The Best Vapi Alternatives in 2026
Seven voice agent platforms, and five more worth a look, compared with Vapi on what a minute really costs, compliance, open source, and where the agent can run once it leaves the phone line. Every price was checked on the vendor's own page in October 2026.
One Vapi minute
$0.05
advertised
$0.08 to $0.13
on Vapi's own calculator
7
alternatives scored
5
more on the longlist
Oct 2
prices checked
Vapi Is Good. It Is Also a Building Block.
Vapi earned its place. It passed a billion calls in 2026, raised a $50M Series B in May, and Amazon Ring routes all of its inbound calls through it after evaluating more than 40 vendors. The model catalog is enormous, the API is deep, and it carries SOC 2 Type II with an EU region.
It is also, by design, an orchestration layer. You pick the transcriber, the LLM, the voice, and the carrier, and Vapi bills you for each of them on top of its own fee. That is exactly what some teams want and exactly what others are trying to get away from.
The “Vapi alternatives” pages that rank today are almost all written by a vendor that puts itself first, and several still recommend tools that have changed or stopped shipping. So we did the homework: pricing pages, docs, and trust centers for every platform below, read on October 1 and 2, 2026, scored on the same five parameters.
One disclosure before we start: SnapSDR runs on Tough Tongue AI's agent infrastructure, so we know one platform on this list from the inside. We scored it with the same rubric as everyone else, including the places where a buyer should push back.
Why Teams Leave Vapi
The reasons repeat across reviews, forum threads, and the pricing page itself. Five come up most.
The advertised rate is one line of the bill
The $0.05 per minute is Vapi's hosting fee. Transcription, the LLM, the voice, and the phone carrier are billed on top. Vapi's own calculator puts a typical setup at $0.08 to $0.13 per minute, and Trustpilot reviewers report higher bills once premium voices and models are in the mix.
Headroom and compliance cost extra
A usage-only account gets 4 concurrent calls; each extra line is $10 per month. HIPAA is a $2,000 per month add-on, and it cannot be combined with zero data retention. The Pro package that adds a 99% uptime SLA has a $999 per month minimum.
It is built for developers
There is a dashboard builder, but the product is API-first. One G2 reviewer put it plainly: you need to be a developer to understand all the options. Ops and sales teams usually want something they can edit themselves.
Support depends on your package
Usage-only accounts get Discord peer support with no email SLA; email support starts on the $29 per month Core package. Reviews also mention latency spikes and slow responses during incidents, though Vapi's public review samples are small (3 on G2, 15 on Trustpilot).
It stops at the phone and the browser
Vapi covers phone calls, web calls, a widget, and SMS. Free Vapi numbers are US-only and inbound-only, and there is no native way to send an agent into a Google Meet or Zoom meeting. For demos, interviews, and training sessions, that is where the other person actually is.
What a Minute Really Costs
Voice agent pricing is quoted in three different ways: a platform fee with everything else passed through (Vapi, LiveKit, Pipecat), a rate that bundles speech but not the LLM (Retell, ElevenLabs, Telnyx, Cartesia), and a rate that bundles the models (Bland, Tough Tongue AI). Comparing headline numbers across those three is how teams end up surprised by the first invoice.
Here is Vapi's own math first, using the defaults in its pricing calculator:
1,000 minutes on Vapi, itemized with Vapi's own calculator
Not in either bar
- + $2,000 per month if you need HIPAA
- + $10 per month for each concurrent call above 4 on a usage-only account
- + carrier minutes if you bring Twilio ($0.008 inbound, $0.014 outbound)
And here is every platform's advertised rate next to the all-in example that the same vendor publishes, where it publishes one:
Advertised rate vs. the vendor's own all-in example, per minute
LiveKit's own phone-call example lands at $0.048 with models, telephony, and observability
Your LLM, speech, and telephony providers bill you separately
Vapi's own calculator reaches $0.08 to $0.13 once speech, LLM, and voice are added
Telnyx estimates about $0.06 all-in with its LLM and carrier minutes
Plus $0.014 for Cartesia telephony; LLM free for UI-built agents for now
Retell's calculator default with a GPT model is $0.11, before telephony
Phone minutes are billed by your own carrier
LLM and telephony are billed on top
Telephony is billed separately on every plan
Rates are each vendor's published numbers on October 2, 2026. All-in examples are the vendor's own calculator or estimate, not our benchmark, and they assume different models and call types. Synthflow is left out because it no longer publishes a per-minute rate.
The pattern: the cheapest hosting fees belong to the open-source frameworks, where you also own the engineering. The bundled rates look higher but stop growing once the call starts. Pick the pricing model that matches who on your team will run the agent, then compare within it.
The 5-Point Scorecard
Every platform below carries the same five badges. A green check means the capability is documented and available without an enterprise contract. An amber tilde means it exists in a limited or conditional form. A gray cross means we found no public evidence of it.
Models in the rate
Does the advertised per-minute price include the LLM, speech-to-text, and voice, or do those arrive as separate lines?
No-code builder
Can someone outside engineering build and edit the agent without touching code?
HIPAA below enterprise
Can you sign a BAA on a public plan, or does it require an enterprise contract or a large add-on?
Open source / self-host
Can you run the stack on your own infrastructure if you need to?
Beyond the phone
Can the same agent run on the web, inside Google Meet or Zoom, or with a video avatar, instead of only on a phone line?
For reference, Vapi itself
Dashboard builder that leans technical, HIPAA through a $2,000 per month add-on, web calls and a widget but no meeting bot.
At a Glance
| Platform | Type | Advertised rate | Best fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Retell AI | Hosted | $0.07/min before LLM | Closest swap, no-code, free BAA |
| Bland AI | Hosted | $0.12 to $0.14/min, models in | One bundled rate, on-prem option |
| ElevenLabs Agents | Hosted | $0.08/min + LLM | Voice quality, compliance depth |
| LiveKit Agents | Open source | $0.01/min hosting | Own the stack, Python or Node.js |
| Pipecat | Open source | $0.01/min hosting | Python, vendor-neutral pipelines |
| Synthflow | Enterprise | From $30,000/yr | Managed rollout, EU hosting |
| Tough Tongue AI | Hosted | $0.07/min, models in | Agents in Meet, Zoom, web, and phone |
1. Retell AI: The Closest Swap
Retell is what most Vapi users try first, and the reason is simple: it does the same job with less assembly. You get a conversation-flow builder that a non-engineer can edit, single and multi-prompt agents, an API for everything, and a rate card that itemizes each component instead of passing provider bills through.
The two practical differences that move budgets are headroom and compliance. Every account gets 20 concurrent calls before paying more, and the HIPAA BAA is a free click-through agreement. Retell also ships cold, warm, and “agentic warm” transfers with whisper messages to the human, plus contact-center guides for Genesys, Five9, Avaya, and Amazon Connect. It reports more than 55 million calls a month and says it is profitable on about $5M of total funding.
Pricing: Pay as you go with $10 in free credits, no platform fee. Voice infrastructure is $0.055/min, most voices $0.015/min (ElevenLabs voices $0.04), and the LLM is priced per model, for example $0.008/min for GPT 5 mini. Retell numbers cost $2/month and $0.015/min; SIP trunking is free. Concurrency beyond 20 is $8 per call per month.
Check before you buy: Retell does not host data in the EU. Per-minute add-ons (knowledge base, PII removal, guardrails, denoising) each add a fraction of a cent and stack up. Like Vapi, it has no native Google Meet or Zoom bot.
2. Bland AI: One Rate, Models Included
Bland runs its own models end to end, so the per-minute rate is the rate: no token charges and no separate speech bills. Conversational Pathways gives you a visual map of the call with guardrails, and Norm, its assistant, drafts a production agent from a single prompt.
Where Bland separates itself is the regulated enterprise. On-prem and VPC deployment are available on Enterprise, it holds FedRAMP 20x Class A alongside SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, and PCI DSS, and it says it handles 3.5 million calls a week for more than 250 enterprise customers. It focuses on the long, non-linear calls that are hardest to automate.
Pricing: Start is free with a $0.14/min talk rate, 10 concurrent calls, and a 100 calls per day cap. Build is $299/month with $0.12/min talk time, 50 concurrent calls, and 2,000 calls per day. Enterprise is custom. LLM, transcription, and voice are bundled; telephony is billed separately on your carrier or Bland's Twilio at cost.
Check before you buy: Warm transfer, the HIPAA BAA, SMS, web chat, and SSO are Enterprise-only. Self-serve plans have daily and hourly call caps. The $499 Scale tier that older articles describe is gone.
3. ElevenLabs Agents: The Voice Quality Pick
ElevenLabs renamed its agent platform ElevenAgents in 2026, and it is now a serious business line: more than 15 million conversations a week, up threefold since February, with customers like Stripe and Deutsche Telekom. Eleven v4 Turbo, released September 28, is available inside it.
You can build in a dashboard or a visual workflow editor, or go code-first with SDKs, WebSockets, and a CLI. Agents deploy to phone through Twilio or SIP, to a web widget, and to mobile, and a HeyGen LiveAvatar integration gives them a face. The compliance list is the longest in this comparison, from SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001 to PCI DSS and FedRAMP 20x.
Pricing: Plans from free (15 minutes) to Business at $990/month (12,375 minutes); every minute is $0.08 including speech and voice. The LLM is billed by model and telephony at cost. Burst calls above your concurrency run at $0.16/min and are deprioritized.
Check before you buy: The HIPAA BAA is Enterprise-only and requires zero retention mode. Warm transfer messages work only with the native Twilio integration, and there is no in-app number purchase.
4. LiveKit Agents: Open Source With a Cloud
LiveKit's open-source media server sits under voice products at OpenAI, Salesforce, and Nvidia, per its pricing page, and its Agents framework is Apache 2.0 with both Python and Node.js SDKs. It raised $100M at a $1B valuation in January and now sells phone numbers, hosted inference, and observability on top of the open-source core.
The appeal is control. Self-host everything, or deploy to LiveKit Cloud at a hosting fee that is a fifth of Vapi's. Telephony covers inbound, outbound, cold and warm transfers, and any SIP trunk, and 16 avatar plugins (Anam, Tavus, HeyGen LiveAvatar, Simli, and more) plug straight in. The cost is that your team writes and operates the agent.
Pricing: Build is free with 1,000 agent minutes and 5 concurrent sessions. Ship starts at $50/month, Scale at $500/month, with agent minutes at $0.01 after the allowance. Models run through LiveKit Inference at per-model prices or your own keys. US numbers are $1/month and $0.01/min. LiveKit's own phone example comes to about $0.048/min all-in.
Check before you buy: It is code-first; the Agent Builder is for prototyping. Concurrency on Build (5) and Ship (20) is low, and the HIPAA BAA and SOC 2 reports start on the $500 per month Scale plan.
5. Pipecat: The Vendor-Neutral Framework
Pipecat reached 1.0 in April 2026 and has kept a steady release cadence since. Maintained by Daily, it treats every stage of the pipeline as a swappable service, with transports for Twilio, Telnyx, Plivo, Vonage, Genesys, WhatsApp, and WebRTC, and avatar services including Tavus, HeyGen, Anam, and Simli.
Pipecat Cloud is the cheapest hosted runtime we found, claims unlimited concurrency with scale-from-zero, and runs in US, Europe, and India regions. Pipecat Enterprise can run a self-hosted region inside your own VPC, and Daily can sign a BAA covering Pipecat Cloud.
Pricing: The framework is free. Pipecat Cloud, run by Daily, charges $0.01/min for a standard agent instance, with free 1:1 WebRTC voice, PSTN at $0.018/min, SIP from $0.003/min, and $0.20 per SIP transfer. You bring and pay for your own LLM, speech, and voice providers.
Check before you buy: You own the code, the evals, and the on-call rotation. Pipecat is Python-only, and Pipecat Cloud's SOC 2 status was not listed on its pricing page when we checked.
6. Synthflow: Now an Enterprise Purchase
Synthflow appears on every “Vapi alternatives” list we reviewed, usually as the no-code option for small teams and agencies. That changed in 2026. Around June, Synthflow pulled its self-serve pay-as-you-go plan and now sells only enterprise contracts.
For the buyers it now targets, the offer is solid: a no-code builder, native Twilio, Telnyx, RingCentral, and Vonage integrations, SIP into Asterisk, Cisco, Avaya, and Genesys, and SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, and ISO 27001 with EU or US hosting, which Retell does not offer.
Pricing: One Enterprise plan. Contracts start at $30,000 a year, scoped by call volume, concurrency, telephony, integrations, and launch support. No per-minute rate is published. Accounts on older self-serve plans were grandfathered.
Check before you buy: If you found Synthflow through a list that calls it the budget no-code option, that list is out of date. SIP and PBX integration also require the Enterprise plan.
7. Tough Tongue AI: When the Call Is Not a Phone Call
Tough Tongue AI is a platform for building live AI agents for the conversations that matter most. You describe the conversation, and it builds an agent with a persona, a conversation flow, and the criteria every call is scored against. Most platforms on this list are built around a phone line or a browser widget. Tough Tongue puts the same agent wherever the other person is.
That matters for the jobs phone agents struggle with: a product demo where the agent shares your product while it talks, a screening interview on Zoom, or a training roleplay where the agent puts a chart on screen and asks about it. Every conversation is scored against a rubric you write, and plain-language edits make the next one better.
It is also operable from the AI tools your team already uses. Through its MCP server (35 tools, OAuth sign-in, and an official ChatGPT app), you can create an agent, place a phone call, send an agent into a meeting, and pull scores from ChatGPT, Claude, Codex, or Cursor.
Pricing: Free includes 25 minutes. Starter is $20/month for 150 minutes, Pro is $99/month for 900 minutes with rollover, team plans start at $299/month, and Enterprise is $0.07/min with unlimited seats, SOC 2, HIPAA, and zero data retention. The models are included in the minute; phone minutes are billed by your own carrier.
Check before you buy: It is a hosted platform, so there is no self-hosting. Below Enterprise (which adds bring-your-own-key), you choose a model tier rather than wiring individual speech and LLM vendors, so there is less low-level control than LiveKit or Pipecat. HIPAA and SOC 2 sit on Enterprise, and the meeting bot does not join Microsoft Teams yet.
Five More Worth a Look
These show up on other shortlists. Each is a fit for a narrower set of buyers, so we have summarized them compactly.
The carrier-owned option. $0.05/min covers orchestration plus speech and voice, the LLM is extra, and US inbound SIP starts at $0.0032/min. Pay-as-you-go allows 500 concurrent calls, and Telnyx says HIPAA, SOC 2, and GDPR are included on every plan.
Cartesia's agent platform went GA in February 2026: $0.06/min of call time on its own Ink and Sonic speech models, $0.014/min telephony, and LLM usage free for UI-built agents for a limited time. Code-first SDK plus a no-code builder. BAAs on Enterprise.
A managed service for enterprise contact centers, with brands like Marriott and Caesars, 45 languages, and an in-house customer-service LLM in Agent Studio. Per-minute pricing through sales. ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, and PCI DSS.
A chat-first agent builder for CX teams where voice is one channel. The public pricing page no longer lists plan prices, billing runs on credits, and phone calls run through your own Twilio or Vonage account.
Enterprise AI workers across voice, email, and SMS, strongest in logistics with customers like DHL and Ryder. Raised $150M at a $1.2B valuation in August 2026. Pricing is not published.
Still recommended on some 2026 lists, but its site now redirects to GitHub and the core repository has not had a commit since November 2024. Treat it as dormant.
Vapi vs Retell, Side by Side
It is the most common head-to-head in this category, so here are the two on the points that usually decide it.
| Vapi | Retell AI | |
|---|---|---|
| Advertised rate | $0.05/min hosting | $0.07/min (infra $0.055 + voice $0.015) |
| Billed on top | LLM, STT, TTS, telephony | LLM, telephony, optional add-ons |
| Vendor's all-in example | $0.08 to $0.13/min | $0.11/min |
| Free concurrency | 4, then $10/line/month | 20, then $8/call/month |
| HIPAA | $2,000/month add-on | Free self-signed BAA |
| EU hosting | Yes, EU region | No |
| Builder | API-first, dashboard builder | Conversation flow builder |
| Support | Email SLA from $29/month Core | Pay as you go or Enterprise |
| Trustpilot | 2.5 from 15 reviews | 4.9 from about 810 reviews |
Per minute, they land close. The deciding lines are usually concurrency, the cost of HIPAA, and whether your data must stay in the EU, which is the one place Vapi wins outright.
Which One to Pick
This is a map from job to platform, not a ranking.
The closest swap from Vapi, with a no-code builder and a free BAA
Retell AI
One bundled rate, on-prem deployment, or FedRAMP
Bland AI
The best-sounding voices and the longest compliance list
ElevenLabs Agents
Open source you can self-host, in Python or Node.js
LiveKit Agents
A Python pipeline where every stage is swappable
Pipecat
Carrier-grade telephony with speech in the rate
Telnyx
An agent that joins Meet or Zoom, embeds on your site, and shows slides or your product while it talks
Tough Tongue AI
A managed enterprise contact-center rollout
PolyAI or Synthflow
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best Vapi alternative in 2026?
It depends on why you are leaving. Retell AI is the closest swap if you want a no-code builder, 20 free concurrent calls, and a free HIPAA BAA. LiveKit Agents and Pipecat are the open-source picks. Bland AI bundles the models into one rate and offers on-prem on Enterprise. ElevenLabs Agents leads on voice quality. Tough Tongue AI is the pick when the agent has to work in Google Meet, Zoom, or a web page and show things while it talks.
How much does Vapi actually cost per minute?
The hosting fee is $0.05 per minute. Speech, the LLM, the voice, and telephony are billed on top, and Vapi's own calculator puts 1,000 minutes at $82 to $129. HIPAA adds $2,000 per month, and usage-only accounts get 4 concurrent calls before paying $10 per extra line.
Is Retell AI cheaper than Vapi?
Per minute, they are close: Retell is $0.07 before the LLM and $0.11 in its default example, while Vapi's calculator gives $0.08 to $0.13. Retell is cheaper on concurrency (20 free vs 4) and HIPAA (free vs $2,000 per month). Vapi has an EU region and Retell does not.
Is there an open-source alternative to Vapi?
Yes: LiveKit Agents (Apache 2.0, Python and Node.js) and Pipecat (BSD-2-Clause, Python). Both self-host, and both offer managed hosting from $0.01 per minute plus your model costs. Vocode has been dormant since November 2024.
Which Vapi alternatives include HIPAA without an enterprise contract?
Retell AI (free self-signed BAA), Telnyx (included on every plan), and LiveKit Cloud (from the $500 per month Scale plan). ElevenLabs Agents, Bland AI, Cartesia, and Tough Tongue AI offer HIPAA on Enterprise.
Can a voice AI agent join a Google Meet or Zoom call?
Not on the phone-first platforms. As of October 2026, none of Vapi, Retell, Bland, ElevenLabs Agents, LiveKit, or Pipecat documents a native meeting bot. Tough Tongue AI agents join Google Meet and Zoom, with Teams support for the bot coming later, from the $20 per month Starter plan.
Is Synthflow still a good Vapi alternative for small teams?
Not for new small teams. Synthflow moved to enterprise-only pricing around June 2026, with contracts from $30,000 per year. Legacy self-serve accounts were grandfathered.
Decide Who Runs the Agent, Then Where It Lives
Most teams leaving Vapi are not leaving because it is bad. They are leaving because they want someone other than an engineer to run the agent, a bill they can predict, or a compliance posture that does not cost $24,000 a year. Retell, Bland, ElevenLabs, LiveKit, and Pipecat each solve a different one of those problems.
The other reason is where the conversation happens. If your agent needs to run a demo, an interview, or a training session, the other person is usually in a meeting or on your website, not on a phone line. Tough Tongue AI is built for that: one agent on the phone, in Google Meet and Zoom, and on the web, with the visuals to match. Start with the free 25 minutes and put an agent in a meeting before you commit to anything.
Put an Agent in the Meeting, Not Just on the Phone
Build a live AI agent by describing the conversation, then run it on the phone, in Google Meet or Zoom, or on your site. Models included in the minute.
Try Tough Tongue AI FreeRelated Reading
SnapSDR Team
AI Sales Automation Experts