Air AI vs Vapi
A side-by-side comparison of capabilities, autonomy, integrations, and pricing to help you choose.
Short answer: choose Air AI if you want defunct ai voice agent; subject of a 2026 ftc enforcement settlement (Autonomous agent, enterprise); choose Vapi if you want developer platform for voice ai agents that handle phone calls (Supervised agent, usage).
| Air AI | Vapi | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Defunct AI voice agent; subject of a 2026 FTC enforcement settlement | Developer platform for voice AI agents that handle phone calls |
| Type | agent | platform |
| Autonomy | Autonomous agent | Supervised agent |
| Pricing | enterprise | usage · $0.05/min platform fee + model costs at cost |
| Best for | smb | developers, smb, mid-market, enterprise |
| Deployment | saas | saas, api |
| Modalities | voice | voice, text, api |
| Models | proprietary | model-agnostic, gpt, claude, gemini |
| Protocols | none | rest-api, function-calling, mcp |
| Integrations | - | Twilio, Deepgram, ElevenLabs, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google |
| Capabilities | 2 documented | 4 documented |
Air AI
- +2023 demos were unusually natural and long-duration for the era and reached a wide audience
- -Defunct: no live product, and the air.ai domain now belongs to an unrelated company
- -Subject of an FTC enforcement action and 2026 settlement banning the owners from marketing business opportunities
Vapi
- +Deep modularity and control: swap any STT/LLM/TTS provider, bring your own keys and models, fine-tune thousands of config points
- +Low latency at scale with enterprise reliability features (model fallbacks, SOC 2/HIPAA/PCI), validated by large production deployments
- +Transparent usage pricing with at-cost model pass-through and a low platform fee, plus open-source SDKs and a CLI
- -Complexity and steep setup; the no-code builder is limited and non-engineering teams face significant manual configuration
- -Costs can stack unpredictably: the per-minute fee is on top of separately billed provider costs and add-ons
Which should you choose?
Air AI is defunct ai voice agent; subject of a 2026 ftc enforcement settlement, best for smb. Vapi is developer platform for voice ai agents that handle phone calls, best for developers, smb, mid-market, enterprise. The right choice depends on the autonomy level you want, your existing integrations, and your budget, all compared above.
This comparison is generated from the sourced Air AI and Vapi profiles. Open either profile to review its evidence and last-reviewed date.