ElevenLabs Agents vs Vocode
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 Vocode if you want open-source framework for building real-time voice llm agents (Assistant, free).
| ElevenLabs Agents | Vocode | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Platform for building real-time voice and chat AI agents | Open-source framework for building real-time voice LLM agents |
| Type | platform | framework |
| Autonomy | Supervised agent | Assistant |
| Pricing | subscription · Free tier; paid plans from ~$5/mo + usage | free · Free (open source, MIT) |
| Best for | developers, mid-market, enterprise | developers |
| Deployment | saas, api | self-hosted, api |
| Modalities | voice, text, api | voice, text, api, code |
| Models | proprietary, model-agnostic, claude, gpt, gemini | model-agnostic, open-source |
| Protocols | mcp, function-calling, rest-api | rest-api, function-calling |
| Integrations | Twilio, Genesys, Vonage, Telnyx, Plivo, HubSpot | Twilio, Vonage, Zoom, Deepgram, ElevenLabs, Cartesia |
| Capabilities | 4 documented | 3 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
Vocode
- +Genuinely modular and provider-agnostic across a broad STT/TTS/LLM menu
- +MIT-licensed and fully self-hostable with no lock-in
- +Solves the hard real-time voice problems (latency, endpointing, interruptions)
- -Effectively unmaintained: no commits since November 2024, making it production-risky
- -The hosted product appears wound down and the marketing site redirects to GitHub
Which should you choose?
ElevenLabs Agents is platform for building real-time voice and chat ai agents, best for developers, mid-market, enterprise. Vocode is open-source framework for building real-time voice llm agents, best for developers. The right choice depends on the autonomy level you want, your existing integrations, and your budget, all compared above.