AgentVoice builds phone agents on both Vapi and Retell AI, and the Vapi vs Retell decision is one we make with clients during scoping for our AI voice agent development work. The two platforms can run the same agent at similar per-minute rates. What separates them is fixed costs, how much of the stack you can bring yourself, how agents get built, and where your call data can live.
How we choose between Vapi and Retell
We lean toward Retell AI when a US business needs a BAA on a modest budget, wants its own staff to edit call flows in a visual builder, or runs enough simultaneous calls to use Retell’s 20 free concurrent lines. We lean toward Vapi when callers or data need to stay in the EU, when the client wants to hold its own provider accounts and keys, or when the agent needs a long, tool-heavy prompt that would trigger Retell’s token multiplier. Both publish their rates, so we price the agent on each before we recommend one.
| Vapi | Retell AI | |
|---|---|---|
| Platform fee | $0.05/min hosting | $0.055/min Voice Infra |
| Other components | At the provider's listed price, or billed to your own provider keys | Retell's published rates. Voices $0.015/min, ElevenLabs $0.040/min |
| Packages | Optional. Core $29/month, Pro 10% of hosting with a $999/month minimum, Premier custom | None on pay-as-you-go. Enterprise is custom |
| Concurrency | 4 usage-only, 10 Core, 30 Pro. Extra lines $10/month | 20 free, then $8 per line per month |
| Billing multipliers | None published beyond provider rates | Prompts over 4,000 tokens scale billed time. 10-second minimum on dynamic openers |
| Visual builder | Workflows retired August 18, 2026. Composer in alpha | Conversation Flow, drag-and-drop |
| Voice providers | 18, ElevenLabs included | 7, ElevenLabs included |
| HIPAA | $2,000/month per organization, with a BAA | Self-signed BAA, no additional fee |
| Regions | US and EU | No EU operation |
| Self-hosting | Not supported | None documented |
| Data retention | 14, 30 or 180 days by package. Zero Data Retention available | 1 to 730 days per agent, kept forever by default |
Vapi vs Retell pricing
Both bill per minute with the parts added together. Vapi charges a $0.05 hosting fee and passes through transcription, the model, the voice and transport “at the provider’s listed price with no markup.” Retell AI publishes every component rate itself, $0.055 a minute for Voice Infra plus the voice, model and telephony you pick, and quotes the total at $0.07 to $0.31 a minute. These figures come from each vendor’s pricing page as of September 2026, and our Vapi pricing and Retell AI pricing pages break each one down further.
The gaps are in the fixed costs and the fine print. Retell includes 20 concurrent calls and charges $8 a month for each line after that, while Vapi includes 4 on usage-only pricing, 10 on its $29 Core package and 30 on Pro, with extra lines at $10 each. An agent that needs 20 simultaneous calls pays nothing extra for concurrency on Retell, and on Vapi, Core plus 10 extra lines comes to $129 a month.
HIPAA is a larger gap. Vapi’s HIPAA mode costs $2,000 a month per organization, and Retell’s BAA is self-signed with “no additional fee” on pay-as-you-go. Retell has its own multipliers to watch, though. Prompts over 4,000 tokens scale the billed duration, calls with a dynamic opening message carry a 10-second minimum, and burst calls above your concurrency limit add $0.10 a minute to the whole call.
How agents get built on each
Retell AI has a working visual builder. Conversation Flow is a drag-and-drop, node-based editor that Retell recommends for “structured, high-stakes calls,” alongside Single Prompt agents, the Conductor AI copilot, and Retell Workflows, launched August 24, 2026, for the steps before and after a call. Vapi retired its visual Workflows builder on August 18, 2026. Vapi agents are now Assistants, or Squads of assistants that hand a call to one another, set up in the dashboard or through the API, with Composer, an AI-assisted builder, still in alpha.
We build in either, so the builder matters mainly to a client who plans to maintain the agent in-house. If your operations manager will be adjusting the booking flow a year from now, Retell’s editor is something they can learn, and Vapi’s configuration is aimed at developers, which is who Vapi says it serves. The testing tools are close to even, with evals and simulations included on every Vapi plan and simulation, batch and A/B testing on Retell.
Phone lines, transfers and voices
Vapi includes free US numbers and lists each carrier’s transport fee, such as Twilio at $0.008 a minute inbound and $0.014 outbound, and you can import numbers from Twilio, Telnyx or DIDWW or connect a SIP trunk. Retell AI numbers cost $2 a month and US calls on Twilio cost $0.015 a minute, while custom telephony over your own SIP trunk carries no Retell charge. Retell also sells verified numbers and branded caller ID as add-ons for outbound calling.
Transfers work differently on the two. Retell supports cold, warm and what it calls agentic warm transfers. Vapi offers five warm-transfer modes, all supported on Twilio calls, so when a Vapi agent needs warm handoffs to staff we put the line on Twilio.
Both platforms carry ElevenLabs voices, which we use in our builds, but they bill them differently. Vapi lets you connect your own ElevenLabs key so ElevenLabs bills you directly, and its calculator shows ElevenLabs at $0.0146 to $0.0238 a minute when billed through Vapi. Retell hosts all seven of its voice providers itself and charges $0.040 a minute for ElevenLabs voices, against $0.015 for the others. Our page on ElevenLabs voice agents covers how those voices fit across platforms.
Retell vs Vapi on compliance and data
Both will sign a BAA, at very different prices. Vapi’s HIPAA mode also limits the organization to HIPAA-compliant providers and can’t run alongside its Zero Data Retention setting, while Retell’s BAA and DPA are self-signed on pay-as-you-go, with a custom BAA on Enterprise. Vapi’s trust center lists SOC 2 Type II and SOC 3, PCI DSS v4.0.1, GDPR and CCPA. Retell lists SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2, ISO 27001:2022, GDPR and CCPA.
Data location is where the two part ways. Vapi runs separate US and EU regions and can store recordings in your own AWS S3, Google Cloud or Cloudflare R2 bucket, with raw data kept for 14, 30 or 180 days depending on package. Retell says it does not “currently operate services within the European Union,” sets retention per agent from 1 to 730 days, and keeps data forever unless you change that setting.
When we'd use neither
Some projects rule out both. If recordings and transcripts have to live in infrastructure you own, Vapi says it doesn’t support on-premise deployments and Retell documents no self-hosted option. ElevenLabs offers private deployments inside your AWS or Google Cloud account, and Bland offers VPC and on-premise options on its Enterprise plan.
We can also deploy the AgentVoice engine into your Azure or AWS account or onto your own servers under our platform license. The source code sits in your GitHub organization, call data stays in your database under your retention policy, and cloud and AI costs are billed at cost with no per-minute platform fee. And if one rate for the whole stack matters more than choosing providers, Bland’s self-serve plans include the model and voice in a per-minute price, which our Bland AI page covers.