How we compare

Every other vendor in these tables built its own agent harness and put it between you and the model. Sierra builds agents with Ghostwriter, the agent-building agent, inside its own Agent OS. Decagon gives you AOPs and Duet on a proprietary engine. Fin runs the patented Fin AI Engine with its own Apex models. Ada has Performance Center and Playbooks, delight.ai has Builder, Botpress has Studio and Viber on its own Engine, Freshchat has AI Agent Studio, and Zendesk's Agent Builder is in early access. Docket calls its harness a custom cognitive architecture, 1mind calls its own the Brain, and Qualified builds on Xforce, native to the Salesforce platform. Of the eighteen, three will name the lab behind their answers: Gorgias says OpenAI, Tidio says Claude, and Chatbase lists its models by name.

We made the opposite bet, and it is worth stating plainly: the frontier labs will spend more engineering on Claude Code and Codex this year than this category will spend on harnesses in a decade, and their harnesses will end up better than anything a vendor builds internally, including anything we would build. So Algomo has no builder chat of its own. The platform is an MCP server, and you build, test and operate it from the coding agent you already run: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, ChatGPT or Claude, signed in over OAuth, no API key.

That choice compounds. The agent you operate Algomo with already holds the context of everything else you do in it: your codebase, your docs, whatever your Claude or ChatGPT subscription has learned about your company. A vendor's internal builder starts from zero and keeps what it learns inside the vendor's walls. Ghostwriter will only ever know what was typed into Ghostwriter.

Two precisions, so the claim stays checkable. First, the conversation your visitors have runs inside Algomo's own runtime on frontier models; the lab harness is how the agent is built, changed and tested, not what chats with your customers. Second, MCP appears in other columns too, pointed the other way: Fin, Decagon and Tidio use MCP to reach your data, Sierra and Docket use it to publish their agents into ChatGPT, Ada lists it in a developer toolkit, Zendesk's server is due this summer, and Warmly sells MCP access to its platform. Algomo is the one whose entire configuration surface is the MCP server, which is why moving the greeting, staging it, testing it on the live site and saving it is a sentence you type to Claude Code rather than a ticket you file with a vendor.

Every competitor cell was read from the vendor's own site, on 31 August 2026 for the original eight and on 3 September 2026 for Ada, delight.ai, Chatbase, Botpress, Tidio, Zendesk, Freshchat, tawk.to, Qualified and Docket. The published prices: Fin's $0.99 per outcome and $9.99 per qualification are on fin.ai/pricing, with seat prices on Intercom's pricing page; Gorgias publishes tiers from $10 to $1,430 a month; Docket publishes a $3,000-a-month floor, billed annually, and a $36,000-a-year figure in its own FAQ; Warmly publishes $10,000, $20,000 and $30,000 a year. Chatbase's tiers are on chatbase.co/pricing, Botpress's on botpress.com/pricing, with the auto-added packs in its FAQ, Tidio's on tidio.com/pricing, where it also says plan changes take effect at the next billing cycle, Zendesk's seat prices on zendesk.com/pricing, Freshchat's euro prices on the Freshworks live chat pricing page, and tawk.to's add-ons on its add-ons page. Chatbase's immediate downgrade with a prorated credit and its non-expiring auto-recharge credits are in its workspace settings guide; Botpress's month-end expiry of pack conversations is in its pricing lesson. The absences are checkable too: Sierra's pricing page is a 404, and so is Decagon's; Ada's pricing page books a consultation; delight.ai's pricing URL redirects to a blog post; Zendesk prices the resolution only as value delivered, and the dollar figures in circulation come from third-party trackers, not Zendesk; Qualified's pricing page has three tiers and no numbers; 1mind has no pricing page at all, which is why we priced it from the public record instead. Ada's contract range is Vendr's, not Ada's.

The harness rows quote product pages: Ghostwriter is Sierra's name for its agent-building agent, and its ChatGPT channel runs over MCP; AOPs are Decagon's authoring layer on its proprietary engine; the Fin AI Engine and the Apex models are Intercom's own names; Gorgias describes its OpenAI partnership and prompt cascades on its AI Agent page; Docket documents both its custom cognitive architecture and its ChatGPT app built on MCP; Warmly's homepage sells access via app, API and MCP; and a guided tour of the website is the closest claim to co-navigation on Qualified's Piper page. Ada's developer toolkit page lists APIs, MCP and SDKs; Tidio's Lyro Actions page describes MCP to your CRM; Zendesk's support article dates its MCP server to summer 2026. We searched every page we fetched, for all eighteen vendors, for co-browsing and live-session claims, and found none: tawk.to and Tidio watch the visitor, which is not acting for them. That is the evidence behind the row of noes.

What we could not verify from the vendors' own sites: Qualified's prices, 1mind's implementation time, and Docket's choice of calendars. Algomo's cells are read from this site's pricing page and from the product as it ships; a conversation is five credits there, and the monthly amount you choose caps every charge.

These eighteen are the vendors we are most often compared with, but whoever else is on your list, the comparison is easy to run yourself: put a working agent on your own site in minutes and judge it directly against anything, including the option most buyers actually weigh us against, which is building it themselves with Claude or ChatGPT.