The 12 Best AI Voice Agents in 2026 (and What a Call Actually Costs)

TL;DR

• Retell AI is the best pick for most teams: 4.8 on G2 across 2,638 reviews, at 0.07 to 0.31 dollars a minute.
• Bland AI is the one predictable number, 0.14 a minute including the model, speech-to-text and text-to-speech.
• ElevenLabs leads on voice quality from 6 dollars a month; Vapi gives the most control at 0.05 a minute.
• Smith.ai answers 25 calls a month free for small businesses, and Rosie is the next step at 149 dollars.
• Telephony bills separately on every developer platform, and Gartner expects cost per resolution above 3 dollars by 2030.

The per-minute rate on a voice AI pricing page is usually not what a call costs. Vapi charges 5 cents a minute, ElevenLabs 8 cents and LiveKit 1 cent, and each of those numbers buys the platform while the speech, language model and telephony bills arrive separately. Retell AI and Bland AI quote a rate with the models already inside it. Retell is the pick for most teams, and it is the only tool here with review volume in the thousands.

Best AI voice agents at a glance

Short on time? Here is the ranked shortlist, with published pricing and the review score from whichever platform actually carries volume for that vendor.

Tool	Best for	Type	Free tier	Starting price	Rating
Retell AI	Best overall	Developer platform	10 dollars in credits	0.07 to 0.31 a minute	G2 4.8 (2,638)
Bland AI	Best for predictable cost	Developer platform	Yes, no platform fee	0.14 a minute	G2 5.0 (11)
ElevenLabs Agents	Best for voice quality	Developer platform	15 minutes a month	6 dollars a month	G2 4.5 (1,175)
Vapi	Best for control over the stack	Developer platform	Yes, minutes included	0.05 a minute plus models	Product Hunt 4.9 (25)
Smith.ai	Best for never missing a call	Turnkey, per call	25 calls a month	150 dollars a month	Trustpilot 4.0 (345)
Rosie	Best for the fastest setup	Turnkey, per minute	7 day trial	49 dollars a month	No verified profile
Synthflow	Best for enterprise no-code	Enterprise no-code	No	30,000 dollars a year	G2 4.5 (1,015)
Thoughtly	Best for unlimited minutes	No-code, flat rate	Pilot only	500 dollars a month	G2 4.6 (42)
LiveKit	Best open-source foundation	Open-source platform	1,000 minutes a month	0.01 a minute	GitHub 13.0k stars
PolyAI	Best for enterprise IVR replacement	Enterprise contact centre	No	Not published	G2 5.0 (12)
Sierra	Best for outcome-based pricing	Enterprise, outcome based	No	Not published	G2 4.4 (84)
Goodcall	Best for a flat per-agent bill	Turnkey, per agent	Trial only	79 dollars a month	G2 3.5 (1)

What is an AI voice agent?

An AI voice agent answers or places phone calls and holds a conversation: greeting a caller, qualifying them, booking something, routing to a person, writing the result back to a record. It replaces the phone tree rather than the contact form.

They come in three shapes that price on different units. Developer platforms give you an SDK and a per-minute meter, and expect you to bring engineers. No-code services give you a console and a monthly plan. Enterprise platforms give you a deployment team and a contract. Raw speech APIs are excluded here, because a text-to-speech endpoint on its own is not an agent.

How we ranked these

Four criteria, applied in this order.

• Can you price a call before you buy? A published rate that covers the whole call ranks above a platform fee with the models metered on top, and both rank above a quote request.
• Independent review volume. A score from thousands of reviews carries more weight than a perfect score from eleven. Where a vendor has no meaningful profile anywhere, the table says so.
• What the rate covers. Speech-to-text, the language model, text-to-speech, telephony and the add-on meters, counted as one number.
• Who it actually fits. A developer SDK and a turnkey answering service are different purchases, which is what the Best for column carries.

The 12 best AI voice agents in 2026

1. Retell AI: Best overall

Retell AI publishes the most complete cost breakdown in this category and has the review record to match, at 4.8 on G2 across 2,638 reviews and 4.9 on Trustpilot across 816. Its pricing page prices the voice infrastructure, every supported text-to-speech voice, every language model and the telephony leg on separate lines, then adds them up in a calculator. The product covers inbound and outbound calling, batch campaigns, IVR navigation, appointment booking and post-call analysis. Billing is tracked to the second and you start with 10 dollars in free credits. It is the default recommendation here because nothing else combines that transparency with that much independent evidence.

Key details:

• Best for: most teams, and anyone who wants every line of the per-minute cost itemised up front.
• What it does: inbound and outbound voice agents, batch calling, call transfer, knowledge base, post-call analysis, quality assurance.
• Free tier: yes, 10 dollars in free credits and 20 concurrent calls included.
• Pricing: 0.07 to 0.31 dollars a minute, built from 0.055 voice infrastructure, 0.015 to 0.040 text-to-speech and 0.003 to 0.16 for the model. Telephony runs 0.015 a minute on US Twilio.
• Rating: G2 4.8 from 2,638 reviews

2. Bland AI: Best for predictable cost

Bland AI quotes one number that already contains the language model, speech-to-text and text-to-speech, which makes it the easiest platform here to forecast. Rates fall as you climb the tiers, and what the higher tiers buy is concurrency and daily call headroom rather than capability you cannot otherwise reach. Telephony stays separate and can run through your own Twilio account or SIP trunk, in which case transfer fees disappear. The entry tier carries no platform fee at all. Its G2 score is a perfect 5.0 but rests on only 11 reviews, so treat it as a signal rather than a verdict.

Key details:

• Best for: teams that want a single per-minute number they can put in a budget.
• What it does: inbound and outbound calling, conversational pathways, warm and live transfers, guardrails, SMS and web chat on higher tiers.
• Free tier: yes, the Start plan has no platform fee, two credits and an inbound number, with no card required.
• Pricing: Start 0.14 a minute with no platform fee. Build 0.12 a minute plus 299 a month. Scale 0.11 a minute plus 499 a month. Enterprise is contracted to volume.
• Rating: G2 5.0 from 11 reviews

3. ElevenLabs Agents: Best for voice quality

ElevenLabs Agents comes at voice agents from the voice side, and the agents platform sits on the same subscription ladder as the company’s speech products. Each tier bundles a block of call minutes and a concurrency limit, with extra minutes charged after that. The builder covers workflows, a knowledge base and multilingual agents, and the same agent can run over voice or text. The language model and any telephony are billed separately from the minute allowance. At 4.5 on G2 across 1,175 reviews it has the second-largest evidence base here, though most of those reviews cover the speech products rather than the agent platform.

Key details:

• Best for: teams that choose a platform on voice quality and language coverage.
• What it does: voice and chat agents, workflow builder, knowledge base, multilingual support, embeddable widget.
• Free tier: yes, 15 minutes of calls and 4 concurrent calls at no cost.
• Pricing: Starter 6, Creator 22, Pro 99, Scale 299 and Business 990 dollars a month, bundling 75, 275, 1,238, 3,738 and 12,375 minutes. Extra minutes cost 0.08. Annual billing cuts the monthly equivalent to 5, 18.33, 82.50, 249.17 and 825.
• Rating: G2 4.5 from 1,175 reviews

4. Vapi: Best for control over the stack

Vapi is the orchestration layer for a voice agent you assemble yourself. It handles call infrastructure, turn-taking, latency and telephony routing, then lets you plug in whichever speech-to-text, language model and text-to-speech provider you prefer. Its dashboard reports cost per minute, latency and CSAT for each agent in production. The published rate covers Vapi’s hosting and nothing else. Its reviews split hard by platform: 4.9 from 25 reviews on Product Hunt against 2.5 from 15 on Trustpilot, where latency is the recurring complaint. It suits a team that wants control over every component and accepts owning the integration.

Key details:

• Best for: engineering teams that want to choose every model in the stack.
• What it does: call orchestration, turn detection, telephony routing, agent monitoring, SMS and chat.
• Free tier: yes, the Build plan starts at no cost with call minutes included.
• Pricing: 0.05 dollars a minute for Vapi hosting, plus model provider costs at cost. Ten concurrent lines are included, then 10 dollars per line per month. HIPAA is a 2,000 a month add-on and zero data retention 1,000.
• Rating: Product Hunt 4.9 from 25 reviews

5. Smith.ai: Best for never missing a call

Smith.ai bills per call rather than per minute and keeps live North America based agents behind the AI, so a call the agent cannot finish escalates to a person instead of failing. It is the only option here with a genuinely usable free tier, at 25 real calls a month for nothing, and it carries the largest consumer review base in this list at 4.0 on Trustpilot across 345 reviews. The AI receptionist is a separate product line from the company’s human receptionist service and is priced on a different page, so check which one you are reading. It suits a firm where one mishandled call costs more than the plan does.

Key details:

• Best for: law firms and service businesses where a lost call is expensive.
• What it does: 24/7 AI answering, lead qualification, scheduling, call routing, transcripts, escalation to live agents.
• Free tier: yes, 25 real calls a month at no cost, then 3.00 dollars a call.
• Pricing: Pro 150 dollars a month for 75 calls at 2.00 each, dropping to 1.80 at 150 calls and 1.67 at 300. Enterprise 500 a month for 300 calls at 1.67, falling to 1.60 at 500.
• Rating: Trustpilot 4.0 from 345 reviews

6. Rosie: Best for the fastest setup

Rosie is the fastest thing in this list to put live. It trains itself on your Google Business profile and website, answers around the clock, books appointments, transfers to a person and texts you a summary of every call. Plans are priced by included minutes, which works out to roughly 15 to 20 cents a minute at the plan allowance, the same band the developer platforms land in once their model bills are counted. Spam filtering and a website chat widget are included on every tier. It has no verified profile on G2, Capterra or Trustpilot, so the only testimonials are the ones it publishes itself.

Key details:

• Best for: small businesses that want an answering service running the same day.
• What it does: 24/7 answering, appointment booking, warm and live transfers, spam filtering, call summaries and transcripts, English and Spanish.
• Free tier: no, but there is a 7 day free trial with all features.
• Pricing: Professional 49, Scale 149 and Growth 299 dollars a month for 250, 1,000 and 2,000 minutes. Annual billing gives two months free.
• Rating: No verified profile

7. Synthflow: Best for enterprise no-code

Synthflow began as a no-code builder and now sells to enterprises, and the pricing page reflects the move. There is no self-serve tier on it any more. What it does publish is the floor, and that floor is unusually specific: enterprise contracts start at 30,000 dollars a year, with the final number scoped around call volume, concurrency, telephony setup, integrations, security review and launch support. The platform includes native telephony rather than assuming you bring a carrier, which is rare here. Its 4.5 on G2 across 1,015 reviews is the third-largest evidence base in this list, much of it from the self-serve era.

Key details:

• Best for: enterprises that want telephony, integrations and rollout support inside one contract.
• What it does: enterprise voice agents, native telephony or SIP trunking, CRM and contact centre integrations, custom routing, escalation and fallback logic.
• Free tier: no.
• Pricing: enterprise contracts start at 30,000 dollars annually. Everything above that floor is scoped per deployment.
• Rating: G2 4.5 from 1,015 reviews

8. Thoughtly: Best for unlimited minutes

Thoughtly prices against the grain of the rest of this list. Voice, SMS, email and workflows ship in every plan, and voice minutes are unlimited on all three tiers, so usage stops being a budgeting variable. What changes as you move up is concurrency, compliance and support rather than capability. The product is built around inbound lead conversion, with two-way CRM sync into HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive and others, and outcomes written back to the record. It suits a revenue team that wants to stop watching a meter.

Key details:

• Best for: inbound revenue teams that want call volume off the invoice.
• What it does: inbound and outbound voice agents, SMS and email follow-up, multi-step workflows, two-way CRM sync, voice cloning, 34 languages.
• Free tier: no, though a pilot is offered.
• Pricing: Flex starts at 500 dollars a month with unlimited voice minutes, SMS and email and 10 concurrent calls. Scale and Enterprise are quoted.
• Rating: G2 4.6 from 42 reviews

9. LiveKit: Best open-source foundation

LiveKit is the open-source realtime layer that a good deal of this category is built on, and the agents framework is public on GitHub with 13,000 stars. LiveKit Cloud is the hosted version, billed per agent session minute with model inference metered per provider on top. The pricing page lists a per-minute rate for every supported speech and language model, which makes it the easiest place to see what a specific model choice costs before you write any code. Self-hosting is a real option rather than a footnote. It suits teams that want the ability to leave.

Key details:

• Best for: teams that want an open-source core and a credible path to self-hosting.
• What it does: realtime agent sessions, telephony, model inference routing, observability, video as well as voice.
• Free tier: yes, the Build plan costs nothing and includes 1,000 agent session minutes a month and one free phone number.
• Pricing: Build free, Ship from 50 dollars a month, Scale from 500. Agent sessions and telephony are 0.01 a minute each beyond the included block. LiveKit’s own calculator puts a worked example at about 0.067 a minute all in.
• Rating: GitHub 13.0k stars

10. PolyAI: Best for enterprise IVR replacement

PolyAI builds enterprise voice agents for high-volume contact centres in banking, insurance, hotels, retail and utilities, using its own agent builder and a dialog model it develops in house. The pricing page describes the model in some detail, billing per minute of ongoing use and folding in maintenance, monitoring, upgrades and 24/7 support, then stops short of a number. Every plan carries a 99.9 percent uptime SLA on the phone lines. It suits an enterprise replacing an IVR estate rather than adding a tool to a stack.

Key details:

• Best for: enterprise contact centres replacing legacy IVR at scale.
• What it does: enterprise dialog agents, call routing, authentication, billing and payments, bookings, order management, troubleshooting.
• Free tier: no.
• Pricing: not published. The pricing page states per-minute billing and lists what is included, without giving a rate.
• Rating: G2 5.0 from 12 reviews

11. Sierra: Best for outcome-based pricing

Sierra sells outcome-based pricing, where the charge attaches to a resolved issue rather than a minute or a seat. On paper that is the most buyer-aligned model in this list, and it is also the hardest to compare against a per-minute rate, because the unit is different. The platform runs voice and chat agents across customer service, with a development platform and quality monitoring around them. It holds 4.4 on G2 across 84 reviews, the strongest independent record of the three enterprise options here. No rate card is published anywhere.

Key details:

• Best for: enterprises that can define and measure a resolved outcome.
• What it does: voice and chat customer service agents, agent development platform, quality monitoring, voice personas.
• Free tier: no.
• Pricing: not published. Sierra states that you pay only when the software achieves specific, valuable outcomes.
• Rating: G2 4.4 from 84 reviews

12. Goodcall: Best for a flat per-agent bill

Goodcall prices per agent rather than per minute, and every tier includes unlimited minutes and tokens. The meter it does run is on unique customers per month, which is an unusual unit and the one to model before signing anything. Setup is aimed at a business owner rather than a developer, with logic flows built in a console and no engineering team required. Annual billing takes 15 percent off across the range. It suits a service business with a predictable base of repeat callers rather than a long tail of new ones. It ranks last here on evidence rather than capability, with a single G2 review to its name.

Key details:

• Best for: small service businesses that want a flat per-agent bill.
• What it does: inbound and outbound phone agents, logic flows, call and customer records, integrations.
• Free tier: no, though a trial is available.
• Pricing: Starter 79, Growth 129 and Scale 249 dollars per agent per month. Annual billing cuts those to 66, 108 and 208.
• Rating: G2 3.5 from 1 reviews

What a call actually costs

The per-minute figure on a voice AI pricing page describes different things at different vendors. Retell and Bland fold speech-to-text, the language model and text-to-speech into theirs. Vapi, ElevenLabs and LiveKit price the platform and meter some or all of the models on top. Telephony sits outside the rate at all five.

Put a five minute call through each one and the spread narrows. Vapi charges 25 cents in hosting before a single model runs. Retell at the 0.11 its own calculator shows by default charges 55 cents plus about 8 cents of telephony. Bland’s entry tier charges 70 cents with the models already inside. LiveKit’s own worked example of 0.067 a minute comes to 34 cents. Rosie’s 149 dollar plan works out at about 15 cents a minute, so the same call costs 75 cents with everything included and no integration to build.

That is the part worth sitting with. Once the model bills are counted, a turnkey answering service lands in roughly the same per-minute band as a developer platform, and it arrives configured. The developer platforms earn their place when you need behaviour the console will not give you, not because the raw minute is cheaper.

The costs that are not in the per-minute rate

• Concurrency. Retell includes 20 concurrent calls then charges 8 dollars per call per month. Vapi includes 10 lines then charges 10 each. ElevenLabs charges 0.16 a minute, double its standard rate, when you exceed the limit.
• Phone numbers. Retell charges 2 dollars a month per number, 10 for a verified one and 20 a month for SMS.
• Compliance. Vapi prices HIPAA at 2,000 dollars a month and zero data retention at 1,000, on both its plans.
• Add-on meters. Retell prices a knowledge base, advanced denoising, safety guardrails, PII removal and quality assurance separately, each per minute.
• Silence. Retell bills for the whole call including hold time, because the speech engine keeps listening throughout.
• Quiet months. Bland’s 299 and 499 dollar platform fees are charged whether you make calls or not.
• Spam. On per-call plans, an answered spam call is a billed call. Smith.ai filters known spammers first and lets you strike up to 10 percent of calls from a bill.

PolyAI and Sierra name no rate anywhere, and Synthflow publishes only the floor you have to clear before it will talk. That pattern is not unique to voice, and the reasoning behind it is the subject of why contact sales pricing is already public.

The counterweight worth reading before you sign

Every rate above is a 2026 rate, and Gartner expects the direction of travel to reverse. Its January 2026 forecast is that cost per resolution for generative AI will exceed 3 dollars by 2030, putting it above many B2C offshore human agents. The reasons it gives are rising data centre costs, a pivot from subsidised growth to profitability among AI vendors, and use cases that consume more tokens as they get more complex.

There is a regulatory counterweight underneath the cost one. Gartner also expects that by 2028, regulatory changes related to AI will increase assisted service volume by 30%, as rules guaranteeing access to a human encourage callers to ask for one by default. A deployment sized on the assumption that the agent handles everything will need the human staffing it was meant to replace.

Two things follow for anyone buying this year. Price the contract on today’s rate but model the renewal on a higher one, and keep the human escalation path funded rather than treating it as a transitional cost.

How to choose without booking six demos

• Start at no cost. Smith.ai answers 25 real calls a month for nothing, which tells you whether callers accept an agent at all before you spend.
• Under a few hundred calls, your shortlist is Rosie, Goodcall and Smith.ai. None of them needs a developer.
• With engineers, price Bland against Vapi at your actual volume. Bland’s bundled rate wins on simplicity and loses on unit cost once you are running high volume with a cheap model.
• Model the meter, not the rate. Goodcall bills unique callers, Smith.ai bills calls, everyone else bills minutes.
• If a vendor will not publish a number, put the length of that sales cycle into the comparison.

Budget this the way you would any other AI spend, against a measured outcome rather than a headcount saving. The same method applies in AI marketing automation workflows, costs and ROI, and the measurement discipline carries over from GEO ROI.

AI voice agents: summary table

Rank	Tool	Best for	Starting price	Rating	Free tier
1	Retell AI	Best overall	0.07 to 0.31 a minute	G2 4.8 (2,638)	10 dollars in credits
2	Bland AI	Best for predictable cost	0.14 a minute	G2 5.0 (11)	Yes, no platform fee
3	ElevenLabs Agents	Best for voice quality	6 dollars a month	G2 4.5 (1,175)	15 minutes a month
4	Vapi	Best for control over the stack	0.05 a minute plus models	Product Hunt 4.9 (25)	Yes, minutes included
5	Smith.ai	Best for never missing a call	150 dollars a month	Trustpilot 4.0 (345)	25 calls a month
6	Rosie	Best for the fastest setup	49 dollars a month	No verified profile	7 day trial
7	Synthflow	Best for enterprise no-code	30,000 dollars a year	G2 4.5 (1,015)	No
8	Thoughtly	Best for unlimited minutes	500 dollars a month	G2 4.6 (42)	Pilot only
9	LiveKit	Best open-source foundation	0.01 a minute	GitHub 13.0k stars	1,000 minutes a month
10	PolyAI	Best for enterprise IVR replacement	Not published	G2 5.0 (12)	No
11	Sierra	Best for outcome-based pricing	Not published	G2 4.4 (84)	No
12	Goodcall	Best for a flat per-agent bill	79 dollars a month	G2 3.5 (1)	Trial only

Where this sits in a wider GTM stack

A voice agent answers demand that already exists. It picks up the call, qualifies the caller and books the meeting, and none of that happens unless someone dials in the first place. Creating that demand is a separate problem, and in 2026 it increasingly runs through AI answers rather than blue links, which is where GTM strategy in the AI era and GEO for B2B SaaS start.

For local service businesses in particular, the call usually starts in an assistant or a map pack rather than a search results page, which is covered in local SEO for ChatGPT and AI maps. The optimisation side of spoken queries sits in voice search and AI assistants and speakable schema.

Four related pieces are worth reading alongside this one: the 12 best AI sales tools for the layer that acts on what the call produced, the 10 best AI SDR tools for the outbound equivalent, AI share of voice for whether buyers meet your brand at all, and the best AI visibility tools for measuring it. Buyers arriving through agent-driven browsing behave differently again, which is the subject of agentic search optimization. For the marketing-side equivalent of this list, see the best GEO tools.

Conclusion

Retell AI is the pick for most teams. It publishes every component of its rate, starts at nothing, and carries more independent review evidence than the rest of this list combined. If you want one number instead of six, Bland at 0.14 a minute includes the models. If you have no engineers, start free on Smith.ai and move to Rosie at 149 dollars a month once the phone is genuinely busy. If you want the lowest unit cost and will assemble the stack yourself, Vapi at 0.05 a minute plus your own model keys is the floor.

Whichever you pick, add telephony, add concurrency, and price the renewal higher than the quote.