ElevenLabs Agents vs Retell AI
A side-by-side comparison of capabilities, autonomy, integrations, and pricing to help you choose.
Short answer: choose ElevenLabs Agents if you want platform for building real-time voice and chat ai agents (Supervised agent, subscription); choose Retell AI if you want platform to build, test, deploy, and monitor ai voice agents for calls (Autonomous agent, usage).
| ElevenLabs Agents | Retell AI | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Platform for building real-time voice and chat AI agents | Platform to build, test, deploy, and monitor AI voice agents for calls |
| Type | platform | platform |
| Autonomy | Supervised agent | Autonomous agent |
| Pricing | subscription · Free tier; paid plans from ~$5/mo + usage | usage · $0.07/min voice engine (model + telephony billed on top); Enterprise from $8,000 |
| Best for | developers, mid-market, enterprise | developers, smb, mid-market, enterprise |
| Deployment | saas, api | saas, api |
| Modalities | voice, text, api | voice, text, api |
| Models | proprietary, model-agnostic, claude, gpt, gemini | model-agnostic, gpt, claude |
| Protocols | mcp, function-calling, rest-api | rest-api, function-calling |
| Integrations | Twilio, Genesys, Vonage, Telnyx, Plivo, HubSpot | Twilio, Telnyx, Vonage, ElevenLabs, PlayHT |
| Capabilities | 4 documented | 4 documented |
ElevenLabs Agents
- +LLM-agnostic on top of best-in-class proprietary text-to-speech and its own speech-to-text
- +Strong first-class telephony story (Twilio, SIP, multiple carriers) with sub-second latency
- +Flexible build paths: no-code builder, SDKs, WebSocket API, function calling, and MCP
- -Layered, recently changed pricing (bundled minutes plus overage plus pass-through LLM cost) makes total cost hard to predict
- -Autonomy is bounded to configured tools, not autonomous out of the box
Retell AI
- +Provider-flexible: bring your own telephony, voices, and LLM, or use Retell's built-in carrier
- +Structured Conversation Flow Agents (nodes and transitions) give fine control alongside looser prompt-based agents
- +Usage-based pricing with no mandatory base subscription and free credits to start; built-in testing and monitoring
- -Advertised $0.07/min covers only the voice engine; LLM, telephony, and international add to real per-minute cost
- -Building reliable structured flows for complex calls takes meaningful human setup
Which should you choose?
ElevenLabs Agents is platform for building real-time voice and chat ai agents, best for developers, mid-market, enterprise. Retell AI is platform to build, test, deploy, and monitor ai voice agents for 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.