Ada vs Stonly

Ada is an AI customer service platform from Toronto, founded in 2016 by Mike Murchison and David Hariri. It started as a no-code chatbot builder and has repositioned itself as an agentic customer experience platform: AI agents that answer and resolve customer inquiries end to end across messaging, email and voice, rather than deflecting them to a help article.

The agent orchestrates several large language models, reads your knowledge base, and uses Actions to call your systems so it can look up orders, change bookings or issue refunds. Playbooks encode multi-step standard operating procedures, and the platform includes testing, coaching, analytics and an automated resolution metric to track how many conversations finish without a human. Ada lists SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR and PCI DSS compliance. There is no self-serve plan: pricing is quote-based after a sales demo.

Ada fits large consumer brands with hundreds of thousands of support conversations a year, such as Pinterest, monday.com, Grab and Life360. Smaller teams usually get faster value from Intercom Fin or Tidio Lyro, which price per resolution and install in an afternoon. Zendesk AI agents make more sense if you want to stay inside one helpdesk vendor, and Decagon and Sierra are the main newer enterprise rivals.

In February 2026 Ada launched a unified Reasoning Engine that powers its agents across all channels from one intelligence layer. When evaluating, ask for a pilot on your own transcripts and compare the automated resolution rate, not deflection, against your current baseline.

Stonly is a knowledge and guidance platform for customer service, founded in 2018 in the Paris area and co-founded by Alexis Fogel, who previously co-founded Dashlane. It raised a $22 million Series A in January 2022 led by Northzone with Accel. Its core job is turning support knowledge into interactive step-by-step guides and decision trees that customers follow on their own and agents follow inside the help desk.

The product combines guides, product tours through an embeddable widget, checklists, a knowledge base with versioning and review flows, contact forms and surveys. AI features include AI Answers, a conversational bot, AI Agent Assist for ticket summaries and draft replies, Knowledge Agents and Business Process Agents. The free Basic plan allows 400 guide views a month and five guides; Small Business, for companies under 100 employees, adds 4,000 views and five seats at a quoted price; Enterprise unlocks help desk integrations, AI Agents, SSO and auto-translation. Small Business has a 14-day trial.

Stonly fits support-heavy SaaS, fintech and hardware companies that want to deflect tickets and standardize agent troubleshooting. It is less suited to product teams focused on onboarding analytics. Whatfix goes deeper on enterprise digital adoption, Userpilot and Appcues are stronger for product-led onboarding, and Chameleon gives more design control over in-app tours.

Buying tip: paid prices are not published and guide views drive the bill; exceeding your limit two months in a row moves you to a higher plan automatically. Measure help-center traffic before talking to sales.