How much does Cresta cost?

Cresta does not publish a price. We checked on 5 October 2026 and cresta.com/pricing returns HTTP 404, so there is no pricing page to read. The Agent Assist product page carries no price, no tier names and no per-seat number, and its call to action is Book a demo. The only public figures attached to Cresta are AWS Marketplace listings of $150,000 for a twelve-month Agent Assist for Voice contract up to 100,000 calls and $150,000 for Agent Assist for Chat up to 125,000 chats. Treat those as an order of magnitude for an enterprise contract rather than as a quote, because they are marketplace listings and not Cresta's own price list. The practical answer is that Cresta is a quoted enterprise purchase priced against interaction volume, agent count and implementation scope, and you will not learn the number without a sales conversation.

What are the real alternatives to Cresta?

It depends which half of Cresta you want. If you want a contact center AI platform, meaning real-time agent assist plus quality management, analytics and telephony integration at floor scale, the direct substitutes are Balto, Observe.AI, Level AI, Abstrakt and the agent assist layers inside NICE, Genesys and Dialpad. All of these are quoted enterprise purchases and none of the ones we opened publishes a per-seat price. If what you actually want is a line on one rep's screen while a buyer is still talking, without a telephony integration or an implementation project, the contact center category is the wrong shelf entirely. That is a much smaller field: Zoom Revenue Accelerator inside Zoom calls, and browser-side tools such as Objeq for calls that play in a Chrome tab. The question that sorts the shelf is not which features overlap, it is whether a vendor will sell you one seat.

Does Balto publish pricing?

No. We read balto.ai on 5 October 2026 and found no price, no per-seat number and no published tier. The calls to action are Get a Demo and a phone number for Togo, its AI voice agent. Balto does publish an unusually specific integration list, which is more useful than a price for working out whether it fits: NICE, Genesys, RingCentral, 8x8, Five9, Convoso, CallTools, ReadyMode, Salesforce, Twilio, Zoom Phone, Microsoft Exchange and Gmail. Read that list as the real product statement. Balto attaches to a telephony platform, so if your reps are not on one of those, the integration question comes before the price question.

Which real-time agent assist vendor publishes a price?

Of the seven vendor sites we opened on 5 October 2026, one published a per-seat price: Zoom. Zoom's newsroom announcement of 22 July 2026 states that Zoom Revenue Accelerator Essentials is $66 per user per month billed annually and Premium is $99.99 per user per month billed annually, both on top of a paid Zoom plan. Cresta, Balto, Observe.AI, Level AI and Abstrakt published nothing. Dialpad publishes prices for its phone products but we could not find a per-seat contact center figure on the Dialpad pages we were able to open, and its AI Contact Center page routes to Talk to sales. Objeq, whose site this is, publishes $99 per seat per month for Starter and $149 for Pro. So the honest count is two published prices out of eight products, and one of those two is ours, which is a fact about the category and not a boast.

Why does every Cresta alternatives list recommend a different tool?

Because the lists are written by the alternatives. On 5 October 2026 we looked at the first page of results for Cresta alternatives and found nine results. Eight were published by a company selling a competing product: Level AI, eesel AI, Maven AGI, Balto, Quiq, Capacity, AmplifAI and CallSphere. The ninth was published by Cresta. Not one was independent. The top result is Level AI's Top 10 Cresta Alternatives, which ranks Level AI first, states that pricing is a recurring concern with Cresta, says several alternatives offer more transparent and flexible pricing, and then publishes no price for any of its ten tools including its own. This page is the tenth such page and it is written by Objeq, so apply the same discount to it. The defence we can offer is a stated method: we name every page we opened, we date it, we quote the vendor instead of paraphrasing, and we say plainly where Objeq is the wrong answer.

Is Cresta or Objeq better for a small sales team?

For a small sales team the comparison does not really happen, because Cresta has no self-serve path and no published entry point. Cresta is a contact center platform that plugs into your telephony, reads your knowledge base and arrives with an implementation phase, and it is sold to floors rather than to teams of five. If you run a 200-agent floor on a native softphone, Cresta is a serious product and this page is not an argument against it. Objeq is a Chrome extension side panel at $99 to $149 per seat per month, one seat, no minimum and no platform fee, and it only works if the call plays in a browser tab. The split is not which is better. It is whether your audio lives in a contact center stack or in a Chrome tab, and whether anyone will sell you a single seat.

What does Cresta actually do during a live call?

It coaches the agent while the customer is still talking, and we are not going to build a page on the pretence that it is only a recorder. Cresta's Agent Assist product page, read 5 October 2026, says it delivers context-aware guidance, knowledge, and automation throughout every conversation, provides real-time hints, reminders, and workflows tailored to each conversation, and that its knowledge layer combines what's being said with on-screen context to deliver exact, source-backed answers instantly. The important word in that last quote is source-backed. There is a knowledge base behind Cresta, meaning your help center, your policies and your approved wording, and the system spots the moment and pulls the right passage forward. That is retrieval, and it is the correct design for a support queue where the right answer usually already exists in writing. It is a weaker fit for a sales objection that is personal, badly phrased and answered in no document you own.

Compare / Cresta alternatives

Cresta alternatives, and the one column every list of them leaves blank

Objeq whispers the next line on your live sales calls. Try it on your toughest objection →

We opened seven vendor sites on 5 October 2026 and six of them publish no price at all. cresta.com/pricing returns HTTP 404, so Cresta has no pricing page to read. Balto, Observe.AI, Level AI and Abstrakt publish nothing either, and all five calls to action are some wording of "book a demo". The one vendor in this category that prints a number is Zoom, at $66 and $99.99 per user per month. And the list currently ranking first for this search is written by Level AI, ranks Level AI first, complains that Cresta's pricing is opaque, and then publishes no price for any of its ten tools, including its own. This page is the tenth vendor-written list on this topic, so discount it accordingly. What we can offer instead is a stated method: every page named, every page dated, every claim quoted rather than paraphrased.

First, the thing that makes all these lists unreliable, including this one

On 5 October 2026 we looked at the first page of results for "Cresta alternatives". Nine results. Eight were published by a company selling a competing product: Level AI, eesel AI, Maven AGI, Balto, Quiq, Capacity, AmplifAI and CallSphere. The ninth was published by Cresta. Zero independent sources on the whole page.

The top one is worth reading closely, because it is the pattern in miniature. Level AI's "Top 10 Cresta Alternatives" ranks ten tools. Level AI is number one. The article says pricing is a recurring concern with Cresta and that several alternatives offer more transparent and flexible pricing. It then publishes no price for any of the ten, including Level AI's own. We checked: there is no published price on thelevel.ai either, and its call to action is "Get a demo".

So treat this page the same way. It is written by Objeq, Objeq sells a competing product, and Objeq appears in the table below. The only defence we can offer is that you can check every line of it in about fifteen minutes, because we name the exact page and the exact date for each one, and we quote the vendor rather than summarising it.

What we opened, and one thing we threw out

Seven vendor websites, read 5 October 2026, vendor pages only. No review sites, no resellers, no competitor blogs, no AI summaries: cresta.com/product/agent-assist and cresta.com/pricing, balto.ai, observe.ai, thelevel.ai, abstrakt.ai, dialpad.com/ai-contact-center, plus Zoom's newsroom and support pages that we read for a separate page on Zoom Revenue Accelerator.

One set of numbers we deliberately dropped. A search summary quoted Dialpad Support at $80, $115 and $150 per user per month. We could not find those figures on any Dialpad page we were able to open, so they are not in our table. Dialpad's own AI Contact Center page points at a pricing URL and leads with "Talk to sales", and the help-center feature comparison returned HTTP 403 to us. If you are evaluating Dialpad, get those tiers in writing from Dialpad, because a number that only exists in a summary of a vendor's page is not a published price.

Everything here is a documentation read rather than a lab test. We have not bought Cresta, Balto, Observe.AI, Level AI or Abstrakt, and we make no claim about how good any of their guidance is, how fast it arrives or whether agents like it. What a vendor publishes about its own product is the narrow thing this page measures.

Cresta really does coach during the call

The lazy version of this page would call Cresta a recorder. It is not one, and here is its own account of the live moment.

"Real-time hints, reminders, and workflows tailored to each conversation."

"Combines what's being said with on-screen context to deliver exact, source-backed answers instantly."

Source: Cresta, Agent Assist product page, read by us 5 October 2026. The same page describes "context-aware guidance, knowledge, and automation throughout every conversation" and "Live Notes that generate throughout each conversation".

A small note on dating, because it is the reason we re-read pages instead of trusting our own archive. When we read this same page on 14 September 2026 it said Agent Assist "proactively identifies knowledge moments and surfaces instant, source-backed answers based on live conversation and on-screen context". The wording changed inside three weeks. The substance did not, but any comparison page quoting this vendor without a date on the quote is telling you about a page that may no longer exist.

The real split is retrieval versus composition. Cresta surfaces a source-backed answer, which means there is a knowledge base behind it. That is the right design for a support queue, where the correct answer usually already exists in writing and the risk is an agent inventing one. It is a weaker fit for a sales objection, which is often personal, badly phrased, and answered by no passage in any document you own.

The table, and the column that matters

Tool	Published per-seat price	Call to action	Sells one seat?	What it says it does live
Cresta	None. `cresta.com/pricing` is a 404	Book a demo	No	"Real-time hints, reminders, and workflows tailored to each conversation"
Balto	None published	Get a Demo	No	"Real-time answers and guidance on every call"
Observe.AI	None published	Request demo	No	"Real-time assist for live agents"
Level AI	None published	Get a demo	No	"Realtime AI or manager help"
Abstrakt	None published	Request Demo	No	Recommended responses "instantly triggered (in 0.2 seconds)"
Dialpad	Not on the pages we could open	Talk to sales	Phone product yes, contact center unclear	"AI Live Coach cards are pop-ups that surface relevant help articles and responses based on what the customer is saying in real-time"
Zoom Revenue Accelerator	$66 Essentials, $99.99 Premium, per user per month billed annually	Buy or contact sales	Yes, on top of a paid Zoom plan	Sales Assist, "objection guidance... in real time"
Objeq	$99 Starter, $149 Pro, per seat per month	Start free, 3-day trial	Yes, one seat, no minimum	A composed treatment for the objection just spoken, under two seconds

Two published prices out of eight products, and one of the two is ours. We would rather say that plainly than dress it up, because the useful finding is about the category and not about us: real-time agent assist is sold almost entirely by quote, and a buyer cannot build a cost comparison from public information. That is not a scandal, it is how enterprise contact center software has always been sold. It does mean that any list claiming one of these tools is "more affordable" than Cresta is guessing, including the list that currently ranks first for this search.

The second column worth reading is the last one. Every vendor here coaches during the call. "Cresta only works after the call" is false and we will not sell against it. The differences are what the guidance is made of, retrieval from your knowledge base versus a line composed for the sentence just spoken, and where the audio has to live for the tool to hear it.

How to actually choose, in one question

Forget the feature grids. Ask where your audio lives.

If your audio lives in a contact center stack, meaning agents on a queue in a native softphone on NICE, Genesys, Five9, RingCentral, 8x8, Convoso or similar, measured on handle time and QA scores, then you want this category and you should shortlist Cresta, Balto and Observe.AI. Balto publishes the most specific integration list of the three, which is the fastest way to disqualify it or keep it. Expect a demo, a quote, a knowledge base integration and an implementation phase from all of them, and budget for the implementation as a real line rather than a footnote. We compared two of these head to head in Balto vs Cresta and Cresta vs Observe.AI, neither of which is a page about Objeq.

If your audio lives in a browser tab, meaning four to twenty reps on Meet, Zoom or Teams joined from the browser, or a browser dialer, then the contact center category is the wrong shelf and the price is not the reason. None of these vendors will sell you five seats. There is no self-serve path, no published entry point and no trial, and a quote scoped to a 200-agent floor does not shrink to fit a team of six. The realistic options there are Zoom Revenue Accelerator if your calls are inside Zoom, or a browser-side tool such as Objeq.

And if you cannot record calls to a vendor cloud, ask every name on your shortlist one narrow question: does the live guidance require the call to be recorded and stored, or does it work on audio that is processed and discarded? Zoom documents cloud recording as a hard prerequisite for its live layer. The contact center vendors do not state it either way on the pages we opened, which is itself worth a written answer before you sign.

Where Objeq fits, and three places it does not

Objeq is a Chrome extension with a side panel. It hears the customer through the Chrome tab the call plays in, works out the fear sitting behind the sentence the buyer just said, and writes a treatment for that sentence. No knowledge base to configure, no bot joining the meeting, audio processed in memory and never stored. $99 per seat per month for Starter, $149 for Pro, published, one seat, no minimum, no platform fee, with a 3-day trial. It also runs in Hebrew end to end, transcription and detection and the whisper itself, which none of the tools on this page do.

Where it is the wrong answer, plainly. If you need quality management, compliance scoring and workforce reporting across a floor, Objeq does none of that and Cresta, Observe.AI and Level AI do all of it. Buy the platform. If your agents work in a native softphone rather than a browser tab, Objeq hears nothing, and no amount of price advantage fixes that. And if the right answer to your customers' questions already exists in your help center, retrieval is a better machine than composition, which is exactly Cresta's argument and it is a good one.

Where it does fit: a small sales team, calls in Chrome, no appetite for an annual contract or an implementation, and a problem that keeps repeating, which is a rep going quiet on an objection nobody wrote a card for. Give it your hardest objection before you believe any of this.

Questions people ask next

Is Cresta worth it? That depends on a number neither of us has. Cresta publishes no price, so "worth it" cannot be answered from public information, and anyone answering it for you in a blog post is working from the same nothing we are. What we can say is that Cresta's own description of its live layer is accurate and specific, which is more than many vendors in this category manage, and that the AWS Marketplace listings attached to it are six-figure annual contracts. Price it against a floor's worth of handle time, not against a per-seat tool.

Is there a free Cresta alternative? Not in real-time agent assist, as far as we can tell. Every vendor on this page is either quoted enterprise software or a paid per-seat tool. The nearest thing to a free entry point is a trial: Objeq runs a 3-day trial, and Zoom Revenue Accelerator is an add-on to a Zoom plan you may already pay for. See free sales coaching software for what the free end of this market actually contains, which is mostly recording and not guidance.

Cresta vs Balto, which one? Both coach live, both are contact center platforms, neither publishes a price, so the decision is made on your telephony stack and your knowledge base rather than on a feature list. Balto publishes the more specific integration list. We wrote it up in Balto vs Cresta.

What about Gong, Chorus or Clari Copilot? Different purchase. Those are conversation intelligence: recording, analytics, deal boards, scorecards and CRM write-back, with the value arriving after the call. If a list puts them next to Cresta without saying that, it is comparing a microscope to a hearing aid. See Gong alternatives and real-time call coaching, where we sort eleven tools by when the help arrives.

I searched for a service rep coaching tool and landed here. Then you probably want the contact center shelf, and you want this page instead, which is written for agents on a queue rather than for sellers.