Gong vs Attention vs Actively vs Ergo: The Three Established Players and the One to Watch

The one line version of each

• Gong: The category leader in revenue intelligence. Best for larger teams with a RevOps or enablement function to drive adoption. Records, transcribes, and analyzes conversations, then leaves the "now what" to you.
• Attention: AI native conversation intelligence built to take action. Real time coaching during the call, automated follow ups, and hands free CRM updates. Aimed at teams that want the software to do the work, not just show it.
• Actively: Account prioritization, not conversation analysis. It reads your CRM and past deal outcomes to tell reps which accounts to work right now. A different job than the other three.
• Ergo (the up and comer): The newest and smallest of the four, worth watching rather than buying blind. Its bet is revenue infrastructure: a unified data layer that turns every call, email, and signal into structured, live deal data so both people and AI agents act from the same source of truth.

Comparison at a glance

Funding, customer, and pricing figures are drawn from public vendor announcements and third party directories as of 2026 and move quickly. Confirm current numbers before treating any of them as fixed.

What is Gong?

Gong is the platform most people picture when they hear "revenue intelligence." Founded in 2015, it records, transcribes, and analyzes sales calls, emails, and meetings, then rolls the data up into deal health, forecasting, and coaching insights. It is widely reported to serve more than 4,500 customers and to be the reference point the entire category gets measured against.

What Gong is best at: capturing what actually happened in your deals and surfacing patterns across a rep team that are almost impossible to see by hand, such as which reps spend real time on discovery and which skip it. The Salesforce integration is consistently rated best in class, and the manager level dashboards are where most of the value shows up.

Where Gong falls short: it tells you what happened, then hands the work back to you. The recording and analysis are strong, but turning insight into action is still a human job, which is why teams that buy Gong purely as a recorder tend to waste most of what they pay for. It also carries a platform fee and enterprise pricing that rarely pencils out for small teams selling low ticket deals.

Best for: sales orgs of roughly fifty reps or more that have a RevOps or enablement function to build coaching workflows around the data.

What is Attention?

Attention, founded in 2021, is an AI native take on conversation intelligence that is built to act rather than just report. It captures calls, emails, and meetings, then automates the parts reps hate: follow up emails, next steps, and CRM updates that happen without manual data entry. It also coaches reps in real time during the call using scorecards tied to frameworks like MEDDIC and BANT, and it ships an MCP server so tools like Claude and ChatGPT can query call and deal data directly.

Where Attention differs from Gong: the pitch is automation, not analytics. Instead of a dashboard you have to open and read, Attention aims to do the post call work for you and guide the rep live. Teams report meaningful weekly time savings from the automation layer.

Where it falls short: it is younger and smaller than Gong, with a smaller install base and less depth in the pure analytics and enterprise forecasting Gong is known for. Pricing is quote only, so it screens out teams that need public pricing for budget approval.

Best for: teams that want the software to reduce admin and coach in the moment, rather than teams that mainly want deep retrospective analytics.

What is Actively?

Actively AI is the odd one out, and that is the point. Founded in 2022 by Stanford AI researchers, it is not a conversation tool. It is an account prioritization engine. It connects your CRM, past deal outcomes, and buying signals, then deploys per account AI agents that answer one question continuously: which accounts and contacts should your reps work right now.

The distinction that matters: Gong, Attention, and Ergo all work on deals that already exist. Actively works one step earlier, on which deals should exist at all. It learns your actual ICP from closed won patterns rather than a generic filter of company size and industry, and it is reported to be in use at teams like Ramp and Samsara.

Where it falls short: it decides who to work, but it is not primarily an outreach or conversation tool, so timing can slip in the handoff to the systems that actually send. It needs mature, clean CRM data to be worth the setup, and pricing is custom and enterprise sized.

Best for: enterprise teams with large account universes and good Salesforce data, where reps waste hours deciding what to work.

What is Ergo?

Ergo is the up and comer, and it belongs in a different tier than the other three. It is the newest and smallest name here, founded by two Georgia Tech classmates, backed by Y Combinator, and still at the seed stage after a $2.8M round announced in 2026. So treat what follows as a bet on where the market is heading, not a proven platform with the track record of Gong, Attention, or Actively.

Its pitch is not "better intelligence." It is "revenue infrastructure": a unified data layer that captures every call, email, Slack thread, and CRM update and turns it into structured, live deal data, so CRM hygiene, follow up, deal risk, forecasting, and coaching happen automatically.

The idea that makes Ergo worth watching: it argues the real value in AI era sales software is not in the application on top, which is where Gong lives, but in the plumbing underneath. The reason is AI agents. Agents cannot act reliably on stale or siloed data, so whoever owns the clean, live data layer feeds both the humans and the agents. Ergo positions itself as that layer, with source backed deal health rather than a black box score. Early customers reported include Rho, Corgi, Retell AI, and Greptile.

Where it falls short, and why it is not yet a peer to the other three: it is very early. The footprint is small, the track record is short, and "revenue infrastructure" is a category Ergo is still building rather than one buyers already shop for. If you need a proven system today, start with the established three. If you like being early and the data layer thesis resonates, Ergo is the name to keep on your radar.

Best for: early adopters and forward looking revenue leaders who want to track where the market is going, and fast growing teams that feel their CRM is already stale and want a clean data foundation for both reps and the agents they are starting to deploy.

Why three of these refuse to compete with Gong (the part that matters)

Here is the pattern underneath the feature comparison, and it is the most useful thing on this page if you sell for a living.

Gong owns "revenue intelligence." It built the category in 2015 and it is now the name every newcomer gets measured against. When you own a category that completely, you set a trap for anyone who follows: they get compared to you on your terms, and "a slightly better Gong" is a losing pitch against a company doing hundreds of millions in revenue.

So watch what the other three actually do. None of them try to win the "better revenue intelligence" label. Each one names a new category so the buyer stops comparing them to Gong at all.

• Attention reframes the axis from analysis to action. Its story casts the incumbent as passive, the tool that tells you what happened, and positions itself as the one that does the work in real time. Same raw conversation data, different problem statement.
• Actively reframes the question the buyer is even asking. Not "what happened on the call" but "which accounts should you be working." It calls that GTM superintelligence. By moving up the funnel, it steps out of the comparison entirely.
• Ergo, the newest and smallest of the group, is making the boldest category play of the three. It reframes to the layer beneath everyone. Not the app, the infrastructure. Its argument is that the value is moving under the application layer to the data plumbing that humans and AI agents both run on, which quietly frames every app level tool, Gong included, as sitting on top of the thing that actually matters. It is the riskiest bet here and the clearest example of a young company trying to name a category rather than fight for an existing one.

This is category creation, and it is evangelist selling in the wild. Each of these companies is creating demand for a problem framing that did not have a name yet. "Your reps are working the wrong accounts." "Your CRM is stale and your agents cannot act on it." Nobody was shopping for a solution to those exact problems until someone named them. That is what selling before a category exists looks like, and it is the only sane way to enter a market an incumbent already owns.

If you are building a 0 to 1 sales motion, this is the lesson: when the category is taken, do not sell a comparison. Sell a new frame. Reshape the buyer's problem into a category you can own, then create the demand for it. It is the same move behind the all in one HR platform, the AI live conversation category, and the newest wave of category creation happening right now.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between Gong and Attention?

Both capture and analyze sales conversations. Gong is the established revenue intelligence platform and leans toward analytics, forecasting, and manager coaching dashboards. Attention is a newer AI native tool that leans toward automation, doing the post call work and coaching reps live rather than mainly reporting after the fact.

Is Actively AI a Gong competitor?

Not really. Gong analyzes conversations on deals you already have. Actively works one step earlier and decides which accounts and contacts your reps should target in the first place. Some enterprise teams run both, because they solve different problems.

What is revenue infrastructure?

It is the category Ergo is trying to build. The idea is a shared data layer that keeps a clean, live record of every deal, so that both humans and AI agents act from the same accurate source instead of a CRM that only reflects what someone remembered to type.

Is Ergo worth adopting, or should I wait?

Ergo is the early stage up and comer of the group, still at the seed stage in 2026 with a small footprint. If you need a proven system in production today, start with Gong, Attention, or Actively depending on the job you are solving. If you are an early adopter, the data layer thesis fits your stack, and you are comfortable partnering with a young company, Ergo is the one to watch and the most interesting long term bet.

Which of these is best for a small sales team?

Often none of them at full price. Gong, Attention, and Actively are enterprise priced and are usually overkill for very small teams selling low ticket deals. A small team is better served by lighter conversation tools until there is a RevOps function to drive adoption and act on the data.

Do these replace each other or stack together?

Mostly they stack. Actively decides who to work, a conversation tool like Gong or Attention handles the deals in flight, and a layer like Ergo tries to keep the underlying data clean for all of it. They overlap at the edges but they are not clean one for one substitutes.

Which of these integrates with Orum?

If you run Orum as your dialer, Gong is the one with a native integration. Orum connects directly through the Gong Collective, so call tasks flow from Gong Engage into Orum and every call, recording, and outcome logs back to Gong automatically. Attention, Actively, and Ergo do not offer a native Orum integration today, so getting Orum call data into them would mean building on Orum's webhooks or open API. For teams already standardized on Orum, that native Gong connection is a real, practical advantage.

Who is behind this comparison?

Colin Specter, VP of Sales at Empathy.com and previously at Orum and Namely, where he has led category creation and evangelist sales motions.