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