Bland AI is unapologetically developer-centric.
Rather than hand-holding your team into creating voice agents, it provides raw building blocks like webhooks, memory stores, pathways and voice cloning, so you can craft a unique voice agent build for your business needs.
If you’ve a team of developers, Bland AI offers extreme flexibility, deep integration and omnichannel communication— but once you put it in front of customers, the cracks show immediately.
The voice sounds too “bot-like" with long pauses that make people drop off within 20–30 seconds.
Compared to Retell, which gives similar customisation features, with low latency, quick setup and voices that feel more natural– less of that awkward lag. Users switching from Bland AI to Retell see 17% higher conversion and people staying longer.
In this Bland AI review, we’ll walk you through Bland AI features–covering the setup, pricing, and overall performance - and why so many businesses switch from Bland to Retell AI.
Bland AI is a conversational AI platform that can handle inbound and outbound calls through human-like AI voice agents. It offers an in-built easy-to-integrate voice call API that makes sending an AI phone call simple (just requiring ten lines of code).
For enterprise clients facing unpredictable spikes, Bland AI is a self-hosted platform that allocates dedicated servers and GPUs exclusively to run their workload for consistent performance.
In short, Bland AI can:
The core idea of Bland AI is to give developers extreme flexibility in building AI voice agents that they can plug and play into any workflow. Its primary uses are managing inbound support calls, executing outbound sales and retention campaigns and automating routine operational calls.
Bland AI operates through several integrated layers working in real time during customer conversations, including:
This part directly powers how the voice agent hears, thinks, and speaks.
At this layer, three core models come together to create the “intelligence loop” of a phone call:
Bland AI offers a high degree of control with its inference-only LLM architecture that integrates with its own text-to-speech (TTS) system. This means the LLM doesn’t just decide what to say — it also decides how to say it. The LLM is the TTS system.
Bland’s “Conversational Pathways” maps out a conversation by splitting prompts into unique nodes. Each of these nodes will be connected to create a pathway that gives it structure and strict guardrails while ensuring conversational flexibility.
The voice agent will make decisions based on the labels you put in the pathways, when connecting nodes, and the dialogue generated will be based on the instructions you set in the nodes.
Through APIs and integrations, the agent can pull information, update records, and trigger workflows instantly, turning it from a talking bot into a fully capable operational assistant.
This allows voice agents to:
By this time, the voice agent has already understood what the caller said, decided the correct response, and fetched any necessary information from external systems.
In an ideal scenario, this would mean no long wait times, no transfers, and no friction—just smooth, real-time interaction. But it's far from the truth. Bland users mention bad call quality, with low latency that can quickly cause you to lose customers.
While Bland AI provides a clean, well-designed API for natural conversations, Developers need to carefully structure prompts, handle edge cases, manage interruptions, and design fallback paths to keep the dialogue smooth.
On the other hand, Retell AI provides structured conversation flows where developers don’t have to manually handle every edge case or interruption.
Choosing the best AI phone solution for your business requires looking beyond surface-level claims to evaluate specific features and functionalities. Let’s look at some of the Bland AI features that make it stand out in the AI voice industry:
Bland AI has a collection of high-quality, pre-recorded human voices varying across language, accent, or gender. It supports English for enterprises, but also a few European languages like French and Spanish. However, users claim that they could only use English for production use-cases.
Beyond this, Bland AI offers beta voice cloning that lets you create custom voices. Simply record 1-2 audio samples and spin up an agent that sounds exactly like them. You can also make bulk calls to send out a large number of calls at once.
It's important to remember that the voice cloning feature is not included in the base pricing of Bland AI and comes as an added cost or add-on, which can often reach $200–$300+/month.
Retell AI, on the other hand, supports 31+ languages with ElevenLabs integration and voice cloning features to meet the needs of a broader audience, leading to increased customer loyalty.
At the heart of Bland AI sits an API-enabled voice infrastructure that handles speech recognition, language processing, and speech synthesis. This is Bland’s strongest area since it gives developers complete control over how they want their voice agents to perform, including:
However, this is the biggest limitation when you don’t know how to code. You can utilize some of its pre-made templates, but if you want to customize your voice agent, you'll need to work with Bland's staff.
Besides integration with your favorite tools like Hubspot, Slack, Twilio, and Pabbly, Bland AI allows you to create custom tools and fine-tune mid-call sessions using APIs. If you’ve programming knowledge, custom tools can integrate external APIs into your workflows, prompts, and pathways.
Bland AI’s custom tool can:
When you create a custom tool, you can put it in a toolbox. So, when your phone agent realizes it’s time to respond, it reviews the tools in its toolbox and picks between them. However, with technical knowledge, it would be difficult to create custom tools and integrate them with your voice bot.
For conversations to feel personal, Bland AI has a new “AI memory” feature that enables agents to recall information from past interactions. This works excellent for follow-up conversations and multi-step engagements with sensitive information stored securely.
Bland agents identify customers by phone number and automatically access relevant information from past interactions. This is supported by a faster variable extraction system that can pull key details like names or order numbers 4–5× quicker, making the conversation feel smoother and more responsive.
At a glance, Bland AI offers a simple usage-based pricing per $0.09 / min inbound and outbound voice calls. This is your baseline cost for any connected call lasting more than a few seconds.
There are different costs subject to a $0.015 minimum cost each attempt, call transfers ($0.025 per minute) and voicemails ($0.09 / min).
On top of that, you pay extra for:
This means a call that goes out for 5 minutes costs $0.45. Add $0.075 if the call is transferred to a real person for three minutes. That's an extra $0.02 if you send a follow-up text. Total: $0.545 for each engagement.
Not to mention that just 100 failed calls connected cost at least $1.50.
When you add up all these costs, it can easily come up to $1,200–$1,500 a month, including transfers, unsuccessful calls, or SMS.
Retell AI offers a more transparent pricing compared to Bland AI. Its pay-as-you-go model comes with a flat fee of $0.07+/minute for AI voice agents and $0.002+/msg for AI chat agents.
Unlike Bland AI, there’s no extra cost for key features:
This allows businesses to customize features without any unexpected costs.
Our pricing plan also comes with a dedicated voice agent cost calculator where you can check its pricing based on the number of calls, LLM, voice engine and telephony used.
New users can explore the platform with 60 minutes of complimentary access and the ability to handle up to 20 concurrent calls. Calculate your voice agent pricing from here.
Bland AI is built for developers who want complete flexibility on how they want their voice agent to look and perform. The main dashboard includes call logs, credit usage, agent configurations, and webhook endpoints. Almost every advanced feature in Bland AI requires code or API calls.
A drag-drop builder exists, but it's basic for production agents, and it can’t visually map fallback or run prompts in real-time. Without any visual tools, businesses cannot stimulate calls without running actual calls on Bland (which costs money).
While Bland AI supports real-time TTS, its voices often feel synthetic and robotic. While testing, one of the users found that Bland AI has the highest latency among Vapi, Synthflow, and Retell (being the lowest). A latency of 2.5 seconds (average 800ms) creates awkward pauses during dynamic conversations.
The impact becomes even more significant in high-speed interactions where timing and responsiveness are critical.
The biggest difference between Retell and Bland performance comes from its training models. Bland AI is trained with an open-source model, while Retell AI integrates with various LLMs, like OpenAI and Anthropic, to provide the best voice experience.
For instance, a Retell voice agent will understand user intent, directions, and real-world messy dialogue better than Bland AI. One of the biggest reasons why businesses choose Retell AI over Bland is how naturally it handles conversations.
A user mentions how easy it is to scale with Retell AI:
Retell’s robust performance with sub-second latency and multilingual support makes it easier to reach a wider audience. Its unlimited concurrent call capacity allows a single agent to manage anything from ten to ten thousand calls at once.
Retell has successfully served large enterprises such as Everise, which operates a call center with over 20,000 employees, making it an ideal choice for enterprise clients.
Bland AI meets basic security and compliance needs for businesses by providing secure data handling, encrypted call processing, and controlled access to logs and recordings. It's also a reliable choice for businesses in regulated industries:
But it stops short of full enterprise readiness. It does not offer:
These limitations could be a blocker for teams in finance, insurance, or healthcare requiring strict internal data controls.
Most support in Bland AI is provided on Discord with a responsive dev team and formal onboarding. Unless you negotiate the enterprise terms, there’s no guaranteed support, onboarding, or ticket system.
Users usually complain that Bland AI support is non-existent. Before signing up, make sure to have a conversation regarding customer support terms with the Bland team.
One of its reviewers says, “I’ve been trying to contact customer support by email for over a week, and I still haven’t reached anyone. I’m worried that I can’t use the platform or cancel my subscription.”
Retell AI offers HIPAA, SOC 2 Type 1 and 2, and GDPR coverage offered by default rather than reserved for enterprise tiers. Its enterprise-grade infrastructure guarantees 99.99% uptime, delivers consistent call quality, minimal latency, and uninterrupted performance at any scale.
Retell AI also provides live onboarding support with chat assistance and fast customer service to help teams launch smoothly.
Based on real user experience, these are a few things that Bland AI performs well and the things that still need improvement.
If you’re a Bland user looking for a more affordable alternative with extreme flexibility and natural-sounding voice agents, then Retell AI is the one for you.
Retell AI brings everything Bland AI falls short on. Here are some of its features:
Overall, Retell AI has a rating of 4.8/5 (780 reviews) with customers talking about low-latency, ease of use, and natural conversations that flow smoothly. The customer support of Retell AI is responsive with clear documentation.
Bland’s API-enabled infrastructure is a flexible option for developers looking to build a customized voice agent for their business. However, its average 800ms latency, $0.09 per minute, and lack of support make it difficult to scale.
For teams that need richer workflows, deeper analytics, intuitive testing, and scalable deployment across phone and web, Retell AI offers a more complete and production-ready solution.
Still in doubt? Check out why Retell AI is better than Bland:
Build your first real-time voice assistant with Retell AI today and launch in minutes.Talk to our sales team now!
See how much your business could save by switching to AI-powered voice agents.
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