Rapport vs Bodyswaps: Which AI Soft Skills Platform Fits Your Team in 2026?

Both platforms train soft skills by putting the learner in a conversation with a virtual person. Bodyswaps started in virtual reality and grew outward to desktop and mobile. Rapport started with the face itself and grew outward into a training platform.

All product, pricing, and security details on this page were read from each vendor's own website and help center in October 2026. Vendors update these pages often, so re-verify before you quote anything in a proposal.

Where a company started tells you what it is still best at. The first hard problem a team solves usually becomes its moat. These two teams solved very different first problems.

Where Rapport came from

Rapport's technology comes from facial animation research that began in Edinburgh in 2009. That work spent a decade on one problem: making a digital face move correctly from audio. It shipped in major video games before it ever reached a training room.

Rapport spun out in 2019 and launched its self-serve platform in July 2024. It acquired Aquifer Motion in October 2025 to add full-body animation and cinematic camera tools. The company runs from Edinburgh with offices in San Francisco, Austin, Budapest, and Singapore.

Where Bodyswaps came from

Bodyswaps grew out of Somewhere Else, a London VR agency known for storytelling projects. In 2019 the team was asked to build a VR project for mental health nursing, and it saw a bigger market in soft skills. The company was co-founded in 2020 by Christophe Mallet, Tom Szirtes, and Julien Denoel.

Ufi Ventures invested £150,000 in October 2020, alongside Haatch Ventures and D Moonshots. Bodyswaps now lists offices in London and Raleigh, North Carolina, and a team of 30+ people. It says educators have built more than 2,000 learning pathways across 300+ campuses.

• Rapport's first problem: make a face behave like a person, in real time.
• Bodyswaps' first problem: make a whole lesson feel immersive, then scale it to every device a college owns.
• What that predicts: Rapport is deepest on the avatar. Bodyswaps is deepest on the curriculum around it.

Most comparisons in this category argue about avatars versus no avatars. That does not apply here, because both platforms put a virtual person in front of the learner. The real question is what surrounds that person and how it reacts.

What Bodyswaps does

• Delivers a library of 100+ modules on topics like job interviews, workplace communication, inclusive leadership, customer experience, and healthcare conversations.
• Wraps each roleplay in scaffolded learning: preparation, practice, quizzes, and reflection.
• Offers the body swap on every roleplay, so the learner can watch the exchange again from the other person's seat.
• Runs the same content in VR, on desktop, on the web, and on phones and tablets.
• Adds eye contact and hand movement analytics when the learner wears a headset.
• Builds healthcare content with subject matter experts from groups such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Royal Society of Medicine.

What Rapport does

• Renders a 3D avatar live, with facial animation driven by the learner's audio at roughly 50ms.
• Uses real-time rendering, not pre-recorded video, so the same words said two ways get two different reactions.
• Lets you set the character, voice, language, AI behavior, and branding, with characters from a built-in library, MetaHuman, Ready Player Me, or your own upload.
• Scores each attempt on competencies such as active listening, empathy, and clarity.
• Ships as a hosted link, an iframe, a web widget, a SCORM package, or a Unity or Unreal Engine build.

What this changes in practice

If you need a full soft skills curriculum next month, Bodyswaps hands you one. If you need one specific conversation to feel real, with a face that reacts to your learner's tone, Rapport is built for that. Many teams discover they are buying a curriculum when they thought they were buying an avatar, or the reverse.

Be fair about the trade. The body swap is a clever teaching tool that Rapport does not offer. Rapport's real-time face is the thing it has spent more than fifteen years refining.

Ask both vendors who builds scenario number 40, not scenario number one. The first one always looks easy in a demo. The fortieth tells you whether your team or the vendor owns the work.

How Bodyswaps builds a scenario

• Start from 40+ pre-made AI roleplay scenarios and 100+ modules, which is enough for many colleges to launch with no custom work.
• Use the no-code pathway builder to mix modules, roleplays, quizzes, and reflection into a custom learning path.
• Use the Open Conversation template to describe a scenario in plain language and let the AI build it.
• Get help from an AI assistant during customization.
• Custom roleplays for your own curriculum are listed from the Engage tier up.

How Rapport builds a scenario

• Start from a template library sorted by domain, covering sales, service, leadership, compliance, and L&D.
• Build custom scenarios with full control of the content, including character, learner role, situation, objectives, and the competencies you score.
• Choose the face, voice, and language that match your real audience, including your own uploaded character.
• On Enterprise, use professional services and prompt engineering support for high-stakes scenarios.

Read our guide on how to design an AI roleplay scenario before either demo. It will help you spot the difference between a good template and a good fit.

Here is the honest summary. If your team wants a large ready-made library and light editing, Bodyswaps gets you there faster. If your team needs a specific buyer, patient, or employee who looks and sounds like your real world, Rapport gives you more control over the person on screen.

Both platforms report on learners. They answer different manager questions. The easiest way to see it is side by side.

Bodyswaps measures whether a learner worked through a curriculum and reflected on it. Rapport measures whether a learner handled a human moment while it was happening. Colleges grading a class often want the first, while sales and service leaders changing behavior often want the second.

This is where pilots stall. A headset program needs devices, charging, cleaning, and updates. A browser program needs a link and a working microphone.

Bodyswaps has the better answer for a college that already owns headsets and wants the full immersive experience. Rapport has the better answer when learners are remote, on locked-down laptops, or when you want the avatar inside your own app or LMS course. Our guide to AI roleplay LMS integration covers the delivery path in detail.

Be straight with your security team here. Bodyswaps is ahead on published certification, and Rapport is ahead on hosting control. Know which one your reviewers care about before week one.

Bodyswaps security

• States ISO 27001 certification in its help center.
• Lets customers choose US, UK, EU, or Canada hosting for core services on Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
• Sends audio to Microsoft Azure for transcription and says it does not store audio recordings afterward.
• Says it does not use transcripts to train public AI models, and lets admins turn AI features off at the account level.
• Lists Google Gemini and OpenAI as AI processors in the US, and MongoDB Atlas in the EU for AI prompts and inferences.
• Keeps customer data accessible for 90 days after a contract ends, then deletes personal data.

Gaps to press on: no SOC 2 report is named, and the retention period for AI prompts is not stated. Ask how US-based model processing fits your residency rules if you chose a non-US region.

Rapport security

• States that your data stays yours, is encrypted, and is never sold or used to train AI models.
• Publishes technical detail in its developer documentation, including HTTPS and TLS, certificate issuance, and encrypted WebRTC media over DTLS.
• Operates under UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, using Standard Contractual Clauses for international transfers.
• Offers on-premise and private cloud hosting on Enterprise, the strongest data control in this comparison.

Gaps to press on: Rapport publishes no SOC 2, ISO 27001, or HIPAA certification. Ask for the current security pack and any audit reports under NDA early.

How to decide: if ISO 27001 is a hard gate, Bodyswaps clears it today. If your gate is that data never leaves your own environment, Rapport is the only one of the two that offers that option.

Both vendors offer a free 14 day trial with no credit card. After that, they price in completely different units. Rapport sells minutes, and Bodyswaps sells seats.

Bodyswaps pricing

• Free trial: 14 days, ready-made lessons, and unlimited AI roleplay practice on VR, PC, and mobile.
• Engage: 25 to 99 users. Custom roleplays, all 100+ modules, unlimited practice minutes, learner analytics, and class management.
• Embed: 100 to 999 users. Adds LMS connection, a dedicated success manager, and live onboarding.
• Enroll: 1,000+ users, custom priced, with a custom service agreement and quarterly check-ins.
• Discounts: 5% for two years, 10% for three years, 10% for education, and 25% for registered charities, on Embed and Enroll.
• Prices are not printed on the page. You get them through an instant quote tool or a sales call.

Rapport pricing

• Trial: free for 14 days with 50 minutes of avatar conversation and no credit card.
• Pro: $19 per month for 100 usage minutes and 1 creator.
• Business: $99 per month for 500 usage minutes, 3 creators, role-based control, and Rapport branding removed.
• Enterprise: quoted, with tailored usage, unlimited creators and workspaces, professional services, and on-premise or private cloud hosting.
• Overage: $0.21 per minute above your allowance, against an effective rate of $0.19 per minute.

See the full Rapport pricing page for current plan details.

How to compare seats against minutes

1. Count your learners and how many practice sessions each will do per month.
2. Multiply by average session length to get total minutes, then price that on Rapport's per-minute rate.
3. Get a Bodyswaps quote for the same learner count, and ask whether inactive learners still count as seats.
4. Add headsets, device management, and staff time if you plan to run Bodyswaps in VR.
5. Divide each total by the practice sessions you expect in year one. Cost per completed session is the only fair number.

A small team practicing a few key conversations usually costs less on minutes. A large cohort practicing often across a full curriculum usually costs less on seats with unlimited minutes.

Skip the category labels for a moment. Find the row that matches what your team actually needs to get better at.

If most rows point one way, you have your answer. If they split, you may have two programs, not one purchase.

When you need both

A university is the clearest example. The careers service rolls out Bodyswaps interview modules to thousands of students, while the medical school builds its own patient cases in Rapport.

A large employer can split the same way. New hires work through a Bodyswaps workplace communication pathway, and the sales and service teams rehearse their hardest live conversations in Rapport. Split by audience, measure each for a year, and decide at renewal.

Score both platforms on the same ten criteria and weight them for your program. Then ask both vendors the same nine questions. It takes an afternoon and removes most of the guesswork.

9 questions to ask on both demos

1. Build me a scenario right now from my own material. How long did it take, and who did the work?
2. Run the same roleplay twice, once calm and once rattled. What changed in the face, the reply, and the score?
3. Show me the scoring rubric as an admin sees it. What can I change?
4. What happens when a learner goes off script or tries to break the simulation?
5. Show me the exact LMS path, including SCORM or LTI version, what data comes back, and which tier it needs.
6. Which region holds my data, which AI providers process it, and how long is each piece kept?
7. Price my real volume: this many learners, this many sessions, this long each.
8. What does a learner without a headset, on a school or company laptop, actually get?
9. Run the scenario in my team's second language and let me judge it myself.

Get answers to questions six and seven in writing. Verbal answers do not survive a security review or a budget meeting.

Most teams that move are not unhappy with Bodyswaps. They move one audience, usually because the conversations that matter most need a face that reacts live, or because headsets never left the cupboard.

1. Export what you have. Pull learning objectives, pathway designs, and completion data before the contract ends. Bodyswaps keeps data accessible for 90 days after termination, so plan inside that window.
2. Keep the curriculum, move the conversation. Modules and quizzes may still work in your LMS. Move only the roleplays where reacting in real time is the skill.
3. Rebuild your top five scenarios first. Pick the five with the most practice volume so you can compare against your baseline.
4. Match the faces to your learners. Choose characters, voices, and languages that look and sound like the people your team really meets.
5. Confirm delivery in week one. Load the SCORM package into your LMS and check that completions land where your reports expect them.
6. Run both for one term or quarter. Compare completion rate, attempts per learner, and improvement from first to last attempt.

Going the other way works the same. If your program is a broad curriculum for thousands of students, the tool built for that is the right tool.

Comparing more platforms? Read Rapport vs Second Nature, our roundup of the best AI roleplay platforms, or see how Rapport supports soft skills training and learning and development teams.