Need a scalable alternative to ElevenLabs for real conversations?
While ElevenLabs has gained attention in text-to-speech and voice synthesis, Retell AI is purpose-built for businesses that rely on live customer conversations. Retell combines competitive pricing, scalable infrastructure, and advanced enterprise features that go beyond simple voice generation.
For CX and operations teams handling thousands of calls every day, Retell is the clear alternative to ElevenLabs.
ElevenLabs is widely known for AI voice generation—turning text into natural speech.
In 2025, they introduced their agent platform, which supports a broad range of use cases such as gaming apps, e-commerce helpers, AI coaching, and basic customer service flows. However, the platform is not designed for enterprise call centers, where teams require:
seamless switching between phone, SMS, and email, persistent multi-turn memory across customer profiles, strong human handoff workflows (warm transfer, whisper messages, agent availability checks), telephony-level reliability and compliance.These limitations make ElevenLabs challenging for large-scale call operations.
Retell AI is designed specifically for high-stakes, high-volume business conversations where voice quality, reliability, and compliance directly affect revenue.
From healthcare and financial services to large call centers and logistics operations, Retell powers 40M+ calls per month with infrastructure engineered to scale.
While ElevenLabs provides voice AI agent capability, it lacks dynamic knowledge handling.
Retell offers native knowledge base syncing—automatically ingesting and updating content from your help center or documentation every 24 hours.This ensures answers remain factual, up-to-date, and consistent across multi-turn conversations.
Retell includes built-in guardrails and structured conversational flows, native SMS and telephony capabilities, DTMF capture and IVR navigation, advanced warm transfer methods, multi-channel orchestration.
ElevenLabs provides preset functions but is limited in core call center features—especially warm transfer, which they only support in its simplest form.
With Retell's AI Quality Assurance feature, it not only includes auto-summaries, sentiment analysis, outcome extraction but also have hallucination monitoring, knowledge-gap detection. CX leaders can audit performance, troubleshoot issues, and improve flows easily.
ElevenLabs offers minimal insight tools for production agent performance.
ElevenLabs offers conversational AI calling at around $0.08 per minute on its Business plan.
While this makes ElevenLabs a functional option for certain workflows, Retell AI delivers more value: starting at just $0.07 per minute, plus native telephony integration, post-call analytics, real-time variable extraction, knowledge base support, features designed from the ground up for high-volume business conversation
Retell offers phone numbers at $2 per month, and toll-free numbers for just $5, making large-scale operations sustainable.
ElevenLabs does not provide native phone number services, requiring phone number imported from providers.
Retell also ensures higher answer rates with Verified Phone Numbers, reducing spam flags and boosting customer trust. ElevenLabs does not offer telephony-level deliverability features.
Retell AI includes HIPAA, SOC 2 Type 1 & 2, and GDPR compliance across all plans, making it suitable for industries where data protection is non-negotiable.
ElevenLabs includes HIPAA, SOC 2 Type 2 and GDPR compliance.
With Retell’s infrastructure, businesses can run unlimited concurrent calls, whether handling 10 or 10,000 interactions simultaneously. This elasticity comes without extra coding or engineering lift.
Retell includes powerful PII redaction, role-based access control, multi-provider fallback routing to avoid downtime.
ElevenLabs does not support fallback routing.
For gaming, consumer apps, or lightweight conversational use cases, ElevenLabs is a solid choice. While if it is But when it comes to corporation call automation, functionality, ease of use, Retell AI is the superior alternative.
Retell not only lowers costs but also delivers smarter conversations, advanced analytics, and the scalability that CX leaders need.
If your business depends on customer conversations at scale, Retell is the clear choice over ElevenLabs.
Retell AI consistently proves to be the smarter alternative, offering flexible plans, advanced compliance, higher reliability, and built-in innovations that others simply don't match.
While Bland struggles with basic automation, Vapi adds usage fees, and Synthflow limits flexibility, Retell combines it all into one powerful solution. From smarter integrations to post-call analytics, Retell is the trusted choice for growing enterprises.
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Explore how AI voice agents work, Retell AI integrates with your business, and our AI call platform meets your needs.
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