Agentic Index
ElevenAgents vs Retell AI (2026)
ElevenLabs Conversational AI and Retell AI are both strong picks for production voice agents, priced on different philosophies: ElevenLabs bundles agent minutes into subscription tiers (free with fifteen minutes a month, Starter at 6 dollars, up to Business at 990 dollars a month, overage at eight cents a minute, with the language model and telephony billed separately on top), while Retell is pure pay as you go with no platform fee, voice engine at seven to eight cents a minute plus your choice of LLM and telephony, commonly landing thirteen to thirty one cents a minute all in, with enterprise volume rates near five cents. That verdict is the Agentic Index coverage score, graded from each vendor's own published materials.
ElevenLabs leads on voice quality and brand voices; Retell leads on developer control and transparent unit economics.
This comparison is published by Agentic Index, an independent agentic AI vendor research platform. ElevenAgents 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 ElevenAgents if
- Voice quality and voice cloning are the product differentiators for your brand.
- Bundled subscription tiers from 6 dollars a month simplify early budgeting.
- You are already using ElevenLabs voices elsewhere in your product.
Choose Retell AI if
- Transparent per minute economics matter for modeling support costs at scale.
- Choosing your own LLM and telephony stack gives you control and leverage.
- Enterprise volume rates near five cents a minute fit your call volumes.
| Feature | E ElevenAgents |
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 | E ElevenAgents |
R Retell AI |
|---|---|---|
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Entry price Lowest public entry point |
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. | 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 |
A hybrid of subscription and usage. Each tier includes a bundle of agent minutes, and time beyond the bundle bills per minute as overage. | 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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