Retell AI

Platform for building human-like conversational voice AI agents for phone calls and web.

Pricing Pay-per-minute / Enterprise custom

Category Voice AI & Agents

Founded 2023

HQ San Francisco, USA

Quick take

Retell AI is the "batteries included" alternative to Vapi. Less flexible, but faster to production. For most voice AI projects, the difference between Vapi and Retell comes down to team preference: do you want maximum control (Vapi) or maximum speed (Retell)? Both are solid choices in a category that barely existed two years ago.

Trusted by

TripleTen

Doxy.me

Retell AI scorecard

How we grade

B+ 87/100

Overall grade

A credible, fast-growing voice-AI platform with real adoption and solid compliance for its age; main drags are misleading headline pricing and thin support on the entry tier.

Idea A Voice AI agents is a hot, real market with a clear contact-center and BPO wedge.

Brand B+ Strong developer mindshare and "fastest-growing" PR, but young and thinner outside dev circles.

Product A- A full build, test, deploy, and monitor stack plus automated QA; loses points on setup complexity.

Market fit A Heavy usage (a claimed 40M calls/month), real paying BPO customers, and high review volume.

Adoption A- 2,555 G2 reviews plus named enterprise case studies, strong for a 2023 startup.

Features A- Broad: voice, chat, and SMS, multi-LLM and TTS, knowledge base, PII redaction, QA, and SIP.

Security A- SOC 2 Type I and II, HIPAA with self-serve BAA, GDPR, and a public trust center.

Value B True pay-as-you-go and no contracts are real strengths, but the $0.07/min headline understates the $0.11-0.31 real cost.

Overview

Retell AI is a developer platform for building, testing, and deploying voice AI agents. It competes directly with Vapi but takes a more opinionated approach: tighter integration between components, a visual agent builder, and built-in testing tools. Retell focuses on making voice agents production-ready faster, with less configuration than Vapi requires. The platform supports phone calls (inbound and outbound), web calls, and integration with existing telephony infrastructure.

Strengths & limitations

Strengths

+Natural-sounding conversations
+Both no-code and developer options
+Good documentation

Limitations

–Newer company, still proving scale
–Limited to voice interactions
–Pricing can be opaque

Pricing

Pay-per-minuteEnterprise custom

Usage-based: starting ~$0.07/min plus LLM and voice costs. Free tier for development. Pricing scales with volume; enterprise plans available for high-volume deployments.

Who it's for

Developers who want a faster path to production voice agents with less configuration. Teams that value built-in testing and analytics over maximum composability. If you want to pick every component yourself, use Vapi. If you want more guardrails and a smoother developer experience, use Retell.