Agentforce Sales vs Cognlay (2026)
The decision is whether the thing you are managing is an institution or an outbound programme. Agentforce Sales holds the deepest institutional answer in this index: a published autonomy boundary with guardrails that withhold rather than display, zero data retention agreements with its model providers stated contractually, a public trust site carrying product level security documentation, and a processing addendum that names the agent products rather than leaving them to inference. Cognlay is a beta product run by one named founder with no customers at all, and it outgrades that platform on the three axes that concern the act of sending email. It addresses four sending regimes separately rather than naming them in a list, states in writing where the sender's duty begins, publishes four real prices with both meters defined in plain words, and ships pre send guardrails and sender health monitoring on every plan including the free one. One vendor has answered how a large company governs software. The other has answered how a message gets sent lawfully.
- The model providers have to be contractually bound rather than merely named. Salesforce states it holds zero data retention agreements with the third party model providers it uses, so customer data is neither retained by them nor used to train their models, and the agent products are named inside the master agreement and its processing addendum.
- You need one vendor across every segment and region. Coverage runs from small business to global enterprise with dedicated product and compliance material by industry, operations and regional infrastructure across the Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific, and extensive localisation.
- You are not adding another system to maintain. Existing automations, prompt templates and interfaces convert into callable agent actions without a separate integration build, against a counterpart whose entire integration surface is a mailbox connection, file import and calendar booking.
- Your domain and your reputation must stay yours at the infrastructure level. Cognlay is not sending infrastructure, holds no address pools, runs no shared warmup accounts, sends through your own mailbox over standard protocols, and revoking those credentials at your own provider stops all sending even if the vendor's systems are unreachable.
- You want the Canadian and European positions stated separately rather than bundled into a compliance page. Cognlay says outright that consent is required before commercial email reaches a Canadian recipient and that this is the sender's responsibility, recommends keeping a consent record, and designates the customer as controller and itself as processor under instruction.
- You are one person or a lean team and the free tier has to actually work. Review first workflow controls, pre send quality guardrails, sender health monitoring, suppression of opted out leads and safe send windows all ship on the free plan, where the counterpart's agent layer requires an existing platform foundation as a precondition.
Plain facts
| Agentforce Sales | Cognlay | |
|---|---|---|
| Primary category | AI SDR & Outbound Agents | AI SDR & Outbound Agents |
| Founded | 1999 | Not published |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, United States | Not published |
| Website | www.salesforce.com/agentforce/ | cognlay.com |
Side by Side
| Axis | A Agentforce Sales |
C Cognlay |
|---|---|---|
|
AI Capability
|
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| AI Centrality | ||
| Autonomy and Oversight Model | ||
| AI Disclosure and Model Transparency | ||
| Operational and Outcome Evidence | ||
|
Compliance and Risk
|
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| Outreach Compliance Posture | ||
| Data Privacy Posture | ||
| Data Licensing and Provenance | ||
| Platform Terms Exposure | ||
| AI Safety and Data Stewardship | ||
| Recipient Disclosure and Authenticity | ||
|
Integration and Deployment
|
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| Ecosystem and Integration Depth | ||
| Deployment Model and Data Residency | ||
| Security Certifications and Trust Center | ||
|
Commercial and Operational
|
||
| Commercial Transparency | ||
| Exit and Data Portability | ||
| Deliverability and Sending Discipline | ||
| Segment and Market Coverage | ||
The short version of each
Agentforce Sales
Agentforce Sales is Salesforce's sales product line, rebranded from Sales Cloud as the agentic layer became the headline, with a development agent that researches leads, drafts and sends outreach and books meetings on the underlying CRM, governed by admin defined topics, actions and engagement rules. The GTM Tech Index grades it A on AI safety and data stewardship, because the cross client question is answered contractually rather than by assurance: the vendor states it holds zero data retention agreements with the third party model providers it uses, so customer data is neither retained by them nor used to train their models, and the agent products are named inside the master agreement and its processing addendum. The index records one caveat the vendor discloses itself, that data masking is currently disabled for this product.
Source: GTM Tech Index, 2026
Cognlay
Cognlay is a governed sales development platform built around the argument that most outbound tools stop thinking at the moment of send, watching what each lead did and rewriting, pausing, routing or stopping before the next touch. The GTM Tech Index grades it A on outreach compliance posture, the clearest allocation of responsibility between platform and sender anywhere in the index and published by a beta stage vendor with no customers: four regimes are addressed separately with their own detail, the vendor states in writing that the sender remains responsible for a lawfully obtained list, and suppression of opted out leads is architectural rather than advisory. The index grades it D on operational and outcome evidence, recorded as a stage fact for a product run by one named founder.
Source: GTM Tech Index, 2026
Common questions
Is Agentforce Sales better than Cognlay?
They answer different halves of the risk. Agentforce holds the deepest institutional answer in this index: a published autonomy boundary, zero data retention agreements with its model providers stated contractually, a public trust site and a processing addendum naming the agent products. Cognlay outgrades it on the three axes that concern the act of sending email, addressing four sending regimes separately, publishing four real prices with both meters defined, and shipping pre send guardrails and sender health monitoring on every plan including the free one. One has answered how a large company governs software. The other has answered how a message gets sent lawfully.
Which one takes a clearer position on outreach law?
Cognlay, which is the smallest vendor in this index outgrading the largest. The GTM Tech Index grades it A and Agentforce B. Cognlay addresses four regimes separately with their own detail, states in writing that the sender remains responsible for a lawfully obtained list, says consent is required before commercial email reaches a Canadian recipient, and suppresses opted out leads architecturally. Agentforce publishes real controls at the point they matter, engagement rules and restricted lead suppression, and nothing addressing unsubscribe mechanics, opt out propagation or consent verification specifically for agent generated outreach.
How much do Agentforce Sales and Cognlay cost?
Cognlay publishes four plans and Agentforce publishes the smaller half of a larger bill. Cognlay lists free, sixty nine, one hundred and twenty nine and two hundred and ninety nine dollars a month against a twelve row matrix, with both meters defined in plain language and no quote only ceiling. Agentforce publishes roughly two dollars per conversation, credits at five hundred dollars per hundred thousand and per user licensing from around a hundred and twenty five dollars a month, while independent guides report the data platform the agents ground against as the largest and least predictable line, running from tens of thousands a year into six figures.
Does either say whether my data trains their models?
Both answer it and Agentforce answers it contractually, which is the stronger form. Salesforce states it holds zero data retention agreements with its third party model providers, so customer data is neither retained by them nor used to train their models, with the agent products named inside the master agreement. Cognlay states it does not use customer email content, lead data, mailbox threads or sequence replies to train models and extends the claim to its providers under their enterprise terms, which is published assurance rather than a contractual term.
Which one protects my sending domain better?
Cognlay, and the difference is architectural rather than a matter of disclosure. Cognlay sends through your own mailbox with no shared address pools and no shared warmup accounts, ships sender health monitoring, safe send windows and connected sender caps on every tier, and declines inbox warmup outright while naming the category of tool to buy instead. Agentforce sends at machine speed and publishes nothing on warmup, volume governance, rotation, spam rate monitoring or what happens when reputation degrades under agent driven volume.
How does the GTM Tech Index grade Agentforce Sales and Cognlay?
Both are graded on the same seventeen capability and compliance axes from public sources, at documented depths of seventeen and sixteen. The GTM Tech Index grades Agentforce Sales A on autonomy and oversight, data privacy posture, AI safety and stewardship, ecosystem depth, security certifications and segment coverage. Cognlay takes A on outreach compliance posture and commercial transparency, against B for Agentforce on both, and B on deliverability discipline where Agentforce holds C. Cognlay carries the pair's only D, on operational and outcome evidence. The index publishes no composite score and declares no winner.
Related comparisons
Other published head to head assessments involving these vendors or their closest peers. The full set for this category is on the Sales Engagement & Outreach page.
Neither vendor's published record answers the question a buyer actually asks, which is whether comparable deployments reached production, and each fills that slot with something else. At Agentforce the marketing volume is high and the measurement basis is absent, and the most decision relevant evidence available comes from outside the company and points the other way: independent 2026 reporting puts typical implementation at five to eleven months and finds fewer than ten percent of customers have the agent layer fully scaled.
Cost modelling guidance from implementation partners is more specific about real agent behaviour than the vendor's own outcome claims. At Cognlay there is nothing to measure yet, and what occupies the slot where customer proof normally sits is roughly fifteen launch directory badges from product discovery sites arranged as a trust wall. Directory placement is a distribution activity rather than evidence of outcome, and a reader cannot infer from it whether the product books meetings.
The vendor does disclose its own beta status on the pricing page, which is more candid than most products at that stage manage, and the absence should be read as a stage fact rather than as concealment. The shared silence is what the recipient learns. Both products send under a real named sender with no persona, no invented correspondent and no manufactured location, and neither tells the person receiving the message that a machine wrote it.
Cognlay publishes the first explicit anti spoofing commitment recorded on this axis, stating it does not spoof sender identities or forge message headers, which is more than the far larger vendor publishes about identity at all.
Article 50 of the EU AI Act has applied since 2 August 2026, and the European Commission's final guidelines of 20 July 2026 place the marking duty principally on the provider of the system rather than the deploying customer, which lands on both companies identically regardless of size. Neither addresses it. This index records what is published and asserts nothing about compliance.