Agentforce is packaged inside the Salesforce CRM suite: its agents are grounded in Salesforce data, its reasoning and state live inside Salesforce, and it runs only on Salesforce-hosted infrastructure. Akka is an open agentic platform that runs any workload across any system, on the cloud, VPC, Kubernetes, or on-prem you choose — you own the stack.
Agentforce is an application-layer agent built into Salesforce. Agents are authored in Agentforce Builder, compiled by Agent Script into Salesforce metadata, and executed by the Atlas Reasoning Engine, grounded in Salesforce CRM objects and Data Cloud. Data Cloud is a technical prerequisite and the agents are an add-on to your Salesforce licenses.
It reaches non-Salesforce systems through Flow and API callouts, but the orchestration, reasoning, and state stay inside Salesforce, and it runs only on Salesforce-hosted SaaS. You deploy where Salesforce runs it, not where you choose.
Akka is the runtime an agentic system runs on, not an application inside one. It provides native agents, durable in-memory state, real-time streaming, an API layer, orchestration, observability, and governance as one platform, for any workload across any system, independent of any single SaaS data model.
It carries no platform prerequisite and no vendor data model. You deploy it on Akka cloud, a hyperscaler VPC, your own Kubernetes, on-prem, or sovereign cloud, and the specs are portable. The stack is yours to own and move.
| Dimension | With Agentforce | With Akka |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | Agents grounded in Salesforce CRM metadata and Data Cloud; external systems reached through Flow and API callouts, with reasoning and state inside Salesforce. | A general-purpose runtime for any agentic workload across any system, with no dependence on a single SaaS data model. |
| Deployment | Salesforce-hosted SaaS only, as an add-on to Salesforce licenses, with Data Cloud as a technical prerequisite. | Runs on infrastructure you own — Akka cloud, a hyperscaler VPC, your Kubernetes, on-prem, or sovereign cloud, with portable specs. |
| Availability | No contractual uptime SLA; the standard Master Subscription Agreement commits to "commercially reasonable efforts," roughly 99.9% in practice, with no automatic service credits. | 99.9999% on the entire platform, backed by contractual indemnities, with sub-1-minute RTO, zero-byte RPO, and active-active HA/DR. |
| State & reasoning | Held inside Salesforce — CRM metadata and Data Cloud — bound to the Salesforce data model. | Durable state held in memory, vendor-neutral and active-active replicated, at 4 ms reads and sub-10 ms writes. |
| Governance | The Einstein Trust Layer detects toxicity and bias, masks prompts and responses, and logs an audit trail to Data Cloud — scoped to the Salesforce ecosystem, not to the EU AI Act broadly. | Risk and compliance define policies independently; the runtime enforces them inline on every action across any workload, pre-deployment classification against 190 regulations and 1,040 controls. |
| Cost model | Consumption — Flex Credits at about $0.10 per action (20 credits), or $2 per conversation; the meter moves with every action or conversation. | One shared-compute runtime carries the same workload on up to 90% less infrastructure, at a fixed annual fee. Akka Optimize keeps improving the models on your own production traffic, so cost per task keeps falling as the system runs. |
It comes down to whether governance covers the whole AI system or only the part inside Salesforce. Agentforce governs the data flowing through its own ecosystem. With Akka, risk and compliance write the policies independently of the agents, and the runtime enforces them on every action, across any workload, with no developer code to customize.
Scoped to Salesforce
Agentforce governs through the Einstein Trust Layer: toxicity and bias detection, prompt and response masking, a zero-retention LLM gateway, and an audit trail logged to Data Cloud. Those safeguards are scoped to the Salesforce ecosystem and the data flowing through it.
It is not a broad EU AI Act conformance program. It does not perform pre-deployment high-risk classification, gate a deployment before it ships, capture multi-persona regulatory sign-offs, or produce a sealed, portable audit artifact for systems outside Salesforce.
Block & escalate
With Akka, your risk and compliance teams write the policies themselves, in a separate versioned lifecycle that is independent of the agents — there is no developer code to customize. The runtime enforces every policy inline at the agent boundary, so human-in-the-loop approvals, human-on-the-loop halt switches, sanitizers, guardrails, evaluations, testing gates, and simulations all run before an action executes and block or escalate anything that does not pass.
Every call is traced automatically into petabyte-scale, tamper-evident storage, and that same trace data feeds continuous evaluations that keep running in production, right alongside your agents. This applies to any agentic workload, not only the part inside a single SaaS application.
Reach for Agentforce when the work lives inside Salesforce — agents grounded in your CRM data and Data Cloud, automating processes on Salesforce objects and business logic — and you are already committed to the Salesforce platform and its licensing, and content to have Salesforce host and run the agent layer for you.
Reach for Akka when the agentic workload must span multiple systems of record, carry a contractual availability SLA, govern to the EU AI Act across the whole system, and run on infrastructure you choose — any cloud, your Kubernetes, on-prem, or sovereign cloud — with portable specs and no dependence on a single vendor's data model.
A sample of agentic and real-time systems on Akka Platform:
Akka Platform runs and governs the entire agentic system under a contractual SLA, across any system, on the infrastructure you own. Tell us what you are building, and we will show you how it runs in production.
