Decagon vs Sierra

Decagon

One of the two or three vendors a large consumer brand should shortlist for a support agent that must handle refunds, bookings and account actions rather than deflect FAQs, and the plain-language procedures plus built-in QA are what make it operable by a support team instead of engineers. It is an enterprise purchase with a sales cycle and a price that depends on your volume, so a team under a few hundred thousand conversations a year is not the customer.

Pros

• +Agent logic written as natural-language operating procedures rather than flow builders
• +Experiments, simulation testing and always-on QA ship with the agent
• +Chat, email and voice from one vendor with pre-built connectors
• +Reference customers at the scale of Deutsche Telekom, American Airlines and Square

Cons

• −No public pricing or trial; everything goes through a demo and an enterprise contract
• −Built for high-volume brands, so smaller teams are unlikely to clear the commercial threshold
• −Rapid growth and new products such as Duet mean the feature set is moving quickly
• −Governing law and a registered office are not stated in the public legal pages, only a San Francisco mailing address

Sierra

Sierra is the enterprise end of the support-agent market: the pitch is not a chatbot but an agent that can actually change an order or a policy inside your systems, priced on what it resolves. The customer list and the certification wall are real signals that large regulated companies have put it in front of their users. It is a procurement, not a purchase - no public price, no trial, and an integration project before anything goes live - so a company without a sizeable support operation has nothing to buy here.

Pros

• +Agents take actions in order, billing and account systems, not just answer questions
• +One agent runs across chat, SMS, WhatsApp, email, voice and ChatGPT
• +Outcome-based pricing aligns the bill with resolutions
• +Ghostwriter drafts agents from existing SOPs and transcripts, and the founders' track record is unusually strong

Cons

• −No public pricing, trial or self-serve path
• −Outcome pricing needs a contract definition of 'resolved' that favours neither side - read it closely
• −Integration with core systems is a project with real lead time
• −Vendor lock-in is high once customer memory and policies live in its context engine

Which has a public API, Decagon or Sierra?

Both ship a public API, so either can be built on; the fact table above shows the platforms each one runs on.