Bland AI vs Retell AI
A side-by-side comparison of Bland AI and Retell AI on what each one charges, what it meters, and which plan every capability actually sits on.
The short answer
6 of the 20 capabilities tracked on both differ, mostly in AI resolution.
| Measure | Bland AI | Retell AI |
|---|---|---|
| Starts at | Usage only | Sales-gated |
| Charged per | The workspace | Not published |
| AI billed at | $0.11 per minute | $0.00 per AI interaction |
| Included, where the other says no | 1 capability | 0 capabilities |
Capability by capability
6 of the 20 capabilities tracked on both products differ.
Channels
| Capability | Bland AI | Retell AI |
|---|---|---|
| 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. | IncludedPay-as-you-go. Chat agents are billed per AI message, from $0.001 to $0.052 depending on model. |
| Voice | IncludedStart. Voice is the product, billed per connected minute. | IncludedPay-as-you-go. Voice is the product, billed per connected minute. |
| 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. | Paid add-on$0.01 per message on both call and chat agents, plus a $20.00 monthly Retell SMS subscription. No charge on custom telephony. |
AI resolution
| Capability | Bland AI | Retell AI |
|---|---|---|
| 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. | Paid add-onKnowledge Base is metered twice: $0.005 a minute when an agent uses one, and $8.00 a month per knowledge base above the first ten. |
| 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. | IncludedTool calls are first-class and readable after the fact through transcript_with_tool_calls. On a Custom LLM agent your own tool calls only appear in the transcript if you report them yourself. |
| 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. | IncludedTransfer stops the AI voice agent fee and leaves only telephony running. Agent transfer cannot target a Custom LLM agent. |
| 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. | Paid add-onSafety Guardrails at $0.005 a minute, listed as a feature of both tiers but metered. Citation behaviour is not published, so only half of this attribute is evidenced. |
| 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. | Not publishedNo language list or count appears on the pricing page, the compliance docs, the integrations page or the custom-LLM docs. |
AI voice
| Capability | Bland AI | Retell AI |
|---|---|---|
| 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. | IncludedTelephony arrives through Twilio elastic SIP trunking or SIP connectors for Five9, Telnyx and Vonage, or through Retell-issued numbers at $2.00 a month. |
| 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. | IncludedThe API returns transcript_object with word-level timings, plus a scrubbed variant. The speech-to-text engine runs for the whole call, which is also why silence is billed. |
| 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 | Retell AI |
|---|---|---|
| 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. | Paid add-onAI Quality Assurance at $0.10 a minute, first 100 minutes free. No export path for its output is documented. |
Reporting
| Capability | Bland AI | Retell AI |
|---|---|---|
| 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. | API onlyCalls, transcripts and recordings come out through the API. There is no export UI, and bulk retrieval is unverified. |
Enterprise
| Capability | Bland AI | Retell AI |
|---|---|---|
| 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. | IncludedEnterprise only. Absent from pay-as-you-go. |
| Role-based access control | Not published | IncludedEnterprise only. Absent from pay-as-you-go, which has no user or role model priced at all. |
| 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. | IncludedAvailable on pay-as-you-go, not enterprise-gated. Self-serve signing at click-agreements.retellai.com at no additional cost, countersigned inside a business day. |
| 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. | IncludedNo plan gate stated. Type 1 and Type 2. |
| 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. | IncludedNo plan gate stated. A DPA with Standard Contractual Clauses covers EU and UK data subjects, because there is no EU service operation to keep the data in. |
| 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. | NoNo customer-selectable region exists. The vendor states it does not currently operate services within the European Union, and recording URLs resolve to AWS us-west-2. |
| 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. | IncludedCustom data retention is listed on both tiers. Configurable per agent from 1 day to 2 years, covering transcripts, recordings and logs. Three privacy modes are documented: store all data, exclude PII, or retain only basic attributes. |
| 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. | IncludedAccount deletion plus a support request for full erasure including third-party identifier removal. |
Developer
| Capability | Bland AI | Retell AI |
|---|---|---|
| REST API | IncludedNo plan gate. A dashboard API key works from Start. | IncludedNo plan gate. A dashboard API key works on pay-as-you-go. |
| 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. | IncludedOfficial Node (retell-sdk) and Python (retell) SDKs. Custom LLM lets a customer run the model on their own WebSocket server, with reference implementations for OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, OpenRouter and Claude. |
| 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 publishedNo rate limit is documented on the endpoint reference that was verified. |
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 Retell AI costs
- Billing unit
Pure consumption with monthly capacity line items and no seat dimension - Free tier
No - AI pricing
Not published - Vendor calls it
GPT 5 nano - Human handoff
Still billed - Reopened chat
Not published - AI billing window
Not published - Data export
Self-serve - Automation export
Not published
4 of 9 not published by Retell AI, checked