Open Source Stream Alternatives

Parlant is a self-hostable conversational AI server designed for teams building customer-facing agents that need to stay on-brand, on-policy, and predictable in production. It sits between your frontend and your LLM provider, managing every interaction through a structured control layer rather than relying on monolithic system prompts or rigid intent graphs.

The core idea is context engineering: instead of stuffing all your rules into one prompt and hoping the model follows them, Parlant dynamically assembles only the rules, data, and tools relevant to each turn. The result is that the 200th behavioral rule is as safe to add as the first, with no degradation in adherence.

Key capabilities:

• Guidelines define conditional behavioral rules that fire based on conversational context. When several apply at once, Parlant merges them intelligently without manual routing.
• Canned responses let you lock down exact wording for high-stakes moments. In strict mode, required fields must be present in context before a response can be selected, making hallucination prevention structural and deterministic.
• Journeys model multi-step interactions while preserving the fluid, non-linear nature of real dialogue. Users can mix topics and circle back without losing context.
• Full traceability on every turn: which guidelines fired, which glossary terms were matched, and why the agent responded the way it did.

This is a meaningful departure from tools like Rasa or flow-based builders. Changing agent behavior is a content change (add or edit a guideline), not a structural one (rewire a graph). That makes it practical for product teams to feed ongoing feedback directly into the agent without requiring engineering intervention for every adjustment.

Parlant is LLM-agnostic and works with OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure, and others. It's built for enterprise AI teams where tone, edge cases, and policy constraints aren't afterthoughts.

Ethora is a messaging SDK for developers and product teams who need to ship chat features fast, without building everything from scratch. It targets web, iOS, and Android through React and React Native components, and it covers both traditional team chat and AI-powered assistant functionality in one package.

The core use case is embedding a fully functional chat experience into an existing product. Drop in the React component, configure it to match your brand, and you have 1-on-1 messaging, group chats, file and document exchange, voice messages, reactions, and push notifications. The UI is fully customizable, so it can match your product's visual style rather than looking like a third-party widget.

Beyond basic messaging, Ethora includes:

• AI chat agents backed by LLMs, RAG, and vector embeddings, so the bot can answer questions grounded in your own documents or website content
• Digital wallet integration for tokenization and in-app asset management
• Gamification features for user engagement
• Social sign-on and webhook/SQS support for backend integrations
• Custom messages, events, and metadata for building non-standard workflows

The AI agent setup is handled through an admin panel. You configure a prompt, upload documents, or crawl your website, and the agent answers with context drawn from that material. Real-world deployments include a HIPAA-compliant healthcare chatbot indexing thousands of medical conference pages, and a workers' compensation platform connecting injured workers with caseworkers.

Ethora's front-end code (React Native mobile app, React web app, NPM component, WordPress plugin, and JS widget) is open source. The backend is closed source by default, but self-hosted and perpetual license options are available for teams that need full control or deep server-side customization.

Pricing starts at a free tier covering 1,000 monthly active users, with paid plans adding SLA guarantees, custom domains, and dedicated hosting. It's positioned as an alternative to building chat interfaces in-house, or to tools like Chatwoot or Typebot when you need both messaging and AI agents in a single SDK.