How Tier2 differs

Every claim about another product on this page is something they publish about themselves, linked to the source. These are different tools for different queues, and if you leave knowing you want the other kind, this page did its job.

The short version

What is the difference between Tier2 and an AI support agent?

An AI support agent is built to resolve a conversation without a human, and is measured on how many it closes. Tier2 is built to produce evidence an engineer will trust, and is measured on whether every claim it makes cites the probe that produced it. Those are different jobs, and most companies with a technical product eventually need both.

	Tier2	Autonomous resolution platforms
Primary goal	Produce evidence an engineer will trust	Resolve the conversation without a human
Answers from a knowledge base	Yes, cited to the article	Yes, and it is the core of the product
Calls your APIs to take actions	No. No write-capable credential enters the sandbox	Yes. Refunds, account updates, subscription changes
Runs code to reproduce a reported bug	Yes, in a per-tenant sandbox	Not a published capability
Live DNS, TLS and HTTP probes	Yes, against validated public hostnames	Not a published capability
Reads your database	Named, parameterized queries on a read replica	Through APIs and connectors, not SQL
Sends to the customer unattended	Never. Draft-only, earned per category	Yes. Autonomous resolution is the product
Uncited claims	Dropped by the renderer, and the drop is counted	A supervisor model reviews for grounding
Pricing basis	Flat plan, no per-seat charge	Per conversation or per resolution
Buyer	Technical teams, roughly 3 to 15 engineers	Enterprise CX organisations

Named, with sources

Who should you buy instead?

Decagon

An AI concierge platform for enterprise support across chat, voice, email and SMS. Agent Operating Procedures are written in natural language, versioned in Git, and shipped with evals.

Offer surface-level, read-only API connections that can only retrieve information ... Achieves deep API integration, enabling the AI to both read information and take meaningful actions.
decagon.ai/blog/ai-agent-assistance

How it differs. Decagon markets deep API access and autonomous closure as the point. It treats read-only integration as a limitation to be overcome, which is the exact constraint we treat as the guarantee.

Buy them instead if: You have high routine volume, the actions are reversible, and you are measured on deflection or resolution rate.

Sierra

An agent platform with a studio for building customer-facing agents, 40+ integrations, custom integrations to proprietary systems, and simulation and regression testing for agent behaviour.

Agent actions can take real-time actions or route conversations to human teams with context.
sierra.ai

How it differs. Sierra agents take real-time actions and route to humans with context. The testing story is genuinely strong. It is built to act on the customer relationship, not to investigate infrastructure.

Buy them instead if: You want conversational agents across a broad surface and you need to prove behaviour before shipping it.

Intercom Fin

An AI agent bolted onto the Intercom support stack, priced per resolution on top of seats.

Fin resolves customer questions instantly, and you only pay for the ones it resolves.
www.intercom.com/fin

How it differs. Fin is strongest when the queue is customer conversations inside a helpdesk you already run. It retrieves and calls tools; it does not execute code to reproduce a defect.

Buy them instead if: You are already on Intercom and want resolution on the existing conversation volume.

Known and chosen

What are you giving up?

Four constraints you will hit, and the reason each one exists. None of them is an oversight we plan to fix.

We do not close the ticket

Four of five verdicts arrive as a draft that waits for a human, and no remediation runs against your systems. If what you want is the last click automated, an autonomous resolution platform is the correct purchase and we will say so. What we automate is the twenty minutes of correlation before it, which is the part that costs an engineer their afternoon.

Setup needs an hour of a senior engineer

A read-only replica role created by your DBA from a script we provide, and about an hour with a platform engineer to map which of your control-plane fields lie. That hour is not overhead we have failed to remove; it is where the diagnosis quality comes from. An agent that has been told which column is stale stops escalating on it.

Access is by invitation

Onboarding is founder-led and we take a small number of customers at a time, which means we say no to queues we are wrong for. It is slower to start than a self-serve trial and it is the reason the first diagnosis is useful rather than generic.

Read-only is permanent

No write-capable credential enters the sandbox, so there is no configuration that grants one later. That closes the door on remediation features for good, and it is the same property that lets a security review finish in one meeting instead of one quarter.

The reasoning behind the read-only and draft-only decisions is written up in why Tier2 does not close your tickets.

Ready when you are

Bring us the queue the other tools hand back.

Send your last 200 technical tickets and we will show you what Tier2 would have answered and what it would have escalated.

Request access

Draft-only by defaultRead + probe access only