Best Retell AI Alternatives of 2026
Seven voice agent platforms to consider instead of Retell AI, ranked on all in per minute cost, builder, concurrency, compliance and fit for teams leaving Retell.
By , research by the BestBots team ยท Updated Oct 19, 2026
Fact checked against each company's published pricing, documentation and verified user ratings. How we score
Vapi is the best Retell AI alternative for developers: $0.05 a minute hosting with models at cost comes to about $0.0818 a minute, and you control every provider. For the lowest bill, Telnyx Voice AI lands near $0.06 a minute all in with HIPAA and 500 concurrent calls included. Most non developers are still best served by Retell itself.
Our top picks
Why people look for Retell alternatives
Retell is our top voice agent platform on published facts. The reasons teams still look elsewhere come from its own pricing page and public reviews:
- The headline is partial. $0.055 is voice infra only; LLMs ($0.0016 to $0.32), voices ($0.015 to $0.10) and telephony ($0.015) come on top.
- Premium stacks get expensive. GPT 5.6 Terra with ElevenLabs v4 is $0.234 a minute.
- Add ons stack. AI QA alone is $0.10 a minute after 100 free.
- Latency complaints. Some Trustpilot reviewers report pauses of 1.5 to 2.5 seconds.
- 20 line ceiling on free concurrency. Large lines pay $8 per extra line.
If none of these bite, read the Retell AI review and Retell AI pricing first.
How to choose
- Developer who wants control: Vapi.
- Lowest cost per minute at volume: Telnyx Voice AI.
- Voice quality is the product: ElevenLabs Agents.
- Want one vendor running everything: Bland AI.
- Enterprise contact center: Synthflow.
- Want it managed for you: PolyAI.
- Already on Twilio: Twilio ConversationRelay.
Our picks, in detail
- Starting price
- $0.05 per minute
- Pricing model
- per minute, pay as you go plus optional monthly packages
- Per minute cost
- $0.05 hosting plus STT ($0.0095 to $0.0099), LLM ($0.0077 to $0.0452) and voice ($0.0146 to $0.0238)
- Latency
- Under 500 ms average, per Vapi's homepage
Vapi charges $0.05 a minute hosting and passes transcription, LLM and voice through at cost, about $0.0818 a minute on its cheapest published components, a bit under Retell's $0.0946. Vapi telephony, SIP, WebSockets and WebRTC are free, and you pick every provider or bring your own keys.
Pros
- Lowest platform fee among the big self serve tools at $0.05 per minute, with models at cost
- Free Vapi telephony and SIP transport removes the separate carrier line item
- Bring your own providers: OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Groq and multiple voice and speech vendors
- Vapi says it has 1M+ developers and 2.5M+ agents launched, with Amazon Ring, Intuit and ServiceTitan named as customers
Cons
- HIPAA is a $2,000 per month add on, which wipes out the per minute savings for small healthcare teams
- Only 4 concurrent calls without a package
- Free tier support is a Discord community
- Trustpilot score is 2.4 from 15 reviews, citing latency pauses and billing surprises
Skip it if you need HIPAA or many lines; Vapi charges $2,000 a month for HIPAA and includes 4 concurrent calls.
- Starting price
- $0.05 per minute
- Pricing model
- per minute, pay as you go
- Per minute cost
- $0.05 including STT and TTS; about $0.06 all in with Kimi and carrier, per Telnyx
- Latency
- Sub 200 ms, per Telnyx
Telnyx charges $0.05 a minute including speech to text and text to speech and says a production agent costs about $0.06 a minute with an LLM and carrier fees, roughly a third less than Retell's budget stack. HIPAA is included and pay as you go allows 500 concurrent calls against Retell's 20.
Pros
- About $0.06 per minute all in, the lowest complete rate published by any platform compared
- HIPAA included on every plan and SOC 2 Type II certified
- 500 concurrent calls on pay as you go, far above Retell's 20 or Vapi's 4
- Owns the network and GPUs, which is how it claims sub 200 ms latency
Cons
- The no code builder is a natural language instruction editor, simpler than Retell's flow canvas
- 30+ prebuilt integrations, fewer than Synthflow's 200+
- Trustpilot reviews (3.2 from 650) cover all of Telnyx and cite slow account verification
- Telnyx pages disagree on specs: the product page says sub 200 ms and 80+ languages, the sign up page says sub 500 ms and 100+ languages
Skip it if you rely on Retell's visual flow canvas; Telnyx's no code editor is an instruction editor.
- Starting price
- $0.08 per minute
- Pricing model
- monthly plan with included minutes, then per minute
- Per minute cost
- $0.08 per minute, no ElevenLabs telephony fee, LLM and carrier extra
- Voices
- 5,000+ voices across 31 languages
ElevenLabs bundles agent minutes into plans (1,238 minutes for $99 on Pro, then $0.08 a minute) with 5,000+ voices in 31 languages. If you pay Retell $0.08 to $0.10 a minute for ElevenLabs v3 or v4 voices, going direct can cost less.
Pros
- Flat $0.08 per extra minute on every plan and no ElevenLabs telephony fee
- 5,000+ voices across 31 languages, the widest voice library of the platforms compared
- Visual workflow builder, knowledge base with RAG, tools and custom LLM support
- Free plan with 15 minutes and 4 concurrent calls to prototype
Cons
- LLM cost is extra and shown only inside the product, so the all in rate is not published
- HIPAA BAAs require Enterprise
- Going over your concurrency limit doubles the rate to $0.16 per minute
- Trustpilot score is 3.0 from 1,188 reviews, mostly about credits and billing across ElevenLabs products
Skip it if you need HIPAA without Enterprise or want LLM costs in one rate.
- Starting price
- $0.14 per minute
- Pricing model
- per connected minute plus optional platform fee
- Per minute cost
- $0.14 Start, $0.12 Build, $0.11 Scale per connected minute; models and telephony included
- Telephony
- Bland numbers included in the minute rate, or bring your own Twilio
Bland runs its own speech, LLM and voice models and bills one rate that includes telephony, $0.14 a minute on Start down to $0.11 on Scale. It lists SOC 2, HIPAA and PCI DSS, offers on premises deployment, and its engineers build the first agent.
Pros
- One connected minute rate covers speech, LLM and voice, so there is no token math
- Runs its own models with self hosted and on premises options; customer data does not train other models
- SOC 2 Type I and II, HIPAA, PCI DSS, GDPR and ISO 27001 listed, plus a FedRAMP badge, with BAAs and DPAs
- Forward deployed engineers build the first agents; Bland says most go live in two to six weeks
Cons
- At $0.14 per minute it costs more than a budget Retell, Vapi or Telnyx stack
- Start plan caps you at 100 calls per day, which blocks real outbound volume
- Transfer minutes ($0.03 to $0.05) are billed on top when calls move to a human on Bland numbers
- Per minute rates rose from a flat $0.09 to $0.11 to $0.14 in December 2025, and the public page and billing docs list different tiers
Skip it if price per minute matters; Bland costs more than Retell's budget and recommended stacks.
- Starting price
- Quote only
- Pricing model
- annual enterprise contract
- Per minute cost
- Not published; contracts from $30,000 per year
- Latency
- Synthflow claims sub 100 ms
Synthflow adds what large contact centers ask for: its own telephony network, connectors for Genesys, Avaya, Cisco and RingCentral, 200+ integrations, a Test Center and forward deployed engineers, with SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI DSS, GDPR and ISO 27001.
Pros
- 200+ integrations including HubSpot, Salesforce, GoHighLevel, Zapier and Cal.com
- Connects to Cisco, Avaya, Genesys and RingCentral contact center stacks
- SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI DSS, GDPR and ISO 27001 with EU and US hosting
- Synthflow reports 500M+ calls processed
Cons
- No public per minute price; the floor is $30,000 a year
- Trustpilot reviewers (4.1 from 215) report slow support and billing after cancellation
- The sub 100 ms latency claim is far below what any other vendor publishes, and Synthflow does not say how it is measured
Skip it if you are not enterprise; contracts start at $30,000 a year.
- Starting price
- Quote only
- Pricing model
- per minute, contract
- Per minute cost
- Not published; per minute contract
- Latency
- Under 300 ms (Dialog-RSN-1) or 280 to 600 ms (Dialog-RAVEN-3.5), per PolyAI
PolyAI builds, runs and tunes the agent for you on a per minute contract that includes improvements, maintenance and 24/7 support with a 99.9% uptime SLA. It suits brands that want an outcome, not a builder, and lists SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001 and PCI DSS.
Pros
- Runs on its own dialog models: Dialog-RSN-1 (under 300 ms, 3.7% word error rate) and Dialog-RAVEN-3.5 for chat and multilingual
- Reports 90% end to end resolution on its largest deployments, 100M+ calls a year and 99.994% trailing uptime
- SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS and GDPR with US, UK, EU and APAC data residency; data never trained on without opt in
- Per minute contracts include ongoing tuning, maintenance and 24/7 support; Dialog Studio, ADK, MCP and APIs for teams that build
Cons
- No published per minute rate or minimum
- Built for large brands, not small teams
- HIPAA status is not stated on the pages we reviewed
- Benchmarks such as Dialog-Eval are PolyAI's own
Skip it if you want to edit agents yourself or need a published price.
- Starting price
- $0.07 per minute
- Pricing model
- per minute, pay as you go
- Per minute cost
- $0.07 plus Twilio voice ($0.0085 inbound, $0.014 outbound) plus your LLM
- Voices
- Google, Amazon Polly and ElevenLabs Flash voices
ConversationRelay adds speech recognition and voice to Twilio calls at $0.07 a minute plus Twilio voice ($0.0085 inbound, $0.014 outbound in the US), with your own LLM. It keeps numbers, routing and billing in your Twilio account.
Pros
- Runs inside your existing Twilio account, numbers and call flows
- Choice of Deepgram or Google speech recognition and Google, Amazon or ElevenLabs voices
- Bring any LLM, since your app generates the reply text
Cons
- No builder, no prompt editor, no included LLM: you write and host the agent logic
- $0.07 covers only speech in and out, so all in cost runs higher than Telnyx
- Latency and HIPAA details are not stated on the ConversationRelay docs page
Skip it if you want a no code builder, testing and analytics out of the box.
Price comparison at a glance
| Platform | Published rate | Budget all in per minute | Free concurrency | HIPAA |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Retell AI | $0.055 infra plus components | About $0.0946 | 20 | Included |
| Vapi | $0.05 hosting plus models | About $0.0818 | 4 | $2,000 a month |
| Telnyx Voice AI | $0.05 incl. STT and TTS | About $0.06 | 500 | Included |
| ElevenLabs Agents | $0.08 after plan minutes | $0.08 plus LLM and carrier | 4 Free, 20 Pro | Enterprise |
| Bland AI | $0.11 to $0.14 all in | Same | 10 Start | Listed |
| Twilio ConversationRelay | $0.07 plus Twilio voice | About $0.0785 plus LLM | Account limits | Not stated on pricing |
| Synthflow | From $30,000 a year | Not published | Contracted | Listed |
| PolyAI | Quote, per minute | Not published | Contracted | Not stated |
A worked comparison at 30,000 minutes a month, 30 concurrent calls. Retell budget: $2,838 plus 10 lines at $8, $2,918. Vapi budget: $2,454 plus Core and 20 lines ($229), $2,683, or $4,683 with HIPAA. Telnyx: about $1,800. Bland Scale: $499 plus $3,300, $3,799. ElevenLabs Business: $990 plus 17,625 minutes at $0.08, $2,400 before the LLM and carrier. All tracked prices are on the AI Price Index.
Who should stay on Retell
Stay if you want a no code builder and an API on one platform, need HIPAA without a surcharge, run under 20 concurrent calls and want every price published in advance. That covers most small and mid size businesses and many enterprises. Compare head to head on Retell AI vs Vapi, Bland AI vs Retell AI and Retell AI vs Synthflow.
How we picked
We started from Retell's published price sheet and the reasons teams leave, then ranked the voice agent platforms in our database on four questions: is the all in per minute cost published and competitive, how much concurrency and compliance is included, how strong is the builder, and how strong are verified ratings. Every price comes from the vendor's own pricing page, checked in October 2026. Nobody paid for placement. See how we score.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best alternative to Retell AI?
Vapi for developers who want to choose every provider at a slightly lower per minute cost, and Telnyx Voice AI for the lowest all in cost at about $0.06 a minute with HIPAA and 500 concurrent calls included.
Is there a cheaper alternative to Retell AI?
Yes. Telnyx says a production agent costs about $0.06 a minute all in, and Vapi's cheapest published stack is about $0.0818, against Retell's $0.0946. Retell's included concurrency and HIPAA can make it cheaper in total than Vapi.
Is Vapi better than Retell?
For developers optimizing cost and control, Vapi. For most businesses, Retell: 20 free concurrent lines, HIPAA included, a no code flow builder and 4.9 on Trustpilot from 810 reviews against Vapi's 2.4 from 15. See Retell AI vs Vapi.
Is Synthflow better than Retell?
For enterprise contact centers on Genesys or Avaya that want vendor engineers, possibly. For everyone else, Retell, which publishes its prices and needs no $30,000 contract. See Retell AI vs Synthflow.
Why do people leave Retell AI?
The headline $0.055 excludes the LLM, voice and telephony, premium voices and add ons stack up quickly, and some Trustpilot reviewers report pauses of 1.5 to 2.5 seconds and slow support replies.
Which Retell alternative is best for HIPAA?
Telnyx includes HIPAA on every plan. Bland and Synthflow list HIPAA. ElevenLabs offers BAAs on Enterprise, and Vapi charges $2,000 a month.