# Vapi Alternatives (2026): 5 Compared

> Source: https://theagentsindex.com/vapi/alternatives (curated, quality-gated, re-verified)

Vapi is a developer platform for building voice AI agents: you bring your own speech-to-text, LLM and text-to-speech providers (or use its hosted defaults) and Vapi orchestrates the live call, handling interruptions, mid-conversation function calls and multi-agent handoffs. It is proven at genuine enterprise scale, not just funding hype -- Amazon Ring evaluated 40+ AI voice vendors before choosing Vapi and now routes 100% of its inbound call volume through the platform, and the company has processed over 1 billion calls for 1M+ developers. The catch is what the headline price hides: the advertised $0.05/min covers orchestration only, real all-in cost typically lands around $0.13-$0.33/min once a model, voice and telephony are added, and enterprise compliance is metered separately even on the Scale plan -- HIPAA costs an additional $2,000/month and Zero Data Retention $1,000/month, on top of the per-minute rate and contract. It is also unapologetically developer-first: its own listing names non-technical teams wanting a turnkey, no-code voice agent live in an afternoon as a poor fit. Stay with Vapi if you want full control over every layer of the stack and are comfortable building against its API; move if you want predictable all-in pricing, compliance that is not a paid add-on, best-in-class voice quality, full code ownership, or the broadest choice of underlying models. The five tools below are independently researched, Published listings on this site, not a scraped or AI-generated list: each carries current pricing we verified, sourced pros and cons, and an honest best-for and not-for call.

| # | Name | What it is | Why it's here | Pricing | API |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | [Retell AI](https://theagentsindex.com/retell-ai.md) | Build phone-call voice agents on Retell's turn-taking layer, plug in your own LLM, voice, and telephony, ship over voice, chat, or SMS. | The closest direct rival in shape and market -- both are bring-your-own-model voice AI platforms competing for the same developer buyer, and this site runs a dedicated Vapi vs Retell AI comparison. Retell's headline $0.07/min composite (voice infrastructure, TTS, LLM and telephony) climbs to roughly $0.13-$0.31/min with add-ons like knowledge base, denoising or PII removal -- the same headline-hides-the-real-cost pattern as Vapi -- but it backs that with a wider integration surface (Twilio, Salesforce, HubSpot, Zapier, Five9) and reached $60M ARR by April 2026 while staying profitable on a single $4.6M seed round, for teams wanting a more established, support-backed peer rather than a genuinely different pricing or deployment model. | $0.07–$0.31 / min | Yes |
| 2 | [Bland AI](https://theagentsindex.com/bland-ai.md) | Enterprise voice AI that owns its own model stack, priced all-in per minute with no model pass-throughs. | Answers Vapi's pricing and compliance cons directly: Bland's Scale plan is $0.11/min, Build $0.12/min and Start $0.14/min, all-inclusive with, in its own words, no token charges and no model-provider pass-throughs -- one number instead of Vapi's $0.05/min orchestration fee plus separate model, voice and telephony costs. It also owns its infrastructure end to end, giving it a genuinely strong built-in compliance story (SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI DSS, self-host/on-prem) rather than Vapi's $2,000/month HIPAA and $1,000/month Zero Data Retention add-ons. The tradeoff: its marketed 400ms latency and 40+ language support are vendor-reported figures with no independent benchmark found, and only the Enterprise tier gets dedicated support beyond the public Discord. | $0.14/min / minute | Yes |
| 3 | [ElevenLabs Conversational AI](https://theagentsindex.com/elevenlabs-conversational-ai.md) | The voice-quality specialist’s own agent layer, 10,000+ voices and instant cloning, with a bring-your-own-LLM brain. | For teams whose top priority is voice quality over orchestration breadth: ElevenLabs' agent product inherits the same voice-cloning models that made it a reference point for AI voice, plus a genuinely flexible LLM layer -- an ElevenLabs-hosted model for lowest latency, or bring your own OpenAI, Anthropic or Google key. Pricing layers a subscription (Pro $99/month for 1,238 minutes, Scale $299/month for 3,738 minutes) with LLM and telephony billed separately on top, the same stacked-cost pattern as Vapi, and the free tier is thin at 15 minutes and 4 concurrent calls. Like Vapi, it is still a developer buy -- you assemble your own telephony and CRM workflow -- so this is a lateral move for voice quality, not an escape from Vapi's developer-first shape. | $0 / mo | Yes |
| 4 | [LiveKit Agents](https://theagentsindex.com/livekit-agents.md) | The Apache 2.0 voice-agent framework. 13.1k GitHub stars, self-hostable, and the only open-source pick in this category with fully published pricing. | The one open-source, self-hostable option in this set (Apache 2.0, 11.5k+ GitHub stars) for teams that want full code ownership instead of Vapi's proprietary orchestration layer -- and it is proven at real scale, powering OpenAI's ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode with xAI, Salesforce and Tesla as named customers. The free Build tier includes 1,000 agent-session minutes a month with no credit card, and Scale runs $500/month for 50,000 minutes. The tradeoff is the inverse of Bland or ElevenLabs: it is a framework and SDK you write and deploy code against, not a configured dashboard product, and the free tier's $2.50 inference credit covers only about 50 minutes before you are paying LiveKit Inference credits or your own provider keys on top of the session-minute meter. | $0 / month | Yes |
| 5 | [Deepgram Voice Agent API](https://theagentsindex.com/deepgram-voice-agent-api.md) | The speech-infrastructure vendor's own voice-agent API. Managed STT, LLM and TTS over a single WebSocket, $4.50/hr flat, with 6 LLM providers and self-hosted or VPC deployment on the same product. | For teams that want compliance built into the infrastructure tier rather than billed as an add-on: Deepgram offers a genuine self-hosted or VPC-hosted deployment alongside managed cloud, backed by SOC 2 Type II certification and signed HIPAA BAAs -- no separate $2,000/month HIPAA fee like Vapi's. It also runs the broadest built-in LLM router in this category, six named providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, NVIDIA, Groq, Amazon Bedrock) spanning 30+ models, versus Vapi's narrower bring-your-own list. There is no recurring free tier, only a one-time $200 signup credit, and like LiveKit it is infrastructure a developer builds on -- no dashboard, call analytics or CRM integrations bundled in. | $4.50/hr Standard / Standard to Custom (BYO LLM and TTS) | Yes |

## Methodology

We only draw alternatives from this site's own Published, individually-researched voice-AI-agent listings, never a fresh, unverified list. A tool qualifies only if it is a genuine voice AI agent platform we have fact-checked against its own pricing and deployment model, with sourced pros, cons and a best-for call already in place. The order below runs from Vapi's closest direct rival through to tools that solve a specific tradeoff -- price predictability, compliance, voice quality, code ownership or model choice -- that Vapi's own listing names as a real limitation.