Parlant: review, pricing, security and alternatives

What Parlant does

Parlant belongs to the business agents family: agents specialised in one job: customer support, sales, finance, legal, HR, security. On our grid it ranks #13 of the 52 projects of this family listed in the directory.

Unlike a ready-made agent, a framework provides the parts to build one: tool calling, step sequencing, memory, coordination of several agents. It is aimed at teams that want a custom agent.

You use it from: developer SDK, terminal (CLI), and API. Usable models: GPT (OpenAI), Gemini (Google), Llama (Meta), and Claude (Anthropic). It can run on your own machine or server.

Who is Parlant for?

It targets a specific job (customer support, sales, finance, legal…) with workflows already set up. Typical tasks people give it:

• handle first-line customer requests
• prepare standard documents
• track cases and follow up

It is a good candidate if you are comfortable in a terminal and your data must stay on your machines.

Access and human control

A framework has no access of its own: the tools you plug in define what the agent can do. Start with read-only tools.

We could not establish whether it asks for human approval before sensitive actions: test it first on an unimportant account or folder.

Parlant pricing

The code is free, under the Apache-2.0 licence.

Getting started with Parlant

1. Install it: the project ships as a Python package (install with pip or uv). The exact command is in the repository README.
2. Create an API key with the model provider and put it in an environment variable, never in a shared or versioned file.
3. Start with the minimal example from the docs, then add one tool at a time and check what the agent does with it.
4. Give it a short, checkable task, review the result and its action log, then raise the difficulty step by step.

Security: risk level

A business agent acts on the company's behalf: define what it may promise, refund or change, and keep a record of its decisions.

Three habits: least privilege (minimal rights, dedicated keys), human approval for irreversible actions, a sandbox for code execution. The AI agent security check reviews your setup in a few minutes.

Project activity and releases

Created on February 15, 2024, the emcie-co/parlant repository has 18,308 stars, 1,551 forks and 15 open issues, with 5,485 commits in total. Last change 4 months ago.

Over the last 52 weeks: 745 commits, an average of 14.3 per week.

33 releases in total; 7 in the last twelve months. Latest release: v3.3.2, on April 28, 2026.

Parlant vs other business agents

GitHub stars of the best-rated open-source projects in the business agents family. Stars measure attention, not quality: a heavily promoted project collects them fast, a specialised tool will have few.

Parlant and other business agents at a glance

The 7 best-ranked agents in the same family, 7 of them open source. The score out of 100 only applies to open-source projects; for proprietary services we show the published entry price. A dash marks information the documentation does not state.

How we rated it

Score: 69/100, computed only from public, verifiable data, with no subjective testing or partnership:

• Adoption 27/40: 18,308 stars on a log scale (40 points from about 200,000).
• Activity 17/30: last commit 4 months ago, 1 release in six months, 745 commits in a year.
• Framework 25/30: licence, default human approval, self-hosting, model choice and documentation site.

The score does not say whether the agent will succeed at your tasks: it measures how solid the project is. The full grid is on the method page.