Dograh vs Cresta: Contact Center AI Suite or Voice Agent Platform

Cresta is a contact center AI suite that guides and coaches human agents, scores every conversation and also sells an AI agent, all priced by contract. Dograh, the open-source AI voice agent platform we build, automates the call itself with the models you choose. You can self-host it or run it on Dograh Cloud.

Key Takeaways

• Cresta makes human agents better. Dograh automates the whole call.
• Cresta leads on live agent assist and a long certification list.
• Dograh runs on your servers with your own model keys or open-weight models.

Teams comparing these two are usually comparing two different jobs that meet at the AI agent. We set out where Cresta is stronger, put both in one table, then walk through automated calls, QA, models and hosting before saying which kind of contact center each one suits.

Two different jobs that meet at the AI agent

Cresta is built around the human agent, and Dograh is built around the automated call. Cresta's range covers several products. Agentic Assist gives live guidance and knowledge to agents during a conversation, Knowledge Agent answers their questions from your knowledge base, Conversation Intelligence finds what drives good customer experience, and Quality Management runs automated QA across every conversation. Coaching sits inside that same set of tools for human work.

Then there is the AI agent. Cresta's AI Agent page describes voice and chat agents in 30+ languages that handle hesitations and interruptions. They call your systems through function calling and MCP, and hand off to a person when they reach an escalation threshold. A newer Deputy Agent handles long-running work for CX operations.

Dograh focuses on the AI agent job. It is open-source software for building voice agents that answer and place calls on their own, from the first hello until the call ends or moves to a person. So the honest comparison is Cresta's AI Agent against Dograh, with the rest of Cresta's suite serving a different buyer, the team that wants to lift its human agents.

Where Cresta is stronger

Cresta is the better fit wherever human agents stay at the center of the work. Live guidance during a call, coaching and a knowledge assistant beside each agent are the core of Cresta's suite, and many contact centers buy it for exactly those.

Its QA reach is wide too. Cresta's Quality Management scores 100% of conversations, human-handled ones included, so a supervisor can grade staff and AI with one tool. Dograh's QA, covered below, scores the calls its own agents run.

Testing an AI agent is another strong area. Cresta calibrates LLM judges against human expert reviewers and builds Synthetic Customers from your own conversation data. Every new version runs against the full test set, and Cresta releases changes with governed rollouts and rollback, and runs A/B experiments on live traffic. Supervisors can step into a live AI conversation and take over in a critical moment.

Cresta also sits on top of the contact center you already have. Cresta's integrations page lists Five9, Amazon Connect, NICE, Genesys, Avaya, Cisco and Twilio. Cresta reports results on its AI Agent page, such as 5.5x higher containment and 23% higher CSAT at Snap Finance, and a 74% containment rate at Xanterra. Those are Cresta's own figures, so ask for the method behind any number you plan to rely on.

Dograh and Cresta in one table

The table compares what each product does on its own pages and in Dograh's code. Where a row is not part of a product's job, the cell says what it does instead.

Open Source Alternative to Vapi / Retell

Self-hosted voice agent platform — no per-minute fees

dograh-hq/dograh

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Automated calls and campaigns

Dograh's strength is running the automated call end to end, inbound or outbound. For outbound work, Campaigns take a contact list and dial it through your own carrier. You set the retries, from 0 to 10, the delay between attempts, from 30 seconds to an hour, and which outcomes, such as busy or no answer, trigger a retry. Calling hours are set by weekday in one time zone per campaign, so split a national list by time zone.

When a caller needs a person, the Transfer Call tool works on Twilio, Telnyx, Plivo, Cloudonix and Asterisk ARI. Dograh dials the destination while the caller hears hold music, and connects them once someone answers. If the transfer goes unanswered or fails, the agent gets a transfer_failed result and the call carries on, so the prompt can offer a callback instead.

Dograh can also work beside a contact center you already run. Through Asterisk ARI it takes calls from an Asterisk phone system, and a VICIdial integration lets the agent end the customer leg, transfer to a VICIdial in-group and update lead fields from what the caller said. That is closer to how Cresta's AI Agent fits on top of a contact center platform, with the agent running on your side.

QA, traces and testing

Both products score calls after the fact, and they differ in scope. Dograh's QA runs on calls from its own agents, both test calls from the editor and live calls of the published agent. It scores each step of the call on its own, with tags, a score from 1 to 10, sentiment and a summary, and a Sample Rate setting picks a random share of calls when you don't want to score them all.

When a score looks wrong, the trace shows why. Each call's View Trace button opens its call trace in Langfuse, with the speech-to-text, AI and voice time for every turn and the exact prompt the model saw. Before going live, Test Chat lets you rerun a turn or edit it and rerun from there, and the Tuner integration runs simulated callers against the agent.

Our post on call QA and scoring for contact centers shows how to set one scorecard per client program. Cresta's QA reaches further, across human agents too, while Dograh's goes deeper into each automated call, down to the turn.

Models, data and where each runs

Cresta chooses the models, and Dograh lets you choose them. Cresta's trust center lists Amazon Web Services under infrastructure and names model and speech providers among its subprocessors, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Fireworks.ai, Deepgram, Cartesia AI and ElevenLabs. It also lists a long set of certifications, from SOC 2 and SOC 3 to ISO/IEC 27001, 27701 and 42001, PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR and TISAX.

With Dograh, the platform runs the call flow, tools and telephony, and you fill the model layer. Bring your own keys for any LLM, speech-to-text and voice provider, and the keys sit in your own database, so protect database access and backups. A provider key puts the contract in your name, but the audio still reaches that provider. To keep audio in-house, run Dograh on your own servers with open-weight models beside it.

Self-hosting also changes the paperwork. For calls with health data, a self-hosted Dograh means no business associate agreement (BAA) with Dograh under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Model providers that handle patient data may need their own, and the phone carrier may need one depending on what it stores.

Self-hosted Dograh has no per-minute platform fee, but servers, model keys and phone minutes still cost money. Dograh Cloud charges a 1¢-a-minute platform fee. Self-hosted, it runs 10 concurrent calls by default, a limit you can raise, and your servers and carrier set the real ceiling.

Which one fits your contact center

Stay with Cresta, or choose it, when your people are the product. A contact center that wants live guidance and coaching for hundreds of agents, with one QA tool for human and AI conversations, gets that from Cresta in one contract, backed by the vendor's own certifications.

Choose Dograh when the goal is calls that run without an agent, on infrastructure you control. Reminder and renewal campaigns, after-hours lines, tier-1 questions and overflow calls are the usual starting points. You keep the models and the call data, and you can change the agent's logic without a new contract.

Many teams will run both, with a coaching suite for the human floor and an open-source agent for the calls that never needed a person. Our guide to AI voice agents for BPO and contact centers walks through which call types to automate first and how the handoff to a person should work.