Salesforce Agentforce vs Sierra

Agentforce and Sierra are two of the most visible ways to put AI agents in front of customers, and both sell hard into financial services. Buyers compare them because they answer the same question: who handles the customer conversation. They answer it from different starting points. Agentforce starts from the CRM. Sierra starts from the conversation.

Agentforce vs Sierra at a glance

Salesforce Agentforce is Salesforce's AI agent platform. Its Atlas Reasoning Engine plans and acts, admins build agents with Agent Builder, Agent Script, Flows, Apex, and MuleSoft connectors, and Data 360 grounds agents in CRM and external data. Salesforce positions it for service agents, sales development agents, employee support, and the contact center, plus industry editions such as Agentforce for Financial Services for banking, wealth, and insurance.

Sierra is a conversational AI platform for customer experience. Agents talk to customers over chat, SMS, WhatsApp, email, voice, and inside ChatGPT. Ghostwriter builds agents from SOPs, transcripts, or plain English, Agent Studio manages them, and a Context Engine keeps customer memory across conversations. In 2026 Sierra launched Horizon for long-running, multi-session customer journeys. Financial customers listed on its site include SoFi, Vanguard, Santander, Rocket Mortgage, Ramp, Fiserv, and Paychex.

Product scope

Agentforce. Broad by design. The same platform covers customer service, sales prospecting, internal HR and IT help, and contact center routing, all tied to Salesforce objects, permissions, and data. If your org already runs on Salesforce, agents inherit that structure. The trade-off is that the experience is shaped by the CRM, and work outside Salesforce reaches it through MuleSoft or APIs.

Sierra. Narrow and deep. Sierra focuses on the customer conversation: tone, multilingual and multichannel delivery, voice, and resolution. Tools like Insights, Experiments, and Monitors are aimed at improving conversation outcomes over time. It does not try to be your CRM or your employee assistant.

Fintech and compliance depth

Agentforce. Agentforce for Financial Services gives banks, wealth managers, and insurers prebuilt templates for onboarding, servicing, underwriting, and claims, with Salesforce's Einstein Trust Layer in the path to the model. It fits firms whose client relationships are managed in Salesforce, such as advisors and bankers. It is less specific about payment operations like ACH returns, chargebacks, or reconciliation.

Sierra. Sierra describes financial services use cases including product discovery, account management, billing disputes, retention, and fraud response. Its Plaid integration lets an agent ask a customer to connect a bank account mid-conversation and use cash-flow data to move an application forward. Sierra lists SOC 2, ISO 27001, ISO 42001, HIPAA, and PCI DSS among its certifications.

Implementation and ownership

Agentforce. Built and run by your Salesforce admins and developers, often with a Salesforce partner. Salesforce Foundations includes Agentforce Builder at no extra cost, so teams can prototype before buying credits. Expect the work to look like a Salesforce project.

Sierra. Ghostwriter and Agent Studio are designed so CX teams can build and change agents from their existing procedures. Sierra is sold to large consumer brands and financial institutions through its sales team.

Pricing

Agentforce publishes pricing: Flex Credits at $500 per 100,000 credits (a standard action uses 20 credits, a voice action 30), $2 per conversation for customer-facing agents, per-user add-ons at $125 per user per month for Sales, Service, and Field Service ($150 for Industries clouds), and Agentforce editions from $550 per user per month.

Sierra uses outcome-based pricing, "pay for a job well done." Rates are not published; it is sold through sales.

Where Runtime fits

Agentforce and Sierra both own the front of the house: the conversation and the CRM record. In payments, the hard part is often behind that conversation. A merchant asks where a payout went. Answering means tracing it through the ledger and processor, checking the bank file and returns, looking at risk holds, and sometimes logging into a portal with no API. Support gets the ticket, payment ops traces it, finance sees a recon break, risk may review it. Today each team investigates separately.

Runtime is the AI agent harness for that back office. Payment ops, risk, compliance, finance, underwriting, and support build agents from their SOPs. Each agent works on its own isolated computer in your AWS, GCP, or Azure account, or a fully self-hosted deployment, with any model you choose, including open-weight models served in your cloud for PCI and PII work. Agents start read-only, stop for approval before anything moves money, and record every run end to end, so the record your sponsor bank asks for stays with you. A forward-deployed AI engineer who has built payment infrastructure sets up the first agents with your team.

Runtime works alongside either. Agentforce or Sierra handles the customer, Runtime agents do the investigation, and the answer flows back to the case.

Which should you choose

Choose Agentforce if:

• Salesforce is your system of record and your admins already build there
• You want service, sales, and employee agents from one vendor
• You're a bank, wealth manager, or insurer and the financial services templates fit

Choose Sierra if:

• The customer conversation is a core part of your product and brand
• You need strong voice and multichannel coverage, including WhatsApp and ChatGPT
• You prefer outcome-based pricing over credits or seats

Choose Runtime if:

• The bottleneck is the payment operations work behind the conversation
• Card data or PII has to stay in your cloud, with models you choose
• You need approvals on money movement and an audit trail for your sponsor bank
• You want one platform for every team that touches a transaction

Frequently asked questions

Is Sierra better than Agentforce?

It depends on where your data lives and what the agent does. Sierra is a specialist in customer-facing conversations across chat, voice, SMS, WhatsApp, and email. Agentforce is broader and tightly tied to Salesforce CRM, covering service, sales, and employee agents. Salesforce-centric teams often lean Agentforce; teams that want a best-in-class conversational layer often lean Sierra.

Does Sierra work with Salesforce?

Sierra agents connect to the systems a business already runs to look up context and take actions. If Salesforce holds your customer records, a Sierra agent can be one channel in front of it, but it is a separate platform from Agentforce.

Which is better for banks and fintechs?

Both sell to financial services. Salesforce offers Agentforce for Financial Services for banking, wealth, and insurance. Sierra lists customers such as SoFi, Vanguard, Santander, Rocket Mortgage, Ramp, and Fiserv, and in 2026 added a Plaid integration so agents can connect a customer's bank account mid-conversation.

How is Agentforce priced compared to Sierra?

Agentforce publishes pricing: Flex Credits at $500 per 100,000 credits, $2 per conversation for customer-facing agents, and per-user add-ons from $125 per user per month. Sierra uses outcome-based pricing and does not publish rates.

Where does Runtime fit?

Runtime handles the back-office work behind a customer conversation: tracing a payout through the ledger and processor, working a recon break, preparing a sponsor bank response. Its agents run on their own computers in your cloud, stop for approval before money moves, and can sit behind either Agentforce or Sierra.