Retell AI vs Deepgram

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

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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Deepgram

🔴Developer

Speech AI

Voice AI platform with a fast, low-cost speech-to-text engine (Nova), a natural-sounding text-to-speech engine (Aura), and a Voice Agent API for building end-to-end voice assistants.

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Starting Price

Free
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Feature Comparison

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FeatureRetell AIDeepgram
CategoryVoice AISpeech AI
Pricing Plans3 listed plans5 listed plans
Starting Price$0.07/minFree
Key Features
  • • 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
  • • 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

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.

Deepgram - Pros & Cons

Pros

  • ✓Nova speech-to-text with 30+ languages and word-level timestamps. This directly supports the primary workflow.
  • ✓Real-time streaming transcription with very low latency.
  • ✓Aura text-to-speech with sub-300ms first audio.
  • ✓Voice Agent API bundling STT + LLM + TTS over one WebSocket.

Cons

  • ✗At least one tier requires a sales quote, preventing a complete public budget calculation.
  • ✗Features and limits can change by plan, billing interval, region, and release; verify current documentation.
  • ✗No native MCP support is documented in this record, so agent workflows may require API work or another integration layer.
  • ✗A representative pilot is necessary because a feature list does not establish reliability or operational fit.

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🔒 Security & Compliance Comparison

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

Review Retell AIReview Deepgram