Vapi vs Retell AI

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

Vapi

🔴Developer

Voice AI

Vapi is the developer platform for voice AI agents — build, deploy, and scale phone agents with usage-based pricing and bring-your-own model keys.

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Starting Price

$0.05/minute + provider costs
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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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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

  • ✓Transparent usage pricing — $0.05/min plus BYO model keys is easy to forecast
  • ✓Sub-700ms turn-taking feels conversational, not robotic
  • ✓Provider-agnostic stack lets you pick best-of-breed STT, LLM, and TTS
  • ✓Developer surface is solid: SDKs, webhooks, custom function calls
  • ✓HIPAA and PCI options unlock healthcare and fintech use cases

Cons

  • ✗Not a no-code product; non-developers will need engineering support
  • ✗HIPAA at $2k/mo and ZDR at $1k/mo add up quickly for small teams
  • ✗10 concurrent lines is fine for most pilots but extra lines at $10/mo scale fast
  • ✗Model costs pass through, so a chatty agent on GPT-4 can be expensive
  • ✗Documentation around advanced routing and warm transfers is still maturing

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 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
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Read the full reviews to make an informed decision

Review VapiReview Retell AI