Compare Retell AI with top alternatives in the voice ai category. Find detailed side-by-side comparisons to help you choose the best tool for your needs.
These tools are commonly compared with Retell AI and offer similar functionality.
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.
Voice AI
Bland AI is an enterprise voice AI platform for building, testing, and running phone agents on a self-hosted stack with sub-second latency and one all-in per-minute rate.
AI audio generation
ElevenLabs is the leading AI voice platform with realistic text-to-speech, voice cloning, multilingual dubbing, and a low-latency Conversational AI agent stack.
Voice AI
Speech-to-text, text-to-speech and voice agent APIs with industry-leading latency, accuracy and per-language model quality.
Other tools in the voice ai category that you might want to compare with Retell AI.
Voice AI
AnveVoice is best for teams that want to add a website voice assistant, text chat, and guided on-page actions with a lightweight embed. It supports multilingual real-time conversations, website auto-training, DOM actions, and integrations for booking, commerce, and lead capture.
Voice AI
Real-time generative voice and on-device speech models built on state-space architectures — Sonic TTS at ~40ms first-token latency, Ink-Whisper STT, voice cloning, and an Edge SDK for offline voice on devices.
Voice AI
Open-source, self-hostable voice agent platform — the Vapi and Retell alternative driven by MCP.
Voice AI
ElevenLabs Conversational AI is a voice and chat agent platform for building low-latency customer conversations across 70+ languages.
💡 Pro tip: Most tools offer free trials or free tiers. Test 2-3 options side-by-side to see which fits your workflow best.
Retell AI uses modular per-minute pricing with three mandatory components: voice infrastructure ($0.055/min), TTS ($0.015-$0.040/min depending on provider), and LLM ($0.003-$0.16/min depending on model). Add optional extras like knowledge base (+$0.005/min), denoising (+$0.005/min), or PII removal (+$0.01/min). SIP trunking telephony is free; phone calls add ~$0.015/min. Realistic total: $0.10-$0.25/min for most production setups.
No, Retell AI is cloud-hosted only. The real-time voice orchestration runs on Retell's infrastructure. For HIPAA compliance, the Enterprise plan offers BAA agreements and data controls. For self-hosted alternatives, LiveKit provides open-source real-time audio infrastructure, though replicating Retell's turn-taking requires significant engineering.
For most use cases, GPT-4.1 ($0.045/min) or GPT-4.1 Mini ($0.016/min) paired with Retell Platform Voices ($0.015/min) offers the best balance. This gives you total costs of $0.115-$0.13/min with strong conversation quality. For budget agents handling simple tasks, GPT-5 nano ($0.003/min) brings total costs to ~$0.073/min.
Pay-as-you-go includes 20 concurrent calls, with additional capacity at $8/month per concurrent slot. Enterprise plans have no cap on concurrent calls and include dedicated server infrastructure for consistent performance under load.
Yes, Retell AI offers chat agents with per-message pricing separate from voice. Chat pricing ranges from $0.001/message (GPT-5 nano) to $0.03/message (Claude 4.5 Sonnet). Chat agents support SMS at $0.01/message and can share the same knowledge base and function calling setup as voice agents.
Compare features, test the interface, and see if it fits your workflow.