ElevenLabs Agents vs Vapi
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 Vapi if you want developer platform for voice ai agents that handle phone calls (Supervised agent, usage).
| ElevenLabs Agents | Vapi | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Platform for building real-time voice and chat AI agents | Developer platform for voice AI agents that handle phone calls |
| Type | platform | platform |
| Autonomy | Supervised agent | Supervised agent |
| Pricing | subscription · Free tier; paid plans from ~$5/mo + usage | usage · $0.05/min platform fee + model costs at cost |
| 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, gemini |
| Protocols | mcp, function-calling, rest-api | rest-api, function-calling, mcp |
| Integrations | Twilio, Genesys, Vonage, Telnyx, Plivo, HubSpot | Twilio, Deepgram, ElevenLabs, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google |
| 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
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?
ElevenLabs Agents is platform for building real-time voice and chat ai agents, best for developers, mid-market, enterprise. 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.