ElevenLabs vs Retell AI

A side-by-side look at pricing, capabilities, pros, cons, and our editorial scores.

	ElevenLabs Audio	Retell AI Audio
Tagline	The gold standard for AI voice cloning and TTS.	Build, test and deploy production-grade AI voice agents for inbound and outbound calls.
Category	Audio	Audio
Pricing	Freemium· Free: $0 · Starter: $6 · Creator: $11 · Pro: $99 · Scale: $299	Freemium· Pay-as-you-go: $0.07-$0.31/minute · Enterprise: Custom Pricing
Model	ElevenLabs Multilingual v2	LLM-agnostic (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others selectable per agent); proprietary turn-taking model and voice pipeline in-house
Editorial score	9.4 / 10	—
Use cases	TTSvoice cloningaudiobooksdubbing	AI inbound call answeringOutbound lead qualificationAppointment scheduling and remindersCollections and payment dialers24/7 customer support triageIVR replacementHealthcare intake and follow-up callsInsurance claims first-notice-of-lossVoice-enabled RAG knowledge assistantsChat and SMS agents sharing a voice knowledge base
Pros	Best-in-class voice quality Hundreds of voices + cloning Multilingual Strong API	Sub-second end-to-end latency (~600 ms) with a purpose-built turn-taking model — conversations feel natural rather than walkie-talkie. Batteries-included telephony: bring Twilio/Vonage/Telnyx/Amazon Connect or use Retell-provisioned numbers with SIP trunking. Real function calling for booking, transfers, payments and CRM writes, with pre-built HubSpot, Salesforce, Cal.com, n8n, Zapier and Make integrations. Streaming RAG knowledge base with auto-sync, plus simulation testing and continuous QA — the operational glue most DIY voice stacks skip. Enterprise compliance out of the box: HIPAA, SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, PII removal and safety guardrails as toggleable add-ons. Genuinely transparent pay-as-you-go pricing with a $10 starter credit, so you can benchmark cost per call before committing.
Cons	Pro features are pricey Voice clone abuse policy needs care	Per-minute costs stack quickly once you enable QA ($0.10/min), knowledge base, denoising and premium LLMs — a 'cheap' agent can land near $0.30+/min. The specific LLMs are pluggable but Retell doesn't publish a default recommendation, so cost/quality tuning is on you. Not open source and there is no self-hosted option — regulated buyers who need on-prem inference are out of scope. Voice/telephony focus means it is overkill (and overpriced) for pure text chatbots you could run on a generic LLM API. True enterprise features (unlimited concurrency, custom compliance, dedicated support) require a sales conversation, not a self-serve upgrade.
Website	elevenlabs.io	www.retellai.com

Pick ElevenLabs if

✅ Best-in-class voice quality
✅ Hundreds of voices + cloning
✅ Multilingual
✅ Strong API

Pick Retell AI if

✅ Sub-second end-to-end latency (~600 ms) with a purpose-built turn-taking model — conversations feel natural rather than walkie-talkie.
✅ Batteries-included telephony: bring Twilio/Vonage/Telnyx/Amazon Connect or use Retell-provisioned numbers with SIP trunking.
✅ Real function calling for booking, transfers, payments and CRM writes, with pre-built HubSpot, Salesforce, Cal.com, n8n, Zapier and Make integrations.
✅ Streaming RAG knowledge base with auto-sync, plus simulation testing and continuous QA — the operational glue most DIY voice stacks skip.

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