ElevenLabs Agents vs Tavus
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 Tavus if you want api-first conversational video ai for real-time face-to-face agents (Supervised agent, freemium).
| ElevenLabs Agents | Tavus | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Platform for building real-time voice and chat AI agents | API-first conversational video AI for real-time face-to-face agents |
| Type | platform | platform |
| Autonomy | Supervised agent | Supervised agent |
| Pricing | subscription · Free tier; paid plans from ~$5/mo + usage | freemium · $59/mo (Starter) |
| Best for | developers, mid-market, enterprise | developers, smb, mid-market, enterprise |
| Deployment | saas, api | saas, api |
| Modalities | voice, text, api | video, voice, text, api |
| Models | proprietary, model-agnostic, claude, gpt, gemini | proprietary, model-agnostic |
| Protocols | mcp, function-calling, rest-api | rest-api, function-calling |
| Integrations | Twilio, Genesys, Vonage, Telnyx, Plivo, HubSpot | OpenAI-compatible LLMs, @tavus/react-cvi (npm), REST API, Daily / WebRTC, custom infrastructure (Vercel, AWS) |
| Capabilities | 4 documented | 6 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
Tavus
- +API-first and bring-your-own-LLM, so the conversation logic and knowledge stay in your stack
- +Low-latency real-time video (reportedly ~600ms speech-to-video) with perception and turn-taking, not just lip-sync
- +Generous free tier and a clear usage-based ladder priced on conversational minutes
- -Minutes-based usage pricing can climb quickly for high-volume, always-on agents
- -It supplies the video front-end, not the agent's reasoning, so you still build and own the LLM and knowledge
Which should you choose?
ElevenLabs Agents is platform for building real-time voice and chat ai agents, best for developers, mid-market, enterprise. Tavus is api-first conversational video ai for real-time face-to-face agents, 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.