Comparing PolyAI and Zoom Contact Center? Both are Contact Center & CCaaS and Voice & Phone AI tools in the directory, which is why buyers put them on the same shortlist. Below is a side-by-side look at how they price, what they integrate with, and when each is the better fit, so you can pick on the facts rather than either vendor's own sales page.
| Attribute | PolyAI | Zoom Contact Center |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Per resolution · Custom (per-minute) | Paid · $69/agent/mo |
| Founded | 2017 | 2011 |
| Categories | Contact Center & CCaaS Enterprise Voice & Phone AI | Contact Center & CCaaS Voice & Phone AI |
| Integrations | Salesforce HubSpot Zendesk Microsoft Dynamics OpenTable Zapier | Salesforce Zendesk ServiceNow Microsoft Dynamics 365 HubSpot Zoom Workplace Zoom Phone |
PolyAI answers the phone. While most of this directory started with chat and added voice later, PolyAI has been voice-first since three Cambridge machine-learning PhDs, Nikola Mrkšić, Pei-Hao Su, and Tsung-Hsien Wen, founded it in London in 2017 out of the university's Machine Intelligence Lab. Its agents are known for sounding genuinely human and for surviving the things that break lesser systems: interruptions, accents, background noise, and callers who change their mind mid-sentence. Restaurants, hotels, banks, and utilities use it to answer every call instantly, day and night, with customers like PG&E, UniCredit, Golden Nugget, and Fogo de Chao on the roster.
The platform matured into what the company calls an agentic dialog platform: Agent Studio for building and managing agents without code, a developer kit for deeper work, and Raven, a proprietary conversation model trained on more than a billion enterprise conversations. Compliance boxes (SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI) are ticked, which matters because taking payments and health information over the phone is exactly where voice AI earns its keep.
Investors have noticed the wedge. In December 2025 PolyAI raised an $86 million Series D at a valuation around $750 million, with NVIDIA's venture arm participating, bringing total funding past $200 million. Commercially it bills on usage, priced per minute of conversation, with rates scoped to your call volume rather than published on the site.
Choose PolyAI when the phone is your problem. If most of your support pain is hold music, missed calls, and staffing the night shift, a voice-native specialist will beat a chat-first platform's bolted-on telephony, and PolyAI is one of the most proven voice specialists in the market.
Read the full PolyAI listing → · See PolyAI alternatives →
Zoom Contact Center is Zoom's omnichannel cloud contact center, built into the same client agents already use for meetings and team chat. It routes voice, video, web chat, SMS, email, and social conversations from a drag and drop flow builder, and layers AI throughout: Zoom Virtual Agent handles self service on chat and voice channels, AI Expert Assist surfaces knowledge and next steps for live agents, and workforce engagement tools cover forecasting, scheduling, and quality management.
Zoom was founded in 2011 by former Cisco engineer Eric Yuan and entered this market in February 2022, when Zoom Contact Center went live in the US and Canada. Three months later it acquired conversational AI startup Solvvy, whose technology became Zoom Virtual Agent in early 2023. The bet has paid off: Zoom reported crossing 100 million dollars in annual contact center revenue in 2026, and at Enterprise Connect 2026 it unveiled Virtual Agent 3.0, a prompt driven Agent Architect, and an Agent Performance Suite for testing AI agents before deployment. Named customers include Vensure, AVI-SPL, Topaz Services, and Oxfordshire County Council.
Pricing is refreshingly public by contact center standards. Zoom sells three tiers, Essentials, Premium, and Elite, with 2026 pricing reported at 69, 99, and 149 dollars per agent per month respectively. AI Companion summaries come with every tier, but AI Expert Assist requires Elite, and Zoom Virtual Agent is a separately quoted add on. Telephony minutes and toll free numbers are metered on top, so budget beyond the sticker price.
Choose Zoom Contact Center if your company already runs on Zoom and wants contact center, phone, and meetings under one roof, or if video support matters, since few rivals handle escalation from chat to video as smoothly. It suits mid market teams modernizing from legacy on premises systems. Skip it if you need a deep standalone helpdesk with ticketing built in, or the decades of niche routing features that Genesys and NICE veterans expect.
Read the full Zoom Contact Center listing → · See Zoom Contact Center alternatives →
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