Open vs. PolyAI

PolyAI is a high-touch enterprise voice AI provider. They specialize in custom-built voice agents for large brands (hotels, banks, insurance, restaurants), delivered as a managed service. The implementation is led by their team, with prompt engineering, vertical-specific models, and a long deployment cycle that produces a polished result. The output is excellent. The cost and timeline are commensurate with that.

Open is the self-serve version of the same idea. Your team configures the agent through a product UI and API: define the role, point at your CRM and calendar, set the voice and language, define your knowledge base, set up routing rules. There's no "PolyAI engineer" to wait on; there's no months-long deployment. Most customers go live within a day. The trade-off is that you do the design work, not their team — but the platform ships with the integrations, compliance, and observability you need so you're not designing infrastructure, just an agent.

Cost differs by an order of magnitude. PolyAI deployments are typically priced as enterprise contracts with onboarding fees and per-minute / per-call rates negotiated. Open's per-resolution pricing applies whether you're an SMB running one agent or an enterprise running ten. Carrier minutes stay invoiced by your carrier in both cases.

When PolyAI is the right answer: when you want a managed service, want a vertical-specific implementation lead, and have the budget and timeline for a full custom build. When Open is the right answer: when you want speed, control, and to plug into the carrier and CRM you already pay for. Both are real options.

Some enterprise customers run both. PolyAI handles the highest-stakes flagship deployment (tier-1 reservations agent for the brand's restaurant chain, for example); Open handles the long tail of internal-facing agents, regional brands, or specific use cases where a self-serve config is faster than another statement-of-work cycle.