Deepgram vs Retell AI

Detailed side-by-side comparison to help you choose the right tool

Deepgram

🔴Developer

Voice AI

Speech-to-text, text-to-speech and voice agent APIs with industry-leading latency, accuracy and per-language model quality.

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Starting Price

Free
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Retell AI

🟡Low Code

Voice AI

Retell AI is an end-to-end platform for building, deploying and monitoring voice AI agents that handle phone calls at production scale.

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Starting Price

$0.07/min
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Feature Comparison

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FeatureDeepgramRetell AI
CategoryVoice AIVoice AI
Pricing Plans104 tiers76 tiers
Starting PriceFree$0.07/min
Key Features
  • • Speech-to-text APIs for streaming and prerecorded audio
  • • Flux conversational STT for real-time voice agents with turn detection and interruption handling
  • • Text-to-speech through Aura voices
  • • Latency-tuned conversational engine with natural turn-taking and interruption handling
  • • No-code conversation flow editor plus full SDK access
  • • Phone-number provisioning in 50+ countries with bring-your-own carrier

Deepgram - Pros & Cons

Pros

  • ✓Best-in-class word error rate via Nova-3 model across 30+ languages
  • ✓Aggressively priced per-minute: from $0.0043/min beats most rivals
  • ✓Voice Agent API unifies STT + LLM + TTS with server-side turn-taking
  • ✓Free $200 credit lets teams prototype end-to-end without commitment
  • ✓On-prem deployment supports HIPAA and air-gapped environments

Cons

  • ✗Aura TTS voice library smaller than ElevenLabs or Cartesia
  • ✗Documentation can feel dense for first-time integrators
  • ✗Some advanced features (diarisation tuning) require sales conversations
  • ✗Voice agent API still maturing relative to Vapi or Retell AI for high-level orchestration

Retell AI - Pros & Cons

Pros

  • ✓Compliance posture (SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, PCI) is genuinely turnkey for regulated industries.
  • ✓No-code flow editor lets ops teams own the agent without engineering tickets.
  • ✓Latency tuning is audibly better than rolling your own STT-LLM-TTS pipeline.

Cons

  • ✗Per-minute pricing can spike on unbounded outbound campaigns without budget caps.
  • ✗Knowledge base ingestion is simpler than dedicated RAG platforms.
  • ✗Deep customisation still requires the SDK and engineering work.

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🔒 Security & Compliance Comparison

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Security FeatureDeepgramRetell AI
SOC2✅ Yes✅ Yes
GDPR✅ Yes✅ Yes
HIPAA❌ No✅ Yes
SSO✅ Yes🏢 Enterprise
Self-Hosted—❌ No
On-Prem✅ Yes❌ No
RBAC✅ Yes🏢 Enterprise
Audit Log✅ Yes🏢 Enterprise
Open Source❌ No❌ No
API Key Auth✅ Yes✅ Yes
Encryption at Rest✅ Yes✅ Yes
Encryption in Transit✅ Yes✅ Yes
Data ResidencyUS—
Data Retentionconfigurableconfigurable
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Read the full reviews to make an informed decision

Review DeepgramReview Retell AI