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.
This comparison is generated from the sourced ElevenLabs Agents and Tavus profiles. Open either profile to review its evidence and last-reviewed date.