Bland AI vs PolyAI
A side-by-side comparison of Bland AI and PolyAI on what each one charges, what it meters, and which plan every capability actually sits on.
Capability by capability
Nothing we track differs between them.
Channels
| Capability | Bland AI | PolyAI |
|---|---|---|
| Live chat | IncludedEnterprise only per the compare table, though the billing docs publish the rate anyway at $0.01 per agent message. The widget carries both voice and chat and uses the same pathways, personas and memory as the phone channel. | Not published |
| Voice | IncludedStart. Voice is the product, billed per connected minute. | IncludedThe only channel. Calls arrive over a SIP or PSTN integration into the customer's existing CCaaS platform or telephony provider. |
| SMS | IncludedEnterprise only, priced at $0.02 per message in the billing docs. US numbers need A2P registration, and BYOT numbers must have their A2P campaign set up in Twilio because Bland cannot yet do it. | Not published |
AI resolution
| Capability | Bland AI | PolyAI |
|---|---|---|
| Resolution over knowledge base | IncludedCounted rather than metered: 10 knowledge bases on Start, 50 on Build, 100 on Scale, unlimited on Enterprise, with no per-query charge. Built from an uploaded file, raw text or a sitemap crawl. | Not published |
| Action-taking (API calls) | IncludedTools call external APIs mid-conversation, webhook nodes fetch data inside a pathway, and secrets hold credentials without hardcoding them. Expanded call logs show every webhook URL, status code and response payload after the fact. The Custom Code node, which runs JavaScript inside a pathway, is Enterprise. | Included"Other systems can be integrated via APIs", with an Agent Developer Kit for custom functions and flow control, and a Connect Portal handling OAuth 2.0 and field mapping. Card payments are taken through a documented PCI Pal integration. |
| Handoff to human | IncludedWarm Transfers and Live Transfers are both Enterprise on the compare table. Cold transfer to a number is available lower down and bills the transferred leg at the plan's transfer rate, or free on your own Twilio. | Not published |
| Guardrails & citations | IncludedBoth Enterprise on the compare table. Guard rails run on every AI and user response in production and come in two shapes: time-based rules that must fire (AI disclosure, self-introduction, recording disclosure, default window 30 seconds) and content rules that must not. Citations extract structured values from transcripts with the quoted source text and timestamp attached. | Not published |
| Multilingual AI | Included17 languages named on the current voice generation plus 10 marked experimental. The docs index claims 40+ out of the box, which is not the same number as the enumerated list. Live Translation streams audio and returns translated speech between supported pairs. | IncludedPublished counts conflict: 75 languages on the about page, 45 as standard on the technology page FAQ, and 43 individually named on the languages page under a 75+ title. |
AI voice
| Capability | Bland AI | PolyAI |
|---|---|---|
| Voice agent | IncludedTelephony arrives three ways: numbers bought from Bland at $15 a month, your own Twilio account, or SIP trunks from Genesys, Five9, NICE CXone, Amazon Connect or Talkdesk. SIP traffic bills at the standard voice rate with no SIP surcharge. | IncludedThe entire product. PolyAI describes itself as an Agentic Dialog Platform answering inbound calls for enterprise contact centres. |
| IVR replacement | IncludedA named solution page, and pathways handle DTMF button presses as call events. Bland says the platform was built phones-first, which shows in features like custom dialing that picks the outbound number to maximise pickup. | Not published |
| Real-time transcription | IncludedBland's own speech-to-text rather than Deepgram or a reseller, which is why no transcription vendor appears in the sub-processor list. Live transcripts stream in the Active tab of call logs, and a separate endpoint returns a corrected transcript re-derived from the recording afterwards. | Not published |
| Call summarization | IncludedAn AI summary is generated per call and returned on the call object, so it comes out with the export rather than living only in the dashboard. | Not published |
QA & workforce
| Capability | Bland AI | PolyAI |
|---|---|---|
| Automated QA coverage | IncludedEvals grade real calls at scale with configurable LLM judges, and every call carries automatic metrics for agent quality, transcription quality, sentiment, silence, interruptions and repetition, with issues flagged by severity. A human review workflow sits alongside it: assignee, status, QC tags and threaded notes. No export path is documented for Evals output. | Not published |
Reporting
| Capability | Bland AI | PolyAI |
|---|---|---|
| Raw data export | IncludedRare in this category: an actual export button, not just an API. Export Calls in the call logs header mails a CSV, respects the filters on screen, spans up to 180 days and lets you include or exclude individual fields. | Not published |
Enterprise
| Capability | Bland AI | PolyAI |
|---|---|---|
| SAML SSO | IncludedEnterprise only. Both OIDC and SAML 2.0, with a setup wizard covering Okta, Azure AD, Google Workspace and Auth0. Users from a verified domain are provisioned automatically on first login. | Not publishedNot addressed anywhere on poly.ai or docs.poly.ai. Consistent with a product that has no seat model, but not stated either way. |
| HIPAA / BAA | IncludedBAA is Enterprise only, blank on all three published columns. HIPAA eligibility is claimed without a tier, but a regulated buyer cannot sign the agreement that makes it usable at a published price. | Not publishedHedged rather than certified: "Where relevant, our systems are designed to meet HIPAA requirements." No attestation and no BAA offer is published, and healthcare is a named vertical. |
| SOC 2 | IncludedNo plan gate on the certification. Type I and Type II, with quarterly third-party penetration tests in scope. The report itself is behind the Trust Portal, and the pricing FAQ adds that compliance documentation is available under NDA on Enterprise. | IncludedNone stated. No plans are published, so plan gating cannot be assessed either way. |
| ISO 27001 | Not publishedNot claimed on the trust page, the AI information page or the pricing FAQ, all three of which enumerate certifications and stop at SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, PCI DSS and FedRAMP. | IncludedNone stated. No plans are published. |
| GDPR | IncludedNo plan gate. A public DPA incorporates the 2021 EU Standard Contractual Clauses and the UK IDTA, and covers CCPA, the Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia and Utah statutes and the Swiss FADP alongside GDPR. Sub-processor changes carry 14 days notice and an objection right. | IncludedNone stated. No plans are published. |
| Data residency | IncludedEnterprise only for selection, though the regions themselves are documented publicly: Oregon, Canada Central, Sydney and Ireland, each with its AWS region and static egress IPs. Owning the models is what makes the claim different from a wrapper's, since inference runs on hardware in the region rather than routing to a US provider cloud. | Not publishedAWS is named as the host with no region, no residency option and no EU-only inference. No VPC, dedicated or on-premises tier is published. |
| Data retention policy | IncludedNo plan gate in the API reference. recording_lifespan_days is set per organization from 1 to 1825 days, or -1 to disable retention. It governs recordings only; no equivalent control is documented for transcripts, pathway logs or extracted variables. | Not publishedNot covered on the compliance page or the security page. Call recordings and transcripts are generated by the product, so the missing window is a real gap rather than an inapplicable field. |
| Right-to-erasure tooling | IncludedUnder the DPA, Bland deletes or returns all Customer Personal Data at the end of the Services on request, excluding backups which it isolates from further processing. The request window is 14 days from cessation, by email to security@bland.ai. | Not published |
Developer
| Capability | Bland AI | PolyAI |
|---|---|---|
| REST API | IncludedNo plan gate. A dashboard API key works from Start. | IncludedOpen APIs and an Agent Developer Kit are published as product surfaces. No public API reference and no data-export endpoint is documented, so what the API can read out is Unknown. |
| Webhooks | IncludedPost-call webhooks fire after a call ends and can be fetched, created or resent through the API. Payloads are verifiable by HMAC signature, and Enterprise adds asymmetric JWT signing. The CLI forwards webhooks to localhost without ngrok. | Not published |
| SDKs | Includedbland-cli from npm covers the whole account and emits JSON on every read command. It bundles a local MCP server and Bland hosts a remote one. A Web Agent SDK embeds an agent in a browser. No first-party Node or Python server library is documented. | IncludedThe Agent Developer Kit is published as the programmatic control surface, documented at docs.poly.ai. |
| Published rate limits | IncludedPartly. org_rate_limit is documented with a default of 5, and the send-call reference enumerates five 429 classes including a 10-second floor between calls to the same number and separate limits for new accounts and international dialing. There is no per-endpoint table, and none of it covers the read endpoints used to extract data. | Not published |
Both entries last checked Sep 9, 2026.
What Bland AI costs
$299/month
3 published plans, billed monthly- Billing unit
A $299 monthly platform fee buys a lower per-minute rate and higher caps - Free tier
No - AI pricing
$0.14 per minute - Vendor calls it
Talk Time Rate - Human handoff
Still billed - Reopened chat
Not published - AI billing window
Not published - Data export
Self-serve - Automation export
Full
2 of 9 not published by Bland AI, checked
What PolyAI costs
- Billing unit
Per minute of voice agent use - Free tier
Not published - AI pricing
Not published - Vendor calls it
minute - Human handoff
Not published - Reopened chat
Not published - AI billing window
Not published - Data export
Not published - Automation export
Not published
7 of 9 not published by PolyAI, checked