Compare / Cresta vs Gong

"We're comparing Cresta and Gong." You are comparing two different purchases. One helps a human mid-call and says so; the other says "real-time" zero times across 1.67MB of its own HTML.

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The clock, measured rather than asserted

We sell a competing product, so we try to break our own angle before we write one of these. The angle we usually have is the clock: most tools in this category help after the call and get listed as if they help during it. Against Cresta that angle fails, and we say so here rather than in a footnote. Against Gong it does not fail, but not because Gong is hiding anything. Gong simply sells a different moment and says so on every page.

Here is the count, because an absence is only worth anything if somebody counted it. Three Gong pages, read today, scripts and styles stripped first so that no framework placeholder could inflate a number:

Read that as a compliment to Gong rather than a criticism. Six of the eight vendors we have measured this autumn glue the words "real time" onto a product that works after the call. Gong does not. Every verb on its coaching page is retrospective and every one of them is honest. The failure mode here is not Gong overclaiming. It is a buyer reading a third-party round-up that files Gong under "real-time sales coaching" and then wondering in month three why nothing appears on screen during a call.

Where your calls run, which disqualifies one of them in about four seconds

This section moved above the feature table because it ends more evaluations than any feature does.

We opened cresta.com/integrations and counted mentions in the raw file with scripts included, so that nothing loaded dynamically could hide from the count.

We expected to be wrong about this and said so in advance, because the same check surprised us a week ago. When we ran it on Balto, a vendor in the same contact-centre bracket, we expected zero web-conferencing platforms and Balto in fact lists Zoom Meetings, Zoom Phone and Zoom Contact Center. So we wrote the falsification row first this time and went looking for a single conferencing platform on Cresta's page. There is not one. Cresta integrates at the telephony layer, full stop. If your calls happen in a browser tab, Cresta is not wired to them and no amount of budget changes that.

Gong is the mirror image on this one question, and we will be careful about how far the evidence goes. On gong.io/platform the six featured integrations are Microsoft Teams, Salesforce, Zoom, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Slack and Okta, against a claim of "300+ integrations in the Gong Collective". Google Meet appears zero times in that page's 913,989 bytes. But six featured names out of a claimed three hundred is a carousel, not a directory, and the directory lives at collective.gong.io, which returned HTTP 403 to our request. So the only honest sentence is the narrow one: Google Meet is not among the integrations Gong chooses to feature, and we did not measure the directory. Ask Gong in writing. Absence from a marketing carousel is not absence from a product.

Neither one prints a price, and they fail differently

If you are building a business case, the shape of the failure changes what you ask for.

A 404 plus a missing sitemap entry are two different facts and together they settle it. A 404 on its own can be a moved page or a bad guess at a URL. A sitemap is the company telling search engines the complete list of pages it wants indexed. When 1,757 declared URLs contain no pricing page, the pricing page does not exist. Nobody is hiding it and there is no clever URL to find.

Gong's failure is the more useful one, because it tells you the pricing model even while withholding the number. Quoted in full, the whole of what that page says about money:

The line to pin down is the platform fee. Per-user licensing plus a platform fee based on headcount is two numbers, and a per-seat comparison against anything else will quietly drop the second one. Ask for both, ask whether the platform fee scales by supported users or licensed users, and ask what it is in year two. For Cresta there is no equivalent shortcut: ask for the all-in annual figure including implementation, minimum seats and contract length, in writing, before you compare it to anything.

For context, this is the category norm rather than an outlier. Of 21 vendor pricing URLs we have requested by hand since late August 2026, seven publish a dollar figure, seven return 200 with no figure at all, and six return 404. Cresta sits in the 404 group with Balto and Observe.AI, which means all three vendors a buyer would shortlist for live agent guidance in a contact centre are unpriceable from the public web. Gong sits in the middle group.

What the live help is made of, which is the Cresta question Gong never has to answer

Once a product does act during the call, the next question is where the words come from, and there are only two answers in this market.

Cresta's live help is authored in advance and then matched. Its own feature list is "real-time hints, reminders, and workflows tailored to each conversation", with behavioural guidance, process checklists and a Knowledge Agent grounded in your own documents. The product demo embedded on its agent assist page spells the mechanism out: a checklist headed "Verify identity", "Explain the waiver", "Offer two flight options", with a knowledge panel citing two source documents by name and a behavioural prompt reading "Show empathy, offer options". Somebody wrote the waiver policy, the checklist and the approved phrasing first.

That is a genuine strength and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Authored material gives you approved-wording control, a required-disclosure guarantee and an audit trail, and in regulated work those three are the entire reason the software gets bought. It also has one structural limit, which is the same for every vendor in this shape: a sentence that matches no entry leaves the screen empty. Cresta brings to nine the vendors we have documented selling the author-in-advance shape, after Salesloft, Outreach, Avoma, Clari Copilot, Dialpad, Balto, Observe.AI and Attention.

Gong never faces this question, because nothing of Gong's is on screen while the buyer is talking. Its coaching material is built from calls that already finished, which is why its own word for the output is "data" rather than "guidance". Different machine, different moment, and no comparison row can be drawn between them.

One observation offered as evidence of pace rather than as a jab, the same kind we have logged for other vendors. Cresta's live integrations page still carries its FAQ placeholder: "Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the typesetting." We read it in the raw bytes today. It tells you something a feature grid cannot, which is that this site is being rebuilt at speed. Ask how old the current Agent Assist packaging is and ask for a reference customer running that version.

The three-way table, including every row we lose

Seven of those thirteen rows go against us and they are staying in. Objeq has no QA scoring, no compliance library, no approved-wording control, no notes, no customer-side automation, no forecasting, and nothing at all for a softphone. If any one of those is why you are shopping, both products on this page beat ours and the comparison is over. We would rather you learn that here in ninety seconds than on a sales call in three weeks.

How to choose, in one question

Does a human need help while a stranger is still talking, or does a manager need to know what happened?

A human mid-call, on a contact-centre floor: Cresta is in the right market. Inbound agents on Genesys, Five9, NICE or Amazon Connect, a quality programme you already run, and a repeating loss where an agent freezes or skips a disclosure. The live prompt is the thing Cresta leads with and its published coaching claim is a 23% improvement in agent performance. Budget for a demo-only pricing conversation.

A manager who needs to know what happened, in a B2B sales organisation: Gong is in the right market and nothing here substitutes for it. Forecasting, pipeline risk, deal boards, call review, and coaching built from calls that already happened. Just do not expect anything on screen during the call, because Gong has never offered one.

If you want both, you have two budget lines and not one shortlist. The shortlist you actually have is Cresta against Balto and Observe.AI, or Gong against Outreach, Salesloft and Clari Copilot. Those are the two real brackets and we hold pages on both.

And if the loss you are trying to stop is one seller going quiet on an objection nobody wrote a card for, neither product is built for it. That is the only question Objeq answers, and it is the reason not to buy Objeq if your problem is anywhere else on this page.

Where Objeq fits, and five places it does not

Objeq is a Chrome extension with a side panel. It hears the customer through the browser tab the call plays in, works out the fear behind the sentence the buyer just said, and writes one line for the seller to say next, visible only to him. The claim is not that a line appears fast. It is that the line is composed for the sentence actually spoken, so there is nothing to author and nothing to keep current. The price is printed on our own pricing page: a Starter seat is $99 per month and a Pro seat is $149 per month, one seat, no minimum, a 3-day trial, English and Hebrew end to end, audio processed in memory and never stored.

Five places it is the wrong answer, all of them on this page. It has no QA scoring and no quality programme, so it does not replace what Cresta is mostly bought for. It has no compliance library and cannot guarantee a required disclosure, so in regulated work it is a liability rather than a tool. It writes no notes and no dispositions, so it does nothing for after-call work. It has no forecasting, no pipeline view and no call archive, so it replaces no part of Gong. And it hears nothing at all for an agent on a desktop softphone with no browser involved, which is most of Cresta's installed base.

Where it does fit: a small team whose calls run in Chrome, and one loss that keeps repeating. Give it your hardest objection before you believe a word of this page.

How to check every claim here in ten minutes

Twelve vendor-owned URLs plus two sitemaps, all read 8 October 2026. On Cresta: the home page, Agent Assist, Cresta Coach, integrations, /pricing, /plans and sitemap.xml. On Gong: the home page, pricing, complete sales coaching, platform, Gong AI, /coaching (a 404) and sitemap.xml.

The method matters more than the list, and two of our own earlier pages got a number wrong by skipping a step. Request each URL yourself and record the status code and the byte count, because a byte count is the cheapest proof that two 404s are the same error document rather than two different pages. Follow redirects by hand so you see where they land: gong.io/integrations does not stay on gong.io at all, it lands on collective.gong.io, which answered us with HTTP 403.

Strip <script> and <style> tags before you search the text. A dollar-sign search on gong.io/pricing returns 26 hits and not one of them is a price: they are Next.js server-component placeholders such as "$1" and "$undefined" sitting inside script tags. Strip the scripts and the honest count is zero. But know which direction the trap runs, because it runs both ways. On dialpad.com the real prices live inside a script-tag JSON blob, so stripping scripts hides figures that genuinely exist. Count both ways and reconcile the difference before you publish anything.

And read the stylesheet before you quote a figure. On avoma.com/pricing one tier emits two different numbers in the markup with the lower one inside a display:none element, so a human and a crawler read different prices off the same page. Neither trap applies to Cresta, for the simple reason that there is no number on the site to misread.

Never let a chatbot read a number off a page for you, including this one. Every byte count, status code and quotation above came out of a request we made ourselves. If any of it has gone stale since 8 October 2026, the URLs are listed so you can prove us wrong in ten minutes.

Questions people ask next

Are Cresta and Gong actually competitors? Rarely. Cresta is a contact-centre platform for inbound agents on telephony systems; Gong is a revenue platform for B2B sales teams on meetings. A shortlist with both names usually means two different people wrote the requirements.

How much does Cresta cost? It does not publish a price. cresta.com/pricing returned HTTP 404 on 8 October 2026 and no pricing page exists among the 1,757 URLs in its own sitemap. Ask for the all-in annual figure including implementation, minimum seats and term.

How much does Gong cost? Also unpublished, but the model is: licences priced per user plus a platform fee based on the number of users supported, quoted from its own pricing page. Pin down the platform fee separately or a per-seat comparison will miss it.

Does Gong have real-time coaching? No, and it does not claim to. "Real-time", "live" and "during the call" appear zero times across its home page, its pricing page and its own sales coaching page. If a round-up article told you otherwise, the article is wrong rather than out of date.

Will Cresta work on Zoom or Google Meet? Neither appears anywhere on its integrations page, scripts included. Cresta integrates at the telephony layer: Genesys, Five9, NICE, Amazon Connect, Twilio, Avaya.

We run a contact centre and also have a small outbound team. Then you have two routes with very different price tags: extend the platform the floor already runs, or add a narrow tool for the one moment the outbound team keeps losing. Ours is printed, a Starter seat at $99 and a Pro seat at $149, which is more than either product on this page will tell you.

What about Balto, Observe.AI and the rest of that bracket? We hold every edge of it: Balto vs Cresta, Cresta vs Observe.AI, Balto vs Observe.AI and Cresta alternatives. All three of those vendors return a 404 on their pricing URL.

Related: Objeq vs Cresta · Objeq vs Gong · Balto vs Cresta · Cresta vs Observe.AI · Gong alternatives · Real-time agent coaching platforms