standard, and that the capability formerly called Amazon Q in Connect is now one of its AI agents.

Pricing: the pricing page lists usage-based billing with no seat licences or upfront commitment: $0.038 per voice minute plus standard telephony, and $0.010 per chat message, varying by region.

Trade-offs: you assemble more of the solution yourself, and moving to Connect is a contact-centre migration, not only an AI swap.

What still needs a human

No platform on this list removes the need for people. Gartner predicts that by 2027, 50% of organisations that expected to significantly reduce their customer service workforce will abandon those plans, and found 95% of service leaders plan to retain human agents (Gartner). Keep people on complaints, hardship and vulnerability, disputes the agent cannot settle, and anything needing judgement. In consumer finance the CFPB warns that chatbots can trap customers in "doom loops" without an offramp to a human, and that firms deploying them risk violating legal obligations (CFPB). Design the handoff first.

How to choose between Cognigy alternatives

• Start from your contact centre. On CXone, NiCE Cognigy is the native option. On Genesys, Amazon Connect, Five9 or Twilio, check each vendor's connector for that platform specifically.

• Ask what the agent completes. Request three of your hardest tickets end to end: an identity check, an account change and a refund or dispute.

• Get prices in the same unit. Convert licences, minutes and outcomes into cost per resolved contact at your volume.

• Test before you sign. Gartner expects over 40% of agentic AI projects to be canceled by the end of 2027 because of cost, unclear value or weak risk controls (Gartner). A trial or paid pilot on real tickets is the cheapest insurance.

• Map controls to a framework. The NIST AI Risk Management Framework, released in January 2023 for voluntary use, gives risk and compliance teams a shared vocabulary for testing and monitoring.

Gartner's forecast that agentic AI will resolve 80% of common service issues without human intervention by 2029, with a 30% cut in operational costs (Gartner), is the prize. Getting there depends on choosing a platform you can test now. If you want to try Lorikeet on your own tickets, you can start a 30-day free trial. For the migration itself, see our guide to switching AI support vendors, and for phone-menu replacement, replacing an IVR with natural-language triage. Related comparisons: LivePerson alternatives and voice AI for Talkdesk and Amazon Connect.