LiveKit Agents vs Retell AI
Detailed side-by-side comparison to help you choose the right tool
LiveKit Agents
🔴DeveloperVoice AI Tools
LiveKit Agents: Real-time media infrastructure platform with an integrated agent framework for building voice and video AI assistants that can participate in live conversations. Enables developers to build programmable AI agents for WebRTC rooms, SIP telephony, and multimodal applications.
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Starting Price
FreeRetell AI
🟢No CodeVoice AI
an AI phone-agent platform for automating customer calls while preserving call quality, analytics, and industry workflows.
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Starting Price
$0.07/minFeature Comparison
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💡 Our Take
Choose LiveKit Agents if you want to build a custom multimodal application where voice agents are part of a broader web, mobile, video, or SIP experience.
LiveKit Agents - Pros & Cons
Pros
- ✓Free Build plan includes 1,000 agent session minutes monthly, 1 free telephony number, agent deployment, observability, inference credits, session metrics, analytics, and access to the global edge network.
- ✓Open-source framework and LiveKit media server can be run locally or self-hosted, which gives teams more deployment control than fully hosted-only voice agent platforms.
- ✓Supports both STT-to-LLM-to-TTS pipelines and realtime speech-to-speech model integrations through documented provider plugins.
- ✓Built on WebRTC with frontend SDKs in multiple languages, making it suitable for web, mobile, video, screen-sharing, and multi-participant real-time experiences rather than phone calls only.
- ✓Native SIP telephony support covers inbound calls, outbound calls, DTMF, and SIP REFER without requiring a separate voice-agent-specific phone stack.
- ✓Cloud pricing exposes concrete usage units for agent sessions, telephony, and inference, which helps teams estimate production costs.
Cons
- ✗Less turnkey than no-code voice agent platforms; teams need to write and operate Python or Node.js agent code.
- ✗The pricing model combines plan fees, agent session minutes, telephony, and inference, so realistic costs require modeling call volume and model choices rather than reading a single flat monthly price.
- ✗Advanced self-hosting still requires real-time infrastructure expertise, including WebRTC operations, media routing, deployment, monitoring, and scaling.
- ✗The free Build plan is useful for development but has limits, including 1,000 free monthly agent session minutes and documented free-plan quota constraints.
- ✗Some enterprise features, including SSO, support SLA, shared Slack channel, custom volume pricing, and private deployment discussions, require contacting sales.
Retell AI - Pros & Cons
Pros
- ✓Usage-based pricing is easier to pilot than annual-contract-only voice platforms
- ✓The pricing page exposes real per-minute ranges instead of hiding all costs
- ✓Strong fit for teams that need phone automation, not just web chat
- ✓Templates and concurrent-call limits help teams test realistic call volume early
Cons
- ✗Per-minute costs can climb quickly at high call volume or with premium voices
- ✗Voice agents need careful fallback rules because failed calls are customer-visible
- ✗Enterprise-grade compliance and support require custom pricing discussions
- ✗Call quality depends on telephony, prompts, latency, and integrations, not the AI model alone
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