Agentforce Alternatives in 2026: Pricing, What It Sees, and What Works With It

TL;DR

• Salesforce Agentforce is the strongest choice when the work lives in Salesforce. Its agents read CRM records and Data 360, act through Salesforce workflows, and inherit Salesforce sharing rules. For sales and service teams already on Salesforce, it is hard to beat.
• Agentforce pricing has three shapes: $2 per customer conversation, Flex Credits at $500 per 100,000 credits (20 credits per action), or per-user add-ons at $125 per user per month. Salesforce Foundations gives you the builder tools for $0.
• The real Agentforce alternatives depend on where your work lives: Microsoft Copilot Studio for Microsoft 365 companies, ServiceNow AI Agents for IT and HR service, Intercom Fin for support on any helpdesk, and Glean for search across many apps.
• Sentra is not another agent builder. It is the company memory Agentforce, Copilot or any other agent checks with over MCP and REST, joining CRM, ERP, HRIS and BI with what people said in email, chat and meetings.

Agentforce alternatives: what they are and when you need one

Agentforce alternatives are AI agent platforms that do what Salesforce Agentforce does, building and running agents that answer questions and take actions, but sit on a different system of record. The right one depends on where your data and workflows already live, because every agent platform sees its own vendor's data best.

Most teams that search for alternatives are not unhappy with Agentforce inside Salesforce. They hit one of three problems. The pricing model is hard to forecast. The work they want automated starts outside Salesforce, in an ERP, a ticketing system or an inbox. Or they already pay for Microsoft Copilot and want to know whether Copilot Studio covers the same ground. This page covers each case with Salesforce's own documentation and prices.

For the wider market of agent products, see our guides to enterprise AI agents and the best enterprise AI platforms.

What Salesforce Agentforce is

Salesforce calls Agentforce "the AI agent platform that delivers 24/7 autonomous support at enterprise scale" and notes it was formerly Einstein Copilot (salesforce.com). Salesforce announced general availability on 29 October 2024, starting with Agentforce Service Agent and Agent Builder (salesforce.com).

The parts a buyer should know:

• Agent Builder. A low-code tool for configuring subagents, actions and instructions (salesforce.com).
• Atlas Reasoning Engine. It breaks a request into smaller tasks, evaluates each step and plans until the answer or action is complete (same source).
• Data. Agents use Salesforce CRM data and external data brought in through Data 360, the product formerly called Data Cloud (salesforce.com). MuleSoft API connectors link agents to other systems.
• MCP. Agentforce agents can connect to external MCP servers. The server must support OAuth 2.0, with either per-user authentication or a service account (salesforce.com).
• Trust Layer. Salesforce says its agreements with LLM providers such as OpenAI include zero data retention commitments (developer.salesforce.com).
• Agentforce Coworker. An employee-facing assistant that Salesforce says "connects and indexes across 300+ enterprise sources" and respects existing sharing rules (salesforce.com). Its setup documentation still refers to a beta.

At Dreamforce on 15 September 2026, Salesforce announced AIforce, an interface layer that brings Salesforce data, workflows and permissions into tools such as Claude and Slack. It launched with Claudeforce, Slackforce and Agentforce Coworker, and Salesforce in Claude is in beta for all customers (salesforce.com).

Agentforce pricing in 2026

Salesforce publishes its rate card, which most agent vendors do not. All figures below are from the Agentforce pricing page, in US dollars.

Three conditions change the maths. Flex Credits and Conversations cannot be used in the same org. Unused Flex Credits do not roll over into the next term. Usage above your entitlement is billed at your contracted rate, monthly in arrears.

A worked Agentforce cost example

Assume a support team handles 10,000 customer conversations a month with an agent, and each conversation takes three actions on average. These are illustrative assumptions.

• Per conversation: 10,000 x $2 = $20,000 a month.
• Flex Credits: 10,000 x 3 actions x 20 credits = 600,000 credits. At $500 per 100,000, that is $3,000 a month.

The gap is large, and it reverses as actions per conversation rise. At 20 actions per conversation, Flex Credits cost $20,000, the same as per-conversation pricing. Model your real action count before you choose, because you cannot run both meters in one org.

For employees, the add-on math is simpler. Fifty sales reps on the Sales add-on cost 50 x $125 = $6,250 a month, or $75,000 a year, before the Salesforce licences they already hold.

What Agentforce can see and what it can't

Agentforce's strength and its limit are the same thing: it works on what Salesforce holds or has been explicitly connected to.

• Salesforce CRM objects: accounts, opportunities, contacts, cases and custom objects, under each user's sharing rules.
• Data 360, including warehouse data shared with zero copy from partners such as Snowflake and Databricks (salesforce.com).
• Systems exposed through MuleSoft APIs or registered MCP servers.
• Slack, which Salesforce owns, through Slackforce and Coworker.

• Conversations outside Salesforce. The supplier email that moved a delivery date, the Teams thread where a discount was agreed, the meeting where a renewal risk came up. If it is not in Salesforce, Data 360 or a connected source, the agent does not know it happened.
• Systems of record outside Salesforce. ERP, HRIS and finance systems reach Agentforce only through Data 360 ingestion, MuleSoft or MCP. Each one is an integration project with its own owner.
• The join between them. Even with connections, each agent pulls what it needs at run time. Nothing in Salesforce's documentation describes a shared, current record of decisions, owners and commitments across CRM, ERP and conversations that every agent reads from.

For a sales or service workflow that starts and ends in Salesforce, none of this matters. For a question like "why did this account's renewal slip?", where the answer is split between a CRM field, an ERP invoice and an email thread, it matters a lot.

Agentforce vs Copilot

Buyers on both stacks ask this most often. The short answer: Agentforce is built around Salesforce data and customer-facing workflows. Microsoft Copilot Studio is built around Microsoft 365 data and employee workflows.

Copilot Studio prices come from microsoft.com and its billing rates from learn.microsoft.com. Our Microsoft Copilot agents guide covers Copilot Studio in depth, and our ChatGPT vs Copilot vs Claude vs Gemini comparison covers the assistants.

If your customer data is in Salesforce and your documents and email are in Microsoft 365, the honest answer is that you will likely run both. The question then is how the two agents share what the company knows.

Agentforce alternatives compared

Sentra

Sentra reads email, chat, meetings, documents, ERP, CRM, HRIS and BI, works out what is true now and who owns it, and raises what is going wrong to the right person. It does not replace Agentforce. Agentforce keeps running the Salesforce workflow, and Sentra supplies the context it does not have.

Microsoft Copilot Studio

Copilot Studio builds agents over Microsoft Graph, Copilot connectors and MCP servers. Microsoft sells credit packs of 25,000 Copilot Credits for $200 a month, plus pay-as-you-go (microsoft.com). Employee-facing agent use is included for users licensed with Microsoft Copilot (learn.microsoft.com).

ServiceNow AI Agents

ServiceNow builds agents in AI Agent Studio, and Action Fabric connects outside agents and tools over MCP and A2A (servicenow.com). Pricing is through sales.

Intercom Fin

Fin is a customer service agent priced per outcome: $0.99 per outcome on your current helpdesk, with a 50-outcome monthly minimum. Intercom says it works with Salesforce, HubSpot and other helpdesks (fin.ai).

Glean

Glean indexes many apps and answers with permission awareness. It publishes no rate card; our Glean pricing breakdown works through estimates.

Works with Sentra: the memory Agentforce checks with

Agentforce acts well on Salesforce data. Sentra gives it, and every other agent you run, the rest of the company.

The mechanism:

1. Connect. Sentra connects to email, chat, meetings, documents, ERP, CRM, HRIS and BI through 200+ integrations. Nothing is entered by hand.

2. Understand. It builds one record of what is true now, who owns what and what was committed. It knows when a fact became true and when it stopped being true, so an agent does not quote last quarter's discount as current.

3. Answer agents. Sentra exposes REST and MCP. Agentforce can connect to external MCP servers that support OAuth 2.0 (salesforce.com), so an Agentforce agent can ask Sentra before it acts. The same memory serves Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and internal agents.

4. Respect permissions. Answers respect each source's existing permissions, checked at query time. A failed check counts as no access.

5. Act first, with approval. Sentra's own agent finds what is going wrong, works out who should act and drafts the message. A named person approves before anything reaches anyone else.

An illustrative case: an Agentforce service agent is about to promise a customer a delivery date from the Salesforce order. Sentra knows the supplier emailed yesterday that the shipment slipped a week, and that the account owner already flagged it in a meeting. The agent gets the corrected date and the source before it replies.

Better context also costs less. On Terminal-Bench 2.1, agents using Sentra scored 88.31% against an 83.37% baseline, with 72.6% lower model cost and 41.2% fewer tokens.

Sentra is SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certified and deploys in the cloud, in an isolated VPC, or air-gapped on-premises.

To see Sentra working alongside your agents, book a demo.

How to choose

1. Map where the work starts and ends. If both ends are in Salesforce, start with Agentforce. If they are in Microsoft 365, ServiceNow or a helpdesk, start with that vendor's agent.

2. Model the meter before you sign. Count conversations, actions per conversation and employee users. Run the numbers for per-conversation and Flex Credits, since you can only use one per org.

3. List the facts the agent needs that live elsewhere. Supplier emails, ERP invoices, HR records, meeting decisions. Each one is a connection to build and maintain, or a reason to add a shared company memory.

4. Check permissions end to end. Confirm the agent answers only with what the requesting user can see at the source, including through MCP connections.

5. Decide who approves actions. For anything customer-facing or financial, require a named person to approve before the agent sends or changes anything.

For a framework on scoping agent projects, see AI agents for business and agentic AI vs AI agents.

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