Retell AI vs Ultravox: Which Is Better for Your Team in 2026?
Retell AI and Ultravox are both used for ai voice agents. Below we compare them on pricing, AI capabilities, compliance, and the use cases each one fits best — all from verified vendor data.
Choose Retell AI if…
- Healthcare and financial-services inbound with strict compliance requirements
- Developer or CX teams wanting managed platform without Vapi's setup overhead
- Multilingual inbound agents across 8+ languages
Choose Ultravox if…
- Developer teams building voice agents who want to eliminate the 3-stage ASR→LLM→TTS pipeline overhead
- Open-source-first engineering teams who want to evaluate or self-host the model weights before committing to the managed API
- Startups needing a fast path to PSTN voice agents with built-in Twilio/Telnyx/Plivo and no infrastructure work
- Teams building on Pipecat or LiveKit who want a drop-in speech-to-speech service with the best benchmark scores
Retell AI vs Ultravox: feature comparison
| Feature | Retell AI | Ultravox |
|---|---|---|
| At a glance | ||
| Category | AI voice agent platform | AI voice agent platform |
| Best fit | Smb, Mid market, Enterprise | Smb, Mid market, Enterprise |
| Deployment | Cloud | Cloud, Self hosted |
| Channels | Voice, Web chat, SMS, Email | Voice |
| Pricing & ratings | ||
| Starting price | From $0.07/min | From $0.05/min |
| Free trial | No | No |
| User rating | 4.8/5 (47 G2 reviews) | — |
| AI capabilities | ||
| Autonomous voice agent | Yes | Yes |
| Real-time agent assist | No | No |
| Conversation intelligence | Yes | No |
| Automated QA | Yes | No |
| Intelligent routing | Yes | No |
| Compliance | ||
| SOC 2 Type II | Yes | No |
| HIPAA | Yes | No |
| PCI DSS | No | No |
| GDPR | Yes | No |
Retell AI vs Ultravox: frequently asked questions
- What is the difference between Retell AI and Ultravox?
- Best latency and voice quality for inbound at production scale. Expanded to chat, SMS, and email in January 2026. Still seed-funded at $40M+ ARR, which is unusual—and signals strong unit economics. By contrast, Speech-native LLM with a managed API — Ultravox v0.7 (GLM 4.6) skips ASR and TTS stages entirely. #1 on VoiceBench. Developer-only; no no-code builder; compliance certs unconfirmed.
- Is Retell AI or Ultravox cheaper?
- Retell AI starts at $0.07/min and Ultravox starts at $0.05/min. Compare the full pricing breakdown above, since seat minimums and add-ons affect total cost.