Parloa vs Retell AI
A side-by-side comparison of Parloa and Retell AI on what each one charges, what it meters, and which plan every capability actually sits on.
The short answer
3 of the 13 capabilities tracked on both differ.
| Measure | Parloa | Retell AI |
|---|---|---|
| Starts at | Sales-gated | Sales-gated |
| AI billed at | Not published | $0.00 per AI interaction |
| Included, where the other says no | 1 capability | 0 capabilities |
Capability by capability
3 of the 13 capabilities tracked on both products differ.
Channels
| Capability | Parloa | Retell AI |
|---|---|---|
| Live chat | IncludedPublished as a first-class channel alongside voice: "Deploy to voice, chat, messaging, and more", with chat, messaging, phone, click-to-call and multimodal listed on the platform architecture diagram. | IncludedPay-as-you-go. Chat agents are billed per AI message, from $0.001 to $0.052 depending on model. |
| Voice | IncludedThe primary channel and the origin of the product, voice-first since 2018. Calls arrive over SIP into the customer's CCaaS or VOIP infrastructure, and Parloa runs its own carrier-grade telephony underneath rather than a third party's. | IncludedPay-as-you-go. Voice is the product, billed per connected minute. |
| SMS | Not published | 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 | Parloa | Retell AI |
|---|---|---|
| Autonomous resolution agent | IncludedPublished outcomes include a global furniture brand where "AI agents handle 100% of calls", GESOBAU at 66% of qualified calls resolved automatically, and MEG at 42% of customer calls automated. No accuracy SLA accompanies any of them. | Not published |
| Resolution over knowledge base | Not published | 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) | IncludedAuthenticated connectors to Salesforce, ServiceNow, Zendesk and Microsoft Dynamics 365, pre-configured Knowledge, Routing and Custom Skills attached directly to an agent, REST APIs for custom services, and MCP Skills released in June 2026. | 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 | IncludedSummaries carrying intent, actions attempted, escalation reason and accessed account context are pushed into CCaaS or CRM before the human picks up. The SAP Service Cloud integration passes conversational context into the Agent Desktop at handoff. | IncludedTransfer stops the AI voice agent fee and leaves only telephony running. Agent transfer cannot target a Custom LLM agent. |
| Guardrails & citations | IncludedPer-agent safety controls that "block harmful content, detect jailbreak attempts, and restrict off-topic conversations", topic enforcement, social-engineering and PII-extraction detection analysing full conversation history each turn, and LLM Guardrails shipped July 2026. Checks run in parallel with the response "for no added latency". | 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 | IncludedGenuinely central to the product and genuinely inconsistent in the numbers. Published counts run 130+, 140+ and 100+ on different pages, with Real-Time Translation quoted separately at 30+. The one auditable deployment figure is BER Airport running four languages. | 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 | Parloa | Retell AI |
|---|---|---|
| Voice agent | IncludedThe product. Parloa calls it an AI Agent Management Platform, managing the lifecycle of AI agents across Design, Test, Scale and Optimize for enterprise contact centres. | 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 | IncludedPublished as a named use case with a customer story titled "1.5 million interactions handled by AI agents annually: The telecommunications IVR replacement playbook", and routing is one of the pre-built Skills shipped with the platform. | Not published |
| Real-time transcription | Not published | 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 | IncludedAI-generated summaries "capture customer intent, actions taken, and conversation outcomes", derived from transcript data in the Conversation Store and retrievable through the Transcripts API. | Not published |
QA & workforce
| Capability | Parloa | Retell AI |
|---|---|---|
| Automated QA coverage | Not published | Paid add-onAI Quality Assurance at $0.10 a minute, first 100 minutes free. No export path for its output is documented. |
Reporting
| Capability | Parloa | Retell AI |
|---|---|---|
| Raw data export | Included"Export data to in-house dashboards or business intelligence tools for deep analysis", with a Data Hub and Sharing component and a Conversation Store in the published architecture. No format, destination or connector is named, and Transcripts API access is enabled per organisation on request. | API onlyCalls, transcripts and recordings come out through the API. There is no export UI, and bulk retrieval is unverified. |
Enterprise
| Capability | Parloa | Retell AI |
|---|---|---|
| SAML SSO | IncludedListed in the Trust Center under Product Security as SSO Support. The protocol, the identity providers and any plan gate are not stated, and there are no plans to gate it against. | IncludedEnterprise only. Absent from pay-as-you-go. |
| Role-based access control | Included"Granular access control with role-based permissions" on the security page, listed again in the Trust Center under Product Security as Role-Based Access Control alongside Multi-Factor Authentication. | IncludedEnterprise only. Absent from pay-as-you-go, which has no user or role model priced at all. |
| Audit logs | Included"Audit-ready architecture with traceable logs" and "Every conversation is logged, searchable, and fully auditable", with version control over agent changes. Whether the trail can be exported is not published. | Not publishedThe vendor blog implies logging differs by tier, saying enterprise adds "the logging that survives a SOC 2 customer audit". Nothing published describes an audit log feature, its retention or its export on either tier. |
| Sandbox environment | IncludedStaging and production environments with promotion between them, plus simulation against thousands of synthetic and historical conversations, LLM-based and rule-based scoring, and regression testing before release. | Not published |
| HIPAA / BAA | Not publishedHIPAA appears in the Trust Center as a certificate entry and a report, and the Knowledge Hub says the platform "aligns with HIPAA". No page offers or mentions a business associate agreement, and healthcare is a named industry with live deployments. | 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 | IncludedNone stated. No plans are published, so plan gating cannot be assessed either way. | IncludedNo plan gate stated. Type 1 and Type 2. |
| ISO 27001 | IncludedNone stated. No plans are published. | Not publishedNot claimed on the compliance page. |
| GDPR | IncludedNone stated. No plans are published. | 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 | Included"Data residency controls and regional hosting options aligned with local jurisdictional requirements", on Azure regions across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. No named region, no EU-only inference guarantee and no statement of which regions come with which contract. | 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 | Not published"PII redaction and flexible data retention policies" is a capability claim without a number. No default window, no maximum, no split between audio, transcripts and summaries, and no post-cancellation window. | 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 | Not published | IncludedAccount deletion plus a support request for full erasure including third-party identifier removal. |
Developer
| Capability | Parloa | Retell AI |
|---|---|---|
| REST API | IncludedREST APIs for custom services and external data sources, plus the Transcripts API for conversation data. The AMP documentation at docs.amp.parloa.com is behind a login and access is granted by a Parloa representative, so no public API reference exists to check rate limits or schemas against. | IncludedNo plan gate. A dashboard API key works on pay-as-you-go. |
| SDKs | Not published | 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. |
Both entries last checked Sep 9, 2026.
What Parloa costs
- Billing unit
Consumption-based - Free tier
Not published - AI pricing
Not published - Vendor calls it
Consumption-based enterprise SaaS - Human handoff
Not published - Reopened chat
Not published - AI billing window
Not published - Data export
Support ticket required - Automation export
Not published
6 of 9 not published by Parloa, 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