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Bland AI vs Retell AI (2026)

Comparing Bland AI and Retell AI? Both are AI Agents & Chatbots and Voice & Phone AI tools in the directory, which is why buyers put them on the same shortlist. Below is a side-by-side look at pricing and an estimated monthly bill, channels, compliance claims, and integrations, plus when each is the better fit, so you can pick on the facts rather than either vendor's own sales page.

At a glance

Conversations/mo

% handled by AI

Agent seats

Price it at my volume

Estimates assume 5,000 conversations a month, 60% handled by AI and 10 agent seats, at each vendor's published list price (the cost calculator's model); treat them as a floor, not a quote. Compliance rows are what vendors publicly claim, and “Not verified” means we have not confirmed that fact yet, not that the tool lacks it.

Choose Bland AI or Retell AI?

About Bland AI

Bland (the site brands it simply as Bland) is a platform for building AI phone agents that answer and place calls, and continue the conversation over SMS and web chat. Agents are designed as Conversational Pathways, call tools against your systems mid-conversation (looking up an account, verifying identity, updating a payment date), and warm-transfer to a human with context when they should. The use cases on its site are the unglamorous high-volume ones: IVR replacement, appointment scheduling, after-hours and overflow coverage, identity verification, payments and collections, and patient care coordination. Bland says agents answer in about 200 milliseconds and work in more than 40 languages.

What sets Bland apart is that it owns the whole voice stack. Where most voice-agent platforms stitch together a third-party transcription engine, a frontier LLM and a separate voice provider, Bland runs its own speech-to-text, language model and text-to-speech on its own GPUs. It turns that into a security argument: no third-party AI sub-processor touches the call, guardrails are fine-tuned into model weights rather than prompts, calls can be pinned to a region with EU data on EU GPUs, and deployment options run from Bland's cloud to your own VPC, on-premise hardware or a fully air-gapped install. It claims SOC 2 Type I and II, HIPAA with a BAA, GDPR and PCI DSS. The tradeoff is that you are betting on Bland's models instead of choosing your own.

Isaiah Granet (CEO) and Sobhan Nejad co-founded Bland in San Francisco in 2023, pivoting into voice midway through Y Combinator. It raised a $16 million Series A led by Scale Venture Partners in August 2024 and a $40 million Series B led by Emergence Capital in February 2025, and Fortune reported a $50 million Series C led by Dell Technologies Capital in June 2026. Bland says more than 250 enterprises use it. Published results include Idaho Housing and Finance Association saving $750,000 a year by retiring its IVR, Slash gaining 13 points of CSAT, and Needle resolving 81 percent of pharmacy inventory calls with no human involved.

Pricing is per minute and covers the LLM, transcription and voice in one rate, with telephony billed separately. The Start plan is $0.14/min with no platform fee and no card required; Build is $0.12/min plus a $299/month platform fee with higher limits; Enterprise is contracted to volume and adds VPC or on-prem deployment, SSO, BAAs and forward-deployed engineers. Choose Bland if you run regulated phone operations in healthcare, insurance or financial services and want a single vendor accountable for the whole call. Skip it if you want to pick your own LLM and voice vendors, or if your support is mostly email and chat.

Read the full Bland AI listing →  ·  See Bland AI alternatives →

About Retell AI

Retell AI is a platform for building AI phone agents that answer and place calls. You compose an agent from interchangeable parts: a speech-to-text layer, your choice of LLM, a voice from providers like ElevenLabs, and telephony via Twilio, Vonage, Telnyx, or your own SIP trunk. The platform handles the hard real time bits, interruption handling, latency, call transfer, and IVR navigation, and adds testing, monitoring, and post call analysis aimed squarely at contact center and front desk workloads.

The company came out of Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch, founded in 2023, with Evie Wang among the cofounders. It grew unusually fast for a seed stage company: a $4.6 million seed led by Alt Capital in September 2024 arrived alongside a reported $3 million in annual revenue within months of launch. Named customers include telehealth company Ro, plus BPOs and contact center operators.

Pricing is published and usage based, which is refreshingly rare. Retell quotes $0.07 to $0.31 per minute all in, depending on your voice and model choices, with components itemized: text-to-speech from $0.015 per minute, LLM costs from $0.003 to $0.16 per minute, US telephony around $0.015 per minute. Every account includes 20 concurrent calls, extra concurrency is $8 per line monthly, phone numbers cost $2 monthly, and new accounts get $10 in free credits. Enterprise plans with dedicated infrastructure are custom.

Choose Retell if you have some technical ability, want a working phone agent this week, and value published per minute economics you can model before committing. Its contact center tilt (batch calling, warm transfer, IVR traversal) makes it a natural fit for support lines. Look elsewhere if you want a fully managed enterprise deployment with a vendor doing the tuning, or a pure no-code experience for a non-technical team.

Read the full Retell AI listing →  ·  See Retell AI alternatives →

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