Roark and Cekura (formerly Vocera) both do the core job: test voice and chat agents before launch, monitor them in production, and score the conversation on more than a transcript. If they're both on your shortlist, you're comparing two real platforms — not a toy against a serious one. We build Roark, so we'll be specific about where it concentrates and honest about where Cekura is strong.
The short answer
Both cover simulation testing, voice-specific evaluation, production monitoring with dashboards, and integrations across the major voice stacks, with SOC 2 and HIPAA on the compliance side. The decision isn't about who has "testing" versus "monitoring" — it's about how deep the simulation goes, how the audio is scored, and what the platform does with a failure once it finds one.
Roark leans hardest into simulation over real telephony, a broad audio-native metric set, and a production-replay loop that turns real failures into permanent regression tests — with reporting built to settle the "is this ready to ship?" question on evidence. It's the best-designed platform in the category, built for the people who actually run voice agents.
And it's proven where it counts: teams at BCG, Spectrum, and Podium run their production voice agents on Roark. Enterprises with real volume and real compliance requirements trust it with their traffic — a stronger signal than any spec sheet.
Where Roark concentrates
- Simulation over real phone calls. Roark dials your agent over the PSTN from leased numbers (and tests WebRTC stacks over WebRTC) — the real call path, not a loopback — from personas, scenarios, run plans, and schedules in 45 languages and accents, with CI gating and inbound and outbound support.
- Audio-native metrics, plus unlimited custom. 64+ built-in metrics and unlimited custom ones — scoring pronunciation, emotion, vocal stress, pace and pauses, and interruptions from the recording itself.
- Production replay as the core loop. Capture a real failed call, replay it against your updated agent, and keep it as a regression test — so the incident becomes coverage, not a one-time fix.
- Reporting the whole team reads. Dashboards with configurable widgets, saved reports, issues filed automatically when a metric breaks, and OpenTelemetry traces.
- Integrations you can inspect. Public, per-platform docs — a code-level Pipecat observer, a self-hosted LiveKit SDK, and API-key flows for Vapi and Retell — plus Node and Python SDKs.
- Compliance. SOC 2 Type II, a HIPAA BAA, and annual penetration tests — see our security page.
Where Cekura is genuinely strong
An honest comparison names the other side's strengths. A few of Cekura's are worth weighing:
- LLM-judge tuning. Cekura foregrounds editing and replaying evaluation prompts against real recordings to align its judges with your ground truth. If hand-tuning the evaluator is central to how your team works, probe both vendors on how much control you get over the scoring layer.
- Contact-center reach. Cekura advertises integrations into traditional contact-center stacks (e.g. Cisco, Five9) alongside the modern voice platforms. If your agent lives in a legacy telephony environment, confirm that path with each vendor.
- A large pre-built scenario library. Cekura markets thousands of ready-made test scenarios. If you want a big starter set out of the box, weigh how much each platform hands you on day one.
These are real. A comparison that pretended the competitor had no strengths wouldn't be worth reading.
When Roark is the right call
- Simulation fidelity matters most. Tests that traverse the real telephony path — PSTN and WebRTC — with structured personas and scenarios you can version and schedule.
- Your failures live in the audio layer, and you want a broad audio-native metric set plus unlimited custom metrics rather than a fixed list.
- You want failures to become permanent tests via the production-replay loop, not just alerts in a dashboard.
- You run Pipecat or self-hosted LiveKit and want the integration mechanics documented and inspectable before you buy.
- You're in a regulated vertical. SOC 2 Type II plus a HIPAA BAA clears procurement in healthcare and financial services.
The fastest way to decide
Two credible platforms won't separate on a feature grid — your own calls will. Take your ten worst production calls from last month, run them through each platform's evaluation, and see what each actually catches; then run the same simulation scenario against your staging agent on both. For Roark, email support@roark.ai with a recording and we'll score it live, or check the mechanics at docs.roark.ai.
