Salesforce Agentforce vs ServiceNow Otto (formerly Now Assist)

Quick answer: which system owns the process?

Ask where the request ends. If a customer's order, a sales opportunity or a service case lives in Salesforce, an Agentforce agent can act on those records directly, and Salesforce sells customer-facing usage by the conversation or by credits. If the request is an employee asking for a laptop, a password reset or an HR letter, and the ticket lives in ServiceNow, Otto is built for that path.

The two only compete head-on in customer service, where some firms run case management on ServiceNow and others on Salesforce Service Cloud. Even there, the deciding factor is which platform already holds the cases, knowledge articles and entitlements. Moving that to buy a different agent is a much bigger project than the agent itself. Prices here are from Salesforce's Agentforce pricing page and ServiceNow's Otto pages, both rechecked on 10 November 2026; we haven't run either.

Who should pick which

Example situations, not customer stories

A retailer handling 'where is my order' questions on its website, with orders in Salesforce, is the textbook Agentforce case. Salesforce's own example prices 20 such requests a day at about $120 a month in Flex Credits, before Data 360 and other consumption. A 2,000-person company whose IT service desk runs on ServiceNow and wants employees to self-serve through Teams or Slack is the textbook Otto case.

A company with both might put Agentforce on customer service and Otto on internal IT and HR, then decide which assistant employees see first. That's a front-door decision for the CIO, not a feature comparison. Microsoft 365 Copilot often enters the same conversation as the general employee assistant; see our Copilot comparisons below.

Pricing differences that change the bill

Agentforce lets you estimate before talking to sales. At the public pack rate a standard action costs about $0.10 and a voice action $0.15, but one customer request can take several actions, so model the full journey. Conversations at $2 each are the simpler unit for customer chat, and Salesforce says Flex Credits and Conversations can't be mixed in one org. Employee-facing work can be bought per user instead: $125 a month for the Sales, Service or Field Service add-on with unmetered employee usage, $150 for Industries, or the $5 User License that still consumes credits.

ServiceNow gives you nothing to multiply. AI capability is bundled into Foundation, Advanced and Prime product tiers, and usage entitlements are set in the contract. Its documentation tells customers to contact the account team for availability and says tier rollout is independent of the upgrade cycle. Ask for the unit definitions in writing; the 'Otto Overview' legal document that defines them wasn't downloadable with our tools.

Governance and data questions

Salesforce describes the Einstein Trust Layer: prompts and responses aren't stored by or used to train third-party LLMs, with PII masking and toxicity detection. EU storage needs Hyperforce Operating Zone, a paid offering, and we couldn't confirm Agentforce's coverage there from the pages we read.

ServiceNow's compliance page lists ISO/IEC 42001, an AI management standard, alongside its ISO and SOC reports. Whether customer data trains its models wasn't stated on the pages we read. For both, the procurement questions are the same: which models process the data, where, for how long, and who can switch an agent off.

Migration and coexistence notes

There's no migration between these products in the usual sense; each runs inside its own platform. What you can move is knowledge. Clean, current knowledge articles and clear case categories matter more to either agent's results than the vendor choice, and that work carries over.

If both run in one company, agree routing rules early. An employee who asks the wrong assistant should be handed to the right one, not told to start again. Pilot on one narrow request type per platform and measure resolved requests and cost per resolution before widening scope.