Agentforce Sales vs Octave (2026)
The decision is where your selling knowledge should live, inside the system of record or above it. Agentforce Sales puts it inside: the agents ground in the customer's own records through the vendor's data platform, and the agent model turns existing automations, prompt templates and interfaces into callable agent actions without a separate integration build, so nothing new has to be maintained outside the platform the records already sit in. Octave argues the opposite, that a company has a schema for customer data and none at all for how it sells, so positioning, personas and proof points sit in decks where no tool can read them, and it builds a separate versioned home for that material and serves it back out through a protocol server, an interface and an agent runtime plugin. Both hold an A on integration depth in this index, for exactly opposite reasons: one because the platform already reaches everything, the other because reaching everything is the entire product.
- The knowledge should sit where the records already are. The agents ground through the customer's own data platform against structured and unstructured company data, and existing automations, prompt templates and interfaces become callable agent actions without a separate integration build to maintain.
- You need engagement rules rather than a context library. Admin defined rules set the conditions under which the agent may begin working a lead and how and when its emails may send, including preventing outreach to restricted leads, with role and attribute based access gating agent behaviour by geography or compliance status.
- Your privacy review will ask which product is actually covered. A dedicated privacy note for the agent products states which branded agents fall inside the services definition of the master agreement and therefore under the published processing addendum, with sub processors documented separately and mapped to those products.
- Several tools need to say the same thing. Octave holds positioning, personas, proof points and competitive angles as structured versioned records with full history and serves them to every downstream system identically, so the message does not drift between the sequencer, the deck and the call script.
- You are not moving to a new system of record and will not be. Octave sits above the stack rather than replacing it, connecting natively to two systems of record, a conversation intelligence platform and a data orchestration tool, where the counterpart's agent layer requires its underlying platform as a precondition and the vendor states that dependency.
- The bill should not scale with headcount. Octave prices a flat platform subscription plus credits and is explicit that it does not charge per seat, with users unlimited at the top tier, where the counterpart meters roughly two dollars per conversation on top of per user licensing from around a hundred and twenty five dollars a month.
Plain facts
| Agentforce Sales | Octave | |
|---|---|---|
| Primary category | AI SDR & Outbound Agents | Sales Enablement & Readiness |
| Founded | 1999 | Not published |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, United States | Not published |
| Website | www.salesforce.com/agentforce/ | www.octavehq.com |
Side by Side
| Axis | A Agentforce Sales |
O Octave |
|---|---|---|
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AI Capability
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| AI Centrality | ||
| Autonomy and Oversight Model | ||
| AI Disclosure and Model Transparency | ||
| Operational and Outcome Evidence | ||
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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 | ||
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Integration and Deployment
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| Ecosystem and Integration Depth | ||
| Deployment Model and Data Residency | ||
| Security Certifications and Trust Center | ||
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Commercial and Operational
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| 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, grounded in the customer's own records through the vendor's data platform. The GTM Tech Index grades it A on ecosystem and integration depth, the deepest integration surface in go to market software, because a public marketplace with thousands of listings and comprehensive interface references sit alongside an agent model that converts a customer's existing automations, prompt templates and endpoints into callable agent actions without a separate integration build. The index grades it C on AI centrality, since the agent layer is separately licensed and metered but the underlying platform's pipeline, forecasting and reporting are untouched if the agents are removed.
Source: GTM Tech Index, 2026
Octave
Octave is a context layer for go to market teams, built on the argument that a company has a schema for customer data and none at all for how it sells, so its ideal customer profiles, personas, positioning, proof points and competitive angles sit in decks and tribal knowledge where no tool can read them. The GTM Tech Index grades it A on ecosystem and integration depth, the deepest programmatic surface in the index, because the integration surface is the product rather than an attachment to it, spanning a versioned interface with public documentation, five enumerated interface surfaces, a protocol server, a command line kit and an agent runtime plugin. The index grades it B on exit and data portability, since exporting artefacts is a feature available on every tier including the free one.
Source: GTM Tech Index, 2026
Common questions
Is Agentforce Sales better than Octave?
They answer opposite questions about where your selling knowledge should live. Agentforce puts it inside the system of record, grounding agents in your own data platform and turning existing automations into callable agent actions. Octave argues that a company has a schema for customer data and none for how it sells, and builds a separate versioned home for positioning, personas and proof points that it serves back out to every tool. If you already run Salesforce and want fewer moving parts, the first. If your stack is mixed and you will not replace it, the second.
Which has better integrations?
Both, and the GTM Tech Index grades both A on that axis for opposite reasons, which is unusual. Agentforce earns it because the platform already reaches everything: a public marketplace with thousands of listings, comprehensive interface references, and an agent model that converts a customer's existing automations, prompt templates and endpoints into agent actions. Octave earns it because reaching everything is the entire product: a versioned interface with public documentation, five enumerated interface surfaces, a protocol server, a command line kit, an agent runtime plugin and per workspace access keys.
Does either come with contact data?
Neither sells you contacts, which is worth knowing before you budget. Agentforce bundles no prospect database at all; the agent works your own records, so provenance traces to systems you already own. Octave claims no contact database either, and an independent review states plainly that there is no native lead data or enrichment and a separate data layer is required. Both are layers over data you supply, so a contact source is a separate purchase in each case.
How do Agentforce Sales and Octave price?
Both publish a rate card and both sit above a cost the card does not contain. Agentforce publishes roughly two dollars per conversation, credits at five hundred dollars per hundred thousand, an action rate card and per user licensing from around a hundred and twenty five dollars a month, while independent guides report the data platform it grounds against as the largest and least predictable line, running from tens of thousands a year into six figures. Octave publishes one figure, fifteen hundred dollars a month billed annually for the top tier, with the other two columns unpriced and the credit unit varying by agent configuration.
Does either say whether my data trains their models?
Agentforce, and it is the strongest answer on that axis in the index. The vendor states it holds zero data retention agreements with the third party model providers it uses, so customer data is neither retained by those providers nor used to train their models, and the agent products are named inside the master agreement and its processing addendum rather than left to inference. One caveat the vendor discloses itself and a buyer should carry into a security review: data masking, one of the trust layer's headline protections, is currently disabled for this product.
How does the GTM Tech Index grade Agentforce Sales and Octave?
Both are graded on the same seventeen capability and compliance axes from public sources, and both sit at full documented depth. 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, and C on AI centrality because the agent layer sits on a platform that works completely without it. Octave takes A on AI centrality and A on ecosystem and integration depth. Both hold C on outreach compliance, recipient disclosure and deliverability discipline. 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 AI SDR & Outbound Agents page.
Each product creates an asset that did not exist before it, and neither vendor commits to returning that asset intact. At Agentforce the underlying records are the customer's own objects, and export capability is real and long documented through scheduled export, bulk interfaces and a large partner tooling ecosystem.
What is not published in a form a buyer can plan around is the agent layer specifically: what happens to conversation logs, audit trails, agent configurations and consumed credit entitlements at termination, and whether the grounding artefacts built inside the data platform leave with the customer.
At Octave, exporting artefacts is a feature row available on every tier including the free one and the library is retrievable programmatically through interfaces covering reading, playbooks and workspaces, which is the right answer to this axis and rare.
An independent review nonetheless reports the export format as limited to a single document type, which for a versioned structured library is a lossy way out, since the structure and the version history are precisely what the customer paid to create. Ask both what an export contains and in what shape. The second thing worth carrying into a budget conversation is that both published prices sit above a dependency the price does not include.
Independent guides consistently report that the data platform Agentforce grounds against is the largest and least predictable line on the bill, with entry list prices in the tens of thousands of dollars a year growing into six figures, so buyers price the agent and are surprised by the data.
Octave's floor of fifteen hundred dollars a month billed annually is the only figure on its served pricing page, the other two tiers carry allowances without prices, the credit unit varies by each agent's configuration and model settings, and independent listings from earlier the same year report an entry tier at a tenth of the current floor.