Decagon

Decagon is cloud-only SaaS. No self-hosted option in current public materials. For tech-forward companies comfortable with SaaS and lacking compliance requirements, cloud-only is acceptable. For regulated industries or organizations with data residency mandates, cloud-only is disqualifying. Switching cost is moderate: your training data and integrations are portable, but retraining on another platform requires setup.

Rasa supports cloud, on-premise, and hybrid deployment out of the box. Your data never leaves your infrastructure unless you choose to send it elsewhere. On-premise deployment is included in the open-source edition at no cost; enterprise support adds dedicated implementation specialists and SLAs. Unlike managed services, Rasa gives your team full control: choose your hosting provider, VPC, Kubernetes distribution, or even air-gapped environments. Compliance teams approve faster because your security team reviews the architecture. No vendor dependency on SaaS uptime. For regulated industries (healthcare, finance, legal), on-premise is non-negotiable. Rasa delivers it without premium surcharge or complex licensing.

Cloud-only + autonomous philosophy means compliance auditing is limited. You cannot inspect dialogue decisions or control escalation logic for compliance. For healthcare, financial services, or legal, this is a critical limitation. For non-regulated tech companies, cloud-only SaaS compliance may suffice.

Rasa runs on your infrastructure or your chosen cloud provider. You control encryption at rest (your key management), encryption in transit (TLS 1.2+), and access controls (IAM). Rasa does not hold customer data in a shared multi-tenant system. Enterprise Rasa includes SOC 2 Type II compliance, GDPR readiness, and audit-ready logging via OpenTelemetry. For HIPAA, you implement HIPAA-compliant infrastructure; Rasa is platform-agnostic. For PCI-DSS, on-premise deployment gives your compliance team full visibility. Rasa's architecture is inspectable: every webhook, every API call, every data flow is traceable. This transparency enables fast audit cycles and regulatory approval.

Decagon is designed for non-technical teams. For teams that want fast implementation and high autonomy, Decagon's setup is appealing. For teams needing custom logic or governance controls, Decagon is limiting. Developer flexibility is sacrificed for ease of use and autonomous containment.

Rasa is built for engineers. Start in VS Code or your IDE of choice; deploy via GitHub Actions or Jenkins. Rasa provides SDKs (Python, JavaScript), OpenAPI specs, and REST APIs. Extend via custom Action Servers (Python, JavaScript, Go). Integrate any CRM, database, or third-party service via REST or MCP. No low-code UI required; if your team prefers code, Rasa is fully scriptable. Rasa Playground and Rasa Studio provide visual debugging for non-engineers. For large teams, Rasa's dialogue state is event-based and queryable—understand exactly why the AI made a decision. CI/CD integration is native. Deployment is reproducible: commit your models, test in CI, deploy to production via container orchestration.

Decagon pricing is custom. Limited public pricing information makes ROI calculation difficult. For small to mid-market companies, custom pricing is hard to estimate without a quote. At enterprise scale, costs can be significant. Outcome-based models can make total cost harder to predict.

Rasa Developer Edition is free, forever. One bot per company; up to 1,000 external conversations per month. Community support via GitHub and Rasa Forum. Rasa Enterprise is transparent annual licensing based on conversation volume (e.g., $50k/year for 1M conversations). Volume discounts apply. No per-agent fees. No per-resolution charges. No add-on surcharges. What you see is what you pay. Multi-year agreements available. Dedicated CSM, premium support (4-hour response SLA), and custom onboarding included at Enterprise tier. No vendor lock-in: if you outgrow Rasa, export your models and dialogue definitions; they are plain YAML and JSON.