Cresta's public reviews tell two different stories. TrustRadius puts Cresta at 5.4 out of 10, from only six ratings. Glassdoor puts it at 4.4 out of 5. One score rates the software your reps would use every day, while the other rates what it's like to work there. If you run a sales floor, you need a third answer: whether Cresta fits your team.
This review covers Cresta's current product lineup, its user reviews, its one public price, and how it looks to a head of sales at a high-volume call center. Here's what Cresta actually does, what it costs, where reviewers push back, and the best alternative if it turns out not to be your tool.
The short verdict
Cresta is a capable AI contact center platform for large enterprises, with genuinely good real-time coaching and conversation intelligence. It fits big customer-experience and support operations that have budget and a dedicated admin to tune it. For a mid-size sales floor, it can be heavy and slow to stand up, and its focus has shifted from coaching toward automation.
Key takeaways:
Cresta scores 5.4 out of 10 on TrustRadius from only six ratings, and 4.4 out of 5 by employees on Glassdoor (68 reviews).
It sells four products: AI Agent, Agentic Assist (formerly Agent Assist), Deputy Agent, and Conversation Intelligence.
There's no public price list. The one public figure, on AWS Marketplace, starts at $150,000 a year for a single Agent Assist product.
Maven AGI's Cresta review puts Agent Assist deployments at about two to four months.
It's built for large enterprise contact centers, and it's often more than a mid-size, fast-moving sales floor needs.
Rating | Best for | Not for | Pricing | Setup |
|---|---|---|---|---|
TrustRadius 5.4/10 (6 ratings) | Large enterprise CX and support centers | Mid-size, high-volume sales floors | No public list; AWS Agent Assist from $150,000 a year | 2–4 months (est.) |
What is Cresta?
The Cresta homepage, headlined "The AI operating system for customer experience," with a banner introducing Deputy Agent.
Cresta is an AI-native contact center platform built for large enterprises. It runs both AI agents and human agents across voice and digital channels, and its customer stories include United Airlines, Brinks Home, and Cox Communications.
On the company side, it's a serious operation. Per its company page, Cresta was born at Stanford's AI Lab. Its CEO, Ping Wu, co-founded Google Contact Center AI, and its backers include Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, and Greylock.
One thing worth knowing up front: Cresta made its name in real-time coaching for sales and service agents. Over the last couple of years, it has leaned harder into autonomous customer-experience automation, which quietly changes who the product is built for.
What Cresta sells: AI Agent, Agentic Assist, Deputy Agent, and Conversation Intelligence
Cresta organizes its platform into four products that share the same data and integrations. Deputy Agent, launched on October 13, 2026, is the newest. If you've ever typed "What is Cresta used for?" into Google, this is the answer.
Cresta AI Agent
Cresta AI Agent handles customer conversations on its own across voice and digital channels. It supports over 30 languages, with multi-step workflows, enterprise knowledge access, human handoff, and guardrails built in. Cresta says its platform combines more than 20 large and small language models.
Cresta Agentic Assist (formerly Agent Assist)
Agentic Assist is the real-time piece that most reviewers talk about. It sits next to a live human agent and surfaces relevant knowledge, compliance prompts, and live summaries during the conversation, plus suggested replies on chat and email.
Cresta Deputy Agent
Deputy Agent is an AI agent that keeps working after the customer hangs up. Cresta built it for multi-day back-office work like refund requests, transaction disputes, and insurance claim appeals.
Cresta Conversation Intelligence
Conversation Intelligence analyzes calls after the fact. Cresta says it analyzes 100% of conversations across human and AI agents for topics, trends, and sentiment.
It bundles Quality Management for automated QA scoring, Coach for AI-targeted coaching recommendations for every agent, AI Analyst for plain-language questions about your conversation data, and Training Simulator, which lets agents practice against simulations built from real customer conversations.
One useful detail when you read the reviews: the only written review on TrustRadius covers the live guidance for chat agents and predates the autonomous AI Agent.
Cresta reviews: What users say
Public Cresta AI reviews are thin. On TrustRadius, Cresta scores 5.4 out of 10 from only six ratings, too few to read much into, and only one written review shows on the page. That review comes from a customer-service chat team in October 2023, and TrustRadius marks it as incentivized, so read it as one team's experience.
If you want to see where Cresta lands against other options, our roundup of call center coaching software compares the field.
What reviewers like
Time savings for reps: "Saves each representative lots of time," the reviewer wrote. On that team, each rep ran several chats at once.
Reply ideas reps might miss: The same review says it offers "creative response options that the representative may not have thought of."
What reviewers complain about
It doesn't always load: The reviewer wrote that "Cresta sometimes would not pop up in our native chat conversation environment."
Prompts can misfire: In one example, Cresta "would call the customer 'Mother' instead of their listed name."
Transcripts need work: TrustRadius's review summary lists "improving the transcripts" among users' most common recommendations.
Setup can be lengthy: Maven AGI's Cresta review estimates roughly two to four months for an Agent Assist rollout.
That mix of praise and honest frustration is normal for enterprise software. The thing to hold onto: these are reviews of the product, which is a separate question from whether Cresta is a good company.
Cresta pricing: What it costs
Cresta doesn't publish a price list, and cresta.com/pricing returns a 404, so most buyers go in blind until they talk to sales.
The one public number lives on the AWS Marketplace. Cresta's Agent Assist listing shows $150,000 for a 12-month subscription to Agent Assist for Voice (up to 100,000 calls) and the same $150,000 for Agent Assist for Chat (up to 125,000 chats). Past those caps, it's $1.50 per extra call and $1.20 per extra chat.
Keep in mind that this covers one product. AI Agent, Conversation Intelligence, and implementation are all quoted separately, so a real deployment runs higher. Our Cresta pricing and products guide breaks down what drives the cost before a sales call.
Is Cresta a legitimate company?
Yes, Cresta is a real and well-funded company. It's headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, came out of Stanford's AI Lab, and is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, and Greylock.
Its customer stories include United Airlines, Alaska Airlines, Cox Communications, and Brinks Home. Forrester also named Cresta a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Conversation Intelligence Solutions for Contact Centers, Q2 2025.
Employees rate it well, too. Cresta scores 4.4 out of 5 on Glassdoor across 66 reviews, with 94% saying they'd recommend it to a friend, and 4.8 out of 5 on Blind. On Blind, work-life balance is its lowest-rated category, at 4.3 out of 5.
Read the 4.4 employer score as a sign that the company is healthy. Whether the product fits your floor is a separate call.
Cresta pros and cons
Pros:
Real-time guidance for agents during live conversations
Reviews up to 100% of calls for QA instead of spot checks
Strong conversation intelligence and quality management
Enterprise security (Cresta lists SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, ISO 42001, PCI DSS, HIPAA, and GDPR)
Cons:
Rollouts can take months
Needs dedicated tuning before it fits your business
Users on TrustRadius ask for better transcripts
Enterprise pricing that starts in six figures
Its sales-coaching roots are now sharing the stage with CX automation
Who Cresta is for (and who should look elsewhere)
Cresta is a good fit if you run a large enterprise contact center with thousands of agents, a heavy customer-service or support load, a budget for a six-figure contract, and someone on staff who can own the tuning. Multilingual, global support operations get real value here.
Picture the other end of the spectrum, though. A 150-agent Medicare or life insurance floor during enrollment season is a different animal. Reps run dozens of calls a day, a new hire takes months to ramp, and the manager can only listen to a handful of calls a week. That team needs coaching that it can stand up in weeks and align with its exact sales process.
So Cresta is probably the wrong call if you run a mid-size, high-volume phone team, you want coaching depth without enterprise overhead, or a long implementation would stall your season. If that's you, keep reading.
Cresta alternatives for sales coaching
If Cresta is more platform than your sales floor needs, a few alternatives are worth a look. Each one fits a different kind of team.
Alpharun: Best for high-volume B2C sales floors that want coaching depth without the enterprise lift. Cresta's Agentic Assist guides reps during the live call. Alpharun takes the other angle: it scores every call afterward and gives each rep sentence-level feedback they apply on the very next one.
It also adds AI voice role-play so new reps can practice before they dial a real prospect. Setup takes about two weeks on average. To be fair, Cresta does more on autonomous CX automation. Alpharun focuses on coaching high-volume phone teams. Our ranked list of Cresta competitors covers the full field.
Observe.AI: Best for QA-led contact centers. It leans toward quality and compliance monitoring at scale.
Balto: Best for real-time compliance guidance. It's strong for regulated sales teams that want live, in-call prompts.
Gong: Best for B2B revenue intelligence. Gong scores 9.1 out of 10 on TrustRadius and is the category leader, though its coaching is more generic than a bespoke playbook. Our full Gong review covers where it fits and where it doesn't.
Second Nature: Best for role-play-first practice. If simulated practice is your priority, our Second Nature AI review walks through the details.
Coaching high-volume sales teams with Alpharun
Alpharun's weekly coaching goal view, tracking one rep's discovery skills from a 4.0 start past a 4.5 target.
Cresta's reviews and product pages make it clear that it's a capable enterprise platform built for big CX operations and leaning further into automation. If your real problem is getting every rep on a high-volume sales floor to perform like your best one, you need coaching that's specific, fast to stand up, and built around how your team actually sells.
That's where Alpharun fits. It sits on top of your existing call setup, like Five9 or Genesys, and turns your own best calls into the standard everyone else gets coached toward. The idea is to get the best of both worlds: your human team performing at its peak, with AI handling the repetitive parts that don't need a person.
With Alpharun, teams can:
Build a bespoke playbook from your own top-performing calls
Score 100% of calls automatically against that playbook
Coach at the sentence level, tied to real moments in each rep's calls
Catch compliance misses like skipped disclosures while they're still fixable
Ramp new reps with AI voice role-play before they ever hit a live call
Keep managers in the loop with weekly digests, and send reps short coaching notes directly
Get set up in about two weeks on average
Alpharun works with Medicare brokerages like Chapter, whose advisors handle hundreds of thousands of calls during the Annual Enrollment Period.
Book a demo with Alpharun to see how high-volume sales teams turn their best calls into the playbook for the whole floor.
Frequently asked questions
What is Cresta used for?
Cresta is used by large contact centers to automate conversations with AI agents, guide live human agents in real time, and analyze calls for quality assurance and coaching. Its four products are AI Agent, Agentic Assist, Deputy Agent, and Conversation Intelligence.
How do users rate Cresta?
On TrustRadius, Cresta scores 5.4 out of 10 from only six ratings. The one written review praises the time it saves chat reps and flags times it didn't load in the chat window, plus incorrect prompts.
How much does Cresta cost?
Cresta doesn't publish standard pricing, and cresta.com/pricing returns a 404. Its AWS Marketplace listing shows $150,000 a year for Agent Assist for Voice (up to 100,000 calls) or Chat (up to 125,000 chats), with other products quoted separately.
Is Cresta a legitimate company?
Yes. Cresta is a venture-backed AI company out of the Stanford AI Lab, funded by Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, and Greylock, and used by enterprises like United Airlines and Cox Communications. Employees rate it 4.4 out of 5 on Glassdoor.
What is the best Cresta alternative for sales coaching?
For high-volume B2C sales floors, Alpharun offers bespoke-playbook coaching and sentence-level post-call feedback with about two weeks of setup on average. Observe.AI, Balto, and Gong fit QA, compliance, and B2B revenue use cases, respectively.
