PolyAI vs Vapi
A side-by-side comparison of capabilities, autonomy, integrations, and pricing to help you choose.
Short answer: choose PolyAI if you want enterprise voice ai agents that answer and resolve customer calls (Supervised agent, usage); choose Vapi if you want developer platform for voice ai agents that handle phone calls (Supervised agent, usage).
| PolyAI | Vapi | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Enterprise voice AI agents that answer and resolve customer calls | Developer platform for voice AI agents that handle phone calls |
| Type | platform | platform |
| Autonomy | Supervised agent | Supervised agent |
| Pricing | usage | usage · $0.05/min platform fee + model costs at cost |
| Best for | enterprise, mid-market | developers, smb, mid-market, enterprise |
| Deployment | saas, api | saas, api |
| Modalities | voice, text, api | voice, text, api |
| Models | proprietary | model-agnostic, gpt, claude, gemini |
| Protocols | mcp, rest-api, function-calling | rest-api, function-calling, mcp |
| Integrations | Five9, NICE CXone, Twilio, Amazon Connect, Genesys, Salesforce | Twilio, Deepgram, ElevenLabs, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google |
| Capabilities | 4 documented | 4 documented |
PolyAI
- +Strong, natural voice quality proven on hard and regulated call types
- +Deep CCaaS and CRM integration plus a proprietary model stack with enterprise compliance
- +Real enterprise traction and NVIDIA backing
- -Opaque, high-floor pricing inaccessible to SMBs
- -Historically heavy managed-service implementation; the self-serve story is newer
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?
PolyAI is enterprise voice ai agents that answer and resolve customer calls, best for enterprise, mid-market. 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.