Vapi vs Retell AI

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

Vapi

🔴Developer

Voice AI

Voice AI platform for building phone-calling agents that sound human and integrate with any business system.

Was this helpful?

Starting Price

$0.05/minute + provider costs
Full ReviewVisit Site

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.

Was this helpful?

Starting Price

$0.07/min
Full ReviewVisit Site

Feature Comparison

Scroll horizontally to compare details.

FeatureVapiRetell AI
CategoryVoice AIVoice AI
Pricing Plans185 tiers76 tiers
Starting Price$0.05/minute + provider costs$0.07/min
Key Features
  • • Build and deploy phone and conversational voice agents
  • • Real-time monitoring and enterprise-grade configurability
  • • Support for customer support, lead qualification, and appointment scheduling
  • • 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

Vapi - Pros & Cons

Pros

  • ✓Combines telephony, streaming speech, models, tools, and transfers in one developer platform
  • ✓Supports multiple LLM, speech, voice, and carrier providers
  • ✓Function calling enables real business-system actions during calls
  • ✓Usage-based entry point supports small pilots

Cons

  • ✗Base platform fee excludes model, speech, and telephony charges
  • ✗Live calls introduce consent, recording, outbound-contact, and privacy obligations
  • ✗Quality depends on several providers plus prompt and tool design

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.

Not sure which to pick?

🎯 Take our quiz →

🔒 Security & Compliance Comparison

Scroll horizontally to compare details.

Security FeatureVapiRetell AI
SOC2✅ Yes✅ Yes
GDPR✅ Yes✅ Yes
HIPAA✅ Yes✅ Yes
SSO🏢 Enterprise🏢 Enterprise
Self-Hosted❌ No❌ No
On-Prem❌ No❌ No
RBAC🏢 Enterprise🏢 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 Residency——
Data Retentionconfigurableconfigurable
🦞

New to AI tools?

Read practical guides for choosing and using AI tools

Read Guides →
🔔

Price Drop Alerts

Get notified when AI tools lower their prices

Tracking 2 tools

We only email when prices actually change. No spam, ever.

Get weekly AI agent tool insights

Comparisons, new tool launches, and expert recommendations delivered to your inbox.

No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.

Ready to Choose?

Read the full reviews to make an informed decision

Review VapiReview Retell AI