The 5 best Coactive AI alternatives in 2025

Coactive AI is a pretty impressive platform for digging through unstructured visual data like images and videos. But let's be real, the most powerful tool isn't always the right tool for the job.

Maybe you're on the hunt for something that’s built for a specific task, like getting customer support on autopilot. Perhaps you don’t have months to wait for a custom setup and just need something that works now. Or maybe you just want to see a price tag without sitting through a sales demo first.

Whatever your reason for looking around, you're in the right place. I’ve spent time digging through the options to find the top five Coactive AI alternatives that can help you find the perfect fit for what your team actually needs to get done.

What is Coactive AI? Understanding the need for Coactive AI alternatives

In a nutshell, Coactive is an AI platform that helps businesses make sense of their huge libraries of images and videos. You can think of it as a smart search engine for all your visual content. Its main purpose is to help you search, classify, and analyze this data so you can get a handle on what you’ve got.

It uses dynamic tagging and what it calls "multimodal intelligence" (looking at video, image, and audio all at once) to understand the content. This comes in handy for things like personalizing content recommendations, moderating user-generated content, or figuring out which visuals are actually performing well, especially for media and e-commerce companies.

How I picked the best Coactive AI alternatives

While Coactive is a beast for general visual data analysis, many of us need a tool that’s less of a Swiss Army knife and more of a specialized screwdriver. We need something that doesn't just analyze data, but actually does something with it.

Here’s the simple checklist I used to find alternatives that deliver real value, quickly:

• How fast can you actually use it? I looked for tools you can set up yourself. No mandatory demos, no six-month onboarding plans. Just sign up and go.

• What’s its main job? Is it a generic AI platform, or was it built from the ground up for a specific, important task like automating customer service, streamlining IT support, or helping developers get work done faster?

• Does it play well with others? A great tool has to connect with the software you already rely on. It should easily plug into your help desk (like Zendesk or Freshdesk), chat tools (like Slack or Microsoft Teams), and knowledge bases without forcing you to rebuild your whole workflow.

• Are you in control? Can you actually tell the AI what to do? I leaned towards tools that let you easily tweak the AI’s personality, customize the actions it can take, and restrict its knowledge to stop it from going off-script.

• Is the price clear? It’s a huge red flag if a company hides its pricing. I searched for tools with straightforward plans and steered clear of confusing "per-resolution" fees that end up punishing you for being successful.

A quick comparison of Coactive AI alternatives

For a quick overview, here’s how the top alternatives stack up against each other.

A deep dive into the 5 best Coactive AI alternatives

Alright, let's get into the nitty-gritty of what makes each of these platforms tick.

1. eesel AI

While Coactive is busy analyzing your content, eesel AI is putting it to work. It’s the best choice for teams that want to automate customer service, IT support, and internal questions right inside the tools they already use every day.

Why I chose it: eesel AI is built to solve the biggest frustrations with adopting AI: it's often too complex and takes forever to show results. With eesel AI, you can sign up, connect your help desk, and have a capable AI agent working for you in minutes, not months. It connects directly with tools like Zendesk, Gorgias, and Slack, so you don’t have to change a thing about how you work.

What it does well:

• Truly self-serve: You can sign up and get your first AI agent running without ever having to talk to a salesperson. It’s a breath of fresh air.

• Powerful simulation mode: This is a standout feature. You can test your AI on thousands of your actual past support tickets to see exactly how it would have performed. This lets you calculate your potential ROI before it ever interacts with a live customer.

The eesel AI simulation feature allows users to test the AI's performance on past tickets to predict future automation success, making it a strong Coactive AI alternative for support teams.::Coactive AI alternatives

• Unifies all your knowledge: It learns from everything you have, old tickets, help center articles, and all the information scattered across Confluence or Google Docs, to provide accurate answers that have the right context.

This infographic shows how eesel AI unifies knowledge from various sources, a key feature for Coactive AI alternatives focused on automation.::Coactive AI alternatives

• Gives you full control: A simple workflow builder lets you decide exactly which tickets the AI should handle. You can adjust its personality and even create custom actions, like having it look up an order status in Shopify using an API call.

The workflow builder in eesel AI gives users full control over the AI's actions, a crucial aspect for those seeking Coactive AI alternatives.::Coactive AI alternatives

Pros:

• You can be up and running in minutes with one-click integrations.

• The pricing is transparent, with no weird per-resolution fees.

• The simulation mode lets you roll it out with confidence, knowing how it will perform.

Cons:

• It's hyper-focused on support and knowledge automation, so it's not the right tool if you just want to analyze media files.

Pricing:

eesel AI's pricing is very clear. The Team plan starts at $299/month (or $239/month billed annually) which includes 1,000 AI interactions. The Business plan is $799/month (or $639/month annually) and adds important features like training on past tickets and AI actions for triaging issues.

eesel AI's transparent pricing page is a significant advantage for those looking for Coactive AI alternatives without hidden costs.::Coactive AI alternatives

2. Visual Layer

Why I chose it: If your main job is prepping huge batches of images and videos to feed into machine learning models, then Visual Layer is a great pick. It comes from the team that made Fastdup, an open-source tool for finding duplicate files, and it’s really good at cleaning up data by spotting outliers and things that have been mislabeled.

What it does well: It’s a no-code platform for visual search, filtering, and tagging. It doesn’t care which ML model you use, and you can run it either on your own servers or in the cloud.

Pros:

• It's designed for data quality control and curation before you train a model.

• It's straightforward enough for both technical and non-technical people on the team.

Cons:

• It’s a tool for preparing data, not an all-in-one platform for analytics or automation. It doesn't have the workflow features you’d need for something like handling live customer support.

Pricing: Starts at $200/month.

3. Clarifai

Why I chose it: Clarifai is like an AI playground for developers who want to build their own applications from scratch. It gives you a huge library of pre-trained models for images, video, text, and audio, which makes it a much more flexible toolkit than Coactive if your project needs more than just visual data.

What it does well: It offers a massive collection of pre-trained models you can use right away, plus the tools to build, train, and share your own custom models. Everything is accessible through an API.

Pros:

• Incredibly flexible and powerful if you're working on a custom development project.

• The free tier is generous, making it easy to jump in and start experimenting.

Cons:

• You really need to be a developer to get much out of it. It’s a box of parts, not a finished product. You’ll have to build all the business logic for your specific use case, whether that's content moderation or support automation, completely on your own.

Pricing:

Clarifai's pricing is based on your usage.

• Community: A free plan that gives you up to 1,000 API calls per month.

• Essential: Starts at $30/month for 30,000 API calls and lets you fine-tune specialized models.

• Professional: Starts at $300/month for 100,000 API calls and access to more powerful hardware.

4. Tensorlake

Why I chose it: Tensorlake calls itself an "AI data cloud," and it does one thing extremely well: it takes unstructured data like documents, images, and slides and neatly converts it into structured formats like JSON or Markdown. This makes the data ready for large language models and RAG systems. If your biggest headache is just getting your data into a usable state, this is a tool worth a look.

What it does well: It has document ingestion APIs that can handle a ton of different file types, serverless workflows for fast processing, and it’s smart enough to keep the original layout and context of your documents intact.

Pros:

• Very efficient for turning messy, unstructured files into AI-ready data.

• The pay-per-page pricing can be really affordable for specific, well-defined projects.

Cons:

• This is a highly specialized, developer-first tool for just one part of the AI pipeline. It doesn’t offer the analytics, automation, or user-facing features you'd find in Coactive or eesel AI.

Pricing: Starts at $0.01 per page processed.

5. Commerce.AI

Why I chose it: Commerce.AI was built for a single purpose: pulling market intelligence from the mountain of unstructured data in the e-commerce world. It gathers text, voice, images, and videos from hundreds of sources to give you a clear picture of what's happening in your market.

What it does well: It automatically collects and cleans data from product reviews, social media, and other sources. It then boils all this information down into useful insights about products, brand perception, and market trends.

Pros:

• Fantastic for competitive analysis and understanding what customers are actually saying in the e-commerce space.

Cons:

• The pricing isn't public, which means you're signing up for a classic enterprise sales process. It’s also focused on market analysis, not on automating your internal workflows or handling customer chats directly.

Pricing:

Commerce.AI's pricing is not available publicly. Their plans are split into Genius (Volume-Based Pricing) and Ultra (Enterprise Pricing), and you have to contact their sales team for a quote for either one.

How to choose the right Coactive AI alternative

The best tool is always the one that solves your most pressing problem. Here are a few thoughts to help you decide.

• First, figure out your core problem. What are you actually trying to accomplish? Are you sifting through a decade-old video archive for hidden gems (Coactive or Visual Layer might be for you)? Are you building a totally new AI application from the ground up (check out Clarifai)? Or are you just tired of answering the same three customer questions a hundred times a day (then you want something like eesel AI)? Your goal will point you to the right tool.

• Value speed and simplicity. A platform that promises to do everything is useless if it takes a team of developers six months to get it working. Look for solutions with self-serve signup, free trials, and clear instructions.

• Keep an eye on the price tag. Be wary of platforms with unpredictable "per-resolution" or "per-ticket" fees. These pricing models essentially punish you for growing. Look for clear, flat-rate pricing that you can actually build a budget around.

The verdict: Which of these Coactive AI alternatives should you choose?

Coactive is a very capable tool, especially for large teams that have the time and resources to manage and analyze massive archives of visual content.

But for most businesses that need a practical AI solution that starts delivering value right away, a more focused tool is almost always the smarter choice.

For any team working in customer service, IT support, or internal operations, eesel AI stands out. Its straightforward setup, smooth integration with existing tools, and risk-free simulation mode deliver real, measurable results in minutes, not months.

Stop analyzing, start automating.

See how eesel AI can resolve over 50% of your support tickets. You can simulate it on your past tickets for free, and be live in minutes.

Start Your Free Trial