Agentic Index
Bland AI vs Retell AI (2026)
Bland AI and Retell AI are the most cross shopped developer voice platforms, and the pricing philosophy is the real difference: Bland charges one all inclusive per minute rate (free Start tier at fourteen cents a minute, Build at 299 dollars a month for twelve cents, Scale at 499 dollars for eleven cents, enterprise near nine cents), bundling model, speech, and telephony, while Retell unbundles with no platform fee, a voice engine at seven to eight cents a minute plus your choice of LLM and telephony, commonly landing thirteen to thirty one cents all in. That verdict is the Agentic Index coverage score, graded from each vendor's own published materials.
Choose Bland for predictable bundled economics, Retell for stack control and the ability to optimize each component.
This comparison is published by Agentic Index, an independent agentic AI vendor research platform. Bland AI and Retell AI 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
- One all inclusive per minute rate simplifies forecasting and vendor management.
- You would rather not assemble and operate an LLM and telephony stack.
- Volume pricing tiers track your call growth.
Choose Retell AI if
- Choosing your own LLM and telephony gives you quality and cost leverage.
- No platform fee and transparent unit costs fit an engineering led evaluation.
- Enterprise volume rates near five cents a minute reward scale.
| Feature | B Bland AI |
R Retell AI |
|---|---|---|
| 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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Retell AIIntegrations & Tool Calling An Apps framework holds credentials for each external system, with agent functions across CRM (Salesforce, HubSpot, Dynamics 365, Zoho, GoHighLevel), helpdesk (Zendesk), scheduling (Calendly, Cal.com) and file storage (Google Drive, OneDrive), plus custom functions calling any HTTP API mid-call, a code tool running JavaScript, and MCP tools and nodes reaching remote MCP servers during a live conversation. Contact data also syncs both ways with the CRM. Sourcedocs.retellai.com/integrations/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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Retell AIWorkflow Orchestration Conversation flow agents are node-and-edge graphs with conversation, subagent, function, code, logic split, extract-variable, SMS, transfer and global nodes, transitions gated by either LLM-evaluated prompt conditions or deterministic equations, reusable subflows shared across flows, and Flex Mode compiling the graph into a runtime prompt for varied caller behavior. Multi-prompt state agents and agent-to-agent transfer cover the same ground for prompt-built agents, with versions and environment tags controlling what is live. Sourcedocs.retellai.com/build/conversation-flow/overviewread 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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Retell AITriggers & Channel Coverage Agents take inbound and outbound calls on Retell-managed numbers or imported ones over elastic SIP trunking, with setup for Twilio, Telnyx, Vonage, Avaya Aura, Genesys Cloud, Five9 and Amazon Connect. They also run browser web calls, a website widget in chat, voice and callback modes, two-way SMS and MMS, and scheduled batch call campaigns, and an inbound call and SMS webhook picks the agent and passes per-call context at ring time. Sourcedocs.retellai.com/deploy/custom-telephonyread 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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Retell AIKnowledge Grounding & RAG The platform builds and maintains knowledge bases from sources attached as URLs, documents across roughly twenty file formats, or custom text, chunking, embedding and storing them in a vector database at creation time, with retrieval tuned by query-rewrite instructions that condense recent dialogue into a standalone search query. Google Drive and OneDrive sources re-sync on a 24-hour refresh cycle, and knowledge bases are managed independently of any one agent through their own API. Sourcedocs.retellai.com/build/knowledge-baseread 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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Retell AIMemory & State Persistence Contact records keyed by phone number carry custom fields populated by post-call extraction mappings, so the agent recalls preferences, past issues and commitments across every later conversation, with a merged timeline of that contact's calls and chats and a backfill job that re-applies mappings to historical calls. Scope is per contact and the record is separately deletable. It is implemented as contact field mappings, so retention follows the contact record. Sourcedocs.retellai.com/integrations/build-contact-memoryread 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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Retell AIHuman Oversight & Guardrails Guardrails detect prohibited topics in both agent responses and user input and replace flagged content with a safe placeholder before it is spoken, and live monitoring lets a person follow the transcript in real time, listen in silently, take over from the agent mid-call or end the call, with an Update Live Call endpoint to inject context or trigger a response on a running session. Sourcedocs.retellai.com/features/live-monitoringread 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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Retell AISecurity, Identity & Governance Retell is SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2 certified and HIPAA and GDPR compliant, with a BAA, a DPA and a GDPR erasure process. Customer controls include role-based access control with Admin, Developer, Analyst and Viewer roles, API keys scoped read or edit per area, a webhook signing key with signature verification and IP allowlisting, expiring signed URLs for recordings and logs, per-agent data storage settings and a per-agent retention policy. Sourcedocs.retellai.com/general/complianceread 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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Retell AIObservability & Auditability A monitor-call WebSocket streams transcript, tool call and node events from a live session, so the path the agent took through the flow is reconstructable turn by turn, backed by session history with transcripts and CSV export, per-call P50, P90 and P99 latency, disconnection reason codes, call_started, call_ended and call_analyzed webhooks, and AI QA scoring calls on hallucination rate, knowledge base accuracy, tool usage, latency and sentiment against customer-defined cohorts. Sourcedocs.retellai.com/api-references/monitor-call-websocketread 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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Retell AIDeployment & Data Residency Data storage settings and a retention policy set per agent, plus expiring signed URLs, control what is stored and for how long, but not where data lives. Retell offers no region selection, VPC, single tenant, self hosted or on premises option, and its reliability page describes shared enterprise infrastructure without naming a region. Sourcedocs.retellai.com/accounts/data-retentionread 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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Retell AIPrebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs The quick start has the customer pick a template as the first build step, Agent Handbook ships toggleable preset prompt packs for personality, accuracy and safety, and reusable subflows package parts of a conversation flow as shared components adopted across agents. The template catalog sits inside the dashboard, and Retell does not publish how broad it is. Sourcedocs.retellai.com/get-started/quick-startread 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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Retell AIModel Flexibility & Routing The customer picks the language model in agent settings and tunes temperature, fast tier, structured output, retries and timeouts, choosing across providers including OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, or runs their own model entirely through the custom LLM WebSocket protocol while Retell handles telephony, transcription and turn-taking. Speech recognition and text-to-speech providers are separately selectable. Sourcedocs.retellai.com/build/llm-optionsread 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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Retell AIAPIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility Retell publishes a REST API at api.retellai.com with an OpenAPI specification and a Postman collection, covering calls, chats, agents, response engines, knowledge bases, contacts, apps, tests and phone numbers. Developers also get official TypeScript and Python SDKs, a browser Web SDK, a command line interface, a hosted MCP server at mcp.retellai.com for Cursor, Claude Desktop and Claude Code, signed webhooks, and an LLM WebSocket protocol for bringing your own model. A published deprecation feed with dated breaking-change notices sits alongside it. Sourcedocs.retellai.com/api-references/overviewread 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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Retell AITesting, Debugging & Optimization Retell ships five testing surfaces with readable results. An LLM Playground inspects tool calls and transitions and replays any turn, LLM simulation testing has an AI-simulated user run a scenario while success criteria grade each run, and batch tests over many cases report pass rate and per-case results in a testing history. Web and phone call testing and production A/B testing, which splits live traffic between agent versions, complete the set. Test case definitions, batch tests and test runs each have their own API. Sourcedocs.retellai.com/test/test-overviewread 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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Retell AIBrowser & Computer Use Agents cannot control a browser, a desktop session or a remote computer. The Press Digit tool and press digit node let the agent infer and press keypad digits to walk a third party's DTMF input IVR menu on an outbound call, and voicemail handling detects and responds to another system's automated flow. Sourcedocs.retellai.com/build/single-multi-prompt/press-digitread 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 |
R Retell AI |
|---|---|---|
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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. | Pay as you go from $0 with $10 in free credits, then $0.07 to $0.31 a minute for voice agents. Voice infrastructure is $0.055 a minute, with the voice, LLM and telephony billed separately on top. Enterprise is custom. |
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Pricing confidence How public the numbers are |
Public, exact | Public, partial |
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Billing Primary billing axis |
Hybrid. The plan tier sets the per minute rate, and usage is billed per connected minute. | Usage, billed per connected minute across separately priced components for voice infrastructure, the voice, the LLM and telephony. |
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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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