PolyAI vs Retell AI
A side-by-side comparison of PolyAI and Retell AI 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 | PolyAI | Retell AI |
|---|---|---|
| Live chat | Not published | IncludedPay-as-you-go. Chat agents are billed per AI message, from $0.001 to $0.052 depending on model. |
| Voice | IncludedThe only channel. Calls arrive over a SIP or PSTN integration into the customer's existing CCaaS platform or telephony provider. | 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 | PolyAI | Retell AI |
|---|---|---|
| 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) | 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. | 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 | Not published | IncludedTransfer stops the AI voice agent fee and leaves only telephony running. Agent transfer cannot target a Custom LLM agent. |
| Guardrails & citations | Not published | 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 | 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. | 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 | PolyAI | Retell AI |
|---|---|---|
| Voice agent | IncludedThe entire product. PolyAI describes itself as an Agentic Dialog Platform answering inbound calls 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. |
| 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. |
QA & workforce
| Capability | PolyAI | 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 | PolyAI | Retell AI |
|---|---|---|
| Raw data export | Not published | API onlyCalls, transcripts and recordings come out through the API. There is no export UI, and bulk retrieval is unverified. |
Enterprise
| Capability | PolyAI | Retell AI |
|---|---|---|
| SAML SSO | 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. | 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 | 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. | 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 | 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. | 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 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. | 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 | PolyAI | Retell AI |
|---|---|---|
| REST API | 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. | IncludedNo plan gate. A dashboard API key works on pay-as-you-go. |
| SDKs | IncludedThe Agent Developer Kit is published as the programmatic control surface, documented at docs.poly.ai. | 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 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
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