Agentic Index
Bland AI vs ElevenAgents (2026)
Bland AI and ElevenLabs Conversational AI both sell production phone agents with bundled economics, metered differently: Bland charges per minute all inclusive (fourteen cents free tier down to about nine cents enterprise, model and telephony included), while ElevenLabs sells subscription tiers of agent minutes (free fifteen minutes, Starter 6 dollars, scaling to Business at 990 dollars a month, overage eight cents a minute) with the language model and telephony billed separately on top. That verdict is the Agentic Index coverage score, graded from each vendor's own published materials.
Bland is the phone first operations choice; ElevenLabs is the voice first product choice where its speech quality carries the experience.
This comparison is published by Agentic Index, an independent agentic AI vendor research platform. Bland AI and ElevenAgents are each graded against the same 14 capability Agentic Index taxonomy, from the vendor's own public materials under the Agentic Index verification standard, alongside 955 researched vendors. No vendor pays for placement and no vendor has reviewed this page. How this evidence is graded
Choose Bland AI if
- High volume phone operations need one predictable all in rate.
- Telephony bundled in the price removes a moving part.
- Enterprise volume rates near nine cents a minute fit your call load.
Choose ElevenAgents if
- Premium voice quality is central to your customer experience.
- Low entry tiers let you prove the concept for single digit dollars.
- You want the same voices across agents, content, and product.
| Feature | B Bland AI |
E ElevenAgents |
|---|---|---|
| Action & orchestration | ||
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Integrations & Tool Calling Ability to connect agents to real systems through native integrations, OAuth-authenticated actions, custom tools, APIs, webhooks, or MCP-compatible tools. |
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Bland AIIntegrations & Tool Calling The v2 Tools API creates tools against built-in integrations including Cal.com, Salesforce and Slack, or against any HTTP endpoint for internal services, invoked automatically mid-call and mid-SMS with the response injected back into the live conversation, with credentials held in a secrets store. Webhook nodes, a custom code node and bring-your-own-Twilio extend it further. Together they reach scheduling, CRM, messaging, telephony and any internal system. Sourcedocs.bland.ai/tutorials/tools/integration-tools.mdread 2026-09-05 |
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ElevenAgentsIntegrations & Tool Calling Integrations span helpdesk (Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom), CRM (Salesforce, HubSpot), ITSM (ServiceNow, Jira), calendar (Cal.com, Calendly, Google Calendar), storage, messaging (Slack, Telegram), search (Exa, Tavily) and CCaaS (Genesys, Five9), with client tools, webhook tools, code tools and MCP tools for anything else. Sourceelevenlabs.io/docs/eleven-agents/overviewread 2026-09-05 |
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Workflow Orchestration Ability to sequence, branch, retry, route, and combine deterministic workflow nodes with autonomous agent steps. |
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Bland AIWorkflow Orchestration Conversational Pathways are node-and-edge conversation graphs with branching, conditional routing on tool output, variable extraction, inline tool execution on dialogue nodes, a custom JavaScript code node, and Flex Mode letting the agent choose its next node. Pathways carry versions that promote to staging or production, folders, and a generation endpoint that builds a pathway from a prompt. Sourcedocs.bland.ai/tutorials/pathways.mdread 2026-09-05 |
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ElevenAgentsWorkflow Orchestration Multi-step conversation workflows are built in a visual workflow builder, with free-form and structured Procedures carrying their own create, compile and draft endpoints, agent transfer between agents, and agent branches that support merge and rebase before deployment. Sourceelevenlabs.io/docs/eleven-agents/customization/agent-workflowsread 2026-09-05 |
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Triggers & Channel Coverage How agents wake up and where they work: schedules, webhooks, message events, CRM events, inbox events, chat, email, voice, and collaboration tools. |
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Bland AITriggers & Channel Coverage Agents take inbound and outbound calls over purchased numbers, SIP trunking with auto-discovery, test calls and number porting, or a bring-your-own Twilio account. Batch outbound campaigns run from a recipient list, and a web voice and chat widget and SMS, RCS and iMessage messaging run the same pathways as voice. Sourcedocs.bland.ai/enterprise-features/sip-integration.mdread 2026-09-05 |
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ElevenAgentsTriggers & Channel Coverage Agents run on inbound and outbound telephony over SIP trunking, Twilio, Vonage, Telnyx, Plivo, Exotel and Bandwidth, CCaaS via Genesys and Five9, Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp with outbound templates, SMS, a web widget, mobile SDKs, programmatic batch calling and a real-time event subscription API. Sourceelevenlabs.io/docs/eleven-agents/integrate/overviewread 2026-09-05 |
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| Knowledge & context | ||
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Knowledge Grounding & RAG Ability to ground agent behavior in company data through document ingestion, retrieval, external knowledge APIs, semantic search, or RAG layers. |
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Bland AIKnowledge Grounding & RAG Knowledge bases are built and held by the platform. A customer creates one from an uploaded file, direct text or a website scrape with sitemap URL discovery, then lists, updates and versions it by id, queries it directly through a chat-with-knowledge-base endpoint, and attaches it to pathway nodes by id. The same knowledge base serves every agent it is attached to. Sourcedocs.bland.ai/api-v1/post/knowledge-learn-web.mdread 2026-09-05 |
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ElevenAgentsKnowledge Grounding & RAG The platform builds and holds the knowledge base, with documents ingested from file, text or URL, website crawl jobs, folders, document refresh, and RAG indexes with their own compute, batch compute, retrieve and delete endpoints plus chunk level inspection and semantic search. The knowledge base persists between conversations. Sourceelevenlabs.io/docs/eleven-agents/customization/knowledge-base/ragread 2026-09-05 |
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Memory & State Persistence Ability to persist context across a run, conversation, workflow, user, team, or longer-term memory layer. |
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Bland AIMemory & State Persistence A dedicated Memory API keeps contact memory records scoped to a persona or agent number, each holding a summary, structured facts and recent cross-channel messages. Endpoints read the memory context a contact sees at conversation start, retrieve what memory changed during a specific call, merge new facts, enable or disable memory per pathway version, and reset one contact's memory without touching the rest. Memory is kept separate from the call record. Sourcedocs.bland.ai/api-v1/post/memory-contact.mdread 2026-09-05 |
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ElevenAgentsMemory & State Persistence Within a conversation, the update-state system tool holds state, with dynamic variables and overrides injected per conversation by the customer. Beyond the session, conversation history is kept against an external user id under the retention policy, and ElevenLabs does not describe a memory the agent recalls from across sessions. Sourceelevenlabs.io/docs/eleven-agents/customization/personalizationread 2026-09-05 |
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| Control & trust | ||
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Human Oversight & Guardrails Approval steps, consent checkpoints, escalation rules, structured guardrails, policy constraints, and pause/resume controls. |
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Bland AIHuman Oversight & Guardrails Guard Rails are configurable objects with their own create, update and delete endpoints, and they run continuously on every AI response to catch critical failures before they reach the caller. They are backed by blocked-number rules, live listen and stop on an active call, warm and live transfer to a human, and threshold alarms routed to email, phone or a custom tool. Guardrails, warm and live transfers and alarms are sold on the Enterprise tier, and the self-serve plans carry only the pathway-level transfer node. Sourcedocs.bland.ai/tutorials/guard-rails.mdread 2026-09-05 |
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ElevenAgentsHuman Oversight & Guardrails MCP servers carry an approval policy with endpoints to set the policy and to create or delete approvals for each tool, so the customer decides which actions the agent may take unattended and which are held for sign off, alongside guardrails that block out of scope requests before a response is sent and transfer tools for handing to a person. Sourceelevenlabs.io/docs/eleven-agents/best-practices/guardrailsread 2026-09-05 |
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Security, Identity & Governance RBAC, SSO, auditability, encryption, least-privilege tool access, compliance posture, and data handling policy. |
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Bland AISecurity, Identity & Governance Bland holds SOC 2 Type I and Type II, is HIPAA-eligible with a signed BAA, and covers GDPR and PCI DSS, with compliance documentation obtainable under NDA on Enterprise. It has announced FedRAMP certification on its own blog, and it publishes a trust and security page, a DPA and a subprocessor list. Customers get SSO, JWT request signing, HMAC webhook validation, organization member permissions, a secrets store and a paginated audit-log endpoint for SIEM export. The identity controls are sold on the Enterprise tier. Sourcebland.ai/trust-securityread 2026-09-05 |
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ElevenAgentsSecurity, Identity & Governance ElevenLabs publishes SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, ISO 42001, PCI DSS Level 1, HIPAA with a Business Associate Agreement, AIUC-1, GDPR and TXRAMP Level 2 through a live trust center, alongside customer-facing controls including SSO, granular workspace access permissions, a workspace secrets store, configurable retention, conversation history redaction and Zero Retention Mode. Sourcecompliance.elevenlabs.ioread 2026-09-05 |
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Observability & Auditability Traces, logs, execution histories, metrics, audit events, and debugging detail for production agent behavior. |
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Bland AIObservability & Auditability An event-stream endpoint returns the sequence of events that occurred during a call, alongside per-execution tool logs with aggregated statistics, call detail with transcripts and corrected transcripts, recordings, citation schemas extracting structured data from transcripts, configurable alarms, and audit logs for SIEM export. Together they let a team reconstruct what the agent did step by step, beyond what a metrics dashboard shows. Sourcedocs.bland.ai/api-v1/get/event-stream.mdread 2026-09-05 |
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ElevenAgentsObservability & Auditability OpenTelemetry traces export the agent's execution to the customer's own observability stack, with real-time monitoring, a tool-executions endpoint, conversation analysis with success evaluation and sentiment, keyword and semantic transcript search, and per-conversation audio and detail retrieval. Sourceelevenlabs.io/docs/eleven-agents/customization/opentelemetry-tracesread 2026-09-05 |
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Deployment & Data Residency Deployment modes and options, including SaaS, dedicated cloud, VPC, on-prem, hybrid, local runtime, and self-hosting. |
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Bland AIDeployment & Data Residency The Enterprise plan includes on-premises and VPC deployment, data residency and a dedicated orchestration server, and Bland offers self-hosted and on-premises deployment for regulated industries, with region-scoped static IPs for outbound and SIP traffic. These options are sold on the Enterprise tier, not held behind an access program. Sourcebland.ai/pricingread 2026-09-05 |
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ElevenAgentsDeployment & Data Residency Data residency is offered through isolated environments the customer selects, with storage locations in the United States, the European Union, India and Singapore, alongside VPC and on-premises options. Those isolated environments come only with the Enterprise plan. Sourceelevenlabs.io/docs/overview/administration/data-residencyread 2026-09-05 |
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| Solution readiness | ||
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Prebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs Ready-made workflows, packaged employees, templates, blueprints, industry solutions, and role-specific agents that reduce time-to-value. |
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Bland AIPrebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs Customers start from pathway templates, clone out-of-box test scenario templates into their own pathway through a dedicated endpoint, and draw on a shipped read-only library of eval agent templates alongside ones their organization saves. Personas are reusable agent identities that attach to any number of phone numbers. All of these can be browsed and cloned. Sourcedocs.bland.ai/tutorials/pathways.mdread 2026-09-05 |
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ElevenAgentsPrebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs ElevenAgents offers a workflow template library plus named role-specific agents the customer clones as units, including Order Support, Triage Agent, Front Desk Agent and FAQ Agent, and use-case starters for appointment scheduling, invoice management, purchase assistance and account support, all browsable and selectable from the app. Sourceelevenlabs.io/agent-templatesread 2026-09-05 |
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| Platform extensibility | ||
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Model Flexibility & Routing Ability to work across multiple foundation models, route tasks to different models, or let buyers bring their own providers and keys. |
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Bland AIModel Flexibility & Routing Bland runs its own full stack, with telephony, speech to text, the language model, text to speech and pathway orchestration all its own, and its per-minute price bundles the language model with no per-token charge. Customers cannot select a model, use a custom model or bring their own. Sourcedocs.bland.ai/welcome-to-bland.mdread 2026-09-05 |
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ElevenAgentsModel Flexibility & Routing The customer selects the language model that powers the agent from a supported list, or brings their own through documented custom LLM integrations with Cloudflare, Groq, SambaNova and Together AI, with LLM cascading for fallback and a list-LLMs endpoint. The platform is explicitly model-agnostic and supplies only the speech and turn-taking models itself. Sourceelevenlabs.io/docs/eleven-agents/customization/llmread 2026-09-05 |
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APIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility Composability layer: stable APIs, SDKs, MCP tool consumption/serving, custom tools, and integration into internal systems. |
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Bland AIAPIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility Developers get a versioned REST API across v1 and v2 covering calls, pathways, knowledge bases, memory, tools, personas, evals, SIP and organizations, plus a command line interface, an interactive dev terminal, a Web Agent SDK with token-based auth, HMAC-signed webhooks and post-call webhooks, and a hosted MCP server with a published tool reference and setup guides for Claude Code, Cursor, Codex and other clients. Sourcedocs.bland.ai/integrations/mcp/overview.mdread 2026-09-05 |
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ElevenAgentsAPIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility ElevenAgents offers a full REST and WebSocket API for the platform itself covering agents, conversations, tools, knowledge base, tests, phone numbers and workspace settings, native SDKs for Python, JavaScript, React, React Native, Swift and Kotlin, post-call webhooks, a CLI for managing agents as code, and a hosted MCP server that lets an external assistant create and update agents. Sourceelevenlabs.io/docs/eleven-agents/api-reference/introductionread 2026-09-05 |
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Testing, Debugging & Optimization Testing, debugging, scoring, retries, fallbacks, quality gates, and optimization loops for improving agent workflows before and after deployment. |
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Bland AITesting, Debugging & Optimization Bland ships two test surfaces for customers. Agent Testing runs scenarios with assertions against a pathway or persona and returns assertion results and scores, batch runs, simulation sets reporting pass rates and flakiness, and node failure heatmaps. Evals grades batches of real calls with configurable LLM judges and returns per-judge verdicts and per-call results. Both test the customer's own agent. Sourcedocs.bland.ai/tutorials/scenarios.mdread 2026-09-05 |
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ElevenAgentsTesting, Debugging & Optimization ElevenAgents ships a customer-facing test suite: automated tests with folders, invocations and a run-tests endpoint, conversation simulation including a streaming variant, Experiments for A/B testing configuration changes against live traffic, agent versioning, and a run-evaluation endpoint returning success criteria per conversation, all run against the customer's own agent. Sourceelevenlabs.io/docs/eleven-agents/customization/agent-testingread 2026-09-05 |
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| Specialist automation | ||
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Browser & Computer Use Browser, desktop, or remote/local computer control for workflows that cannot be handled through stable APIs alone. |
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Bland AIBrowser & Computer Use Agents navigate third party IVR menus that take DTMF input by inferring and playing keypad tones, through a play-keypad-touch-tone system tool and pathway configuration, and they detect and respond to voicemail systems on outbound calls. This is control of a telephone keypad only, and Bland offers no browser, desktop session or remote computer control. Sourcedocs.bland.ai/api-v1/post/calls.mdread 2026-09-05 |
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ElevenAgentsBrowser & Computer Use The agent acts only through programmatic surfaces, client tools, webhook tools, code tools, MCP servers and system tools for call control. ElevenLabs does not describe browser control, a virtual desktop or operating software that has no programmatic interface. Sourceelevenlabs.io/docs/eleven-agents/customization/toolsread 2026-09-05 |
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Pricing snapshot
Sourced from the Index pricing dataset · open each vendor's profile for full detail.
| Pricing | B Bland AI |
E ElevenAgents |
|---|---|---|
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Entry price Lowest public entry point |
Start at $0.14 a minute with no platform fee. Build is $299 a month at $0.12 a minute and Scale $499 a month at $0.11 a minute. Enterprise is custom. | Free tier with 15 agent minutes a month. Paid plans run from Starter at $6/mo up to Business at $990/mo, with overage at $0.08/min. Enterprise is custom. |
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Pricing confidence How public the numbers are |
Public, exact | Public, exact |
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Billing Primary billing axis |
Hybrid. The plan tier sets the per minute rate, and usage is billed per connected minute. | A hybrid of subscription and usage. Each tier includes a bundle of agent minutes, and time beyond the bundle bills per minute as overage. |
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Variable cost Workload / overage exposure |
High variable cost | High variable cost |
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Free tier / trial Try before you buy |
Free tierTrial
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Free tierTrial
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Buying motion Self-serve vs sales call |
Mixed | Mixed |
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