So you are weighing ElevenLabs against Retell, and the first useful thing I can tell you is that these two are not really competing for the same job. They get lumped together because both have the words “AI voice” near them, but one is a voice product and the other is a phone-call platform. ElevenLabs makes voices: over 10,000 of them, the best cloning around, and on a blind listen most people cannot tell its output from a human. Retell makes a working phone agent that answers a caller, talks, books a slot, qualifies a lead, and shows you the lot on a dashboard. You can use both at once. The question is which one is the centre of what you are building.
Quick map of where this goes. First the honest version of the price, because the two do not even bill the same way and a straight number-to-number comparison would mislead you. Then who each one is actually built for. Then where each genuinely wins. Then a worked example, compliance, the bit we have not measured yet, and a straight answer at the end.
Different categories, and that is the whole point
Let me say the awkward thing up front so the rest of the page makes sense. ElevenLabs is the voice. Retell is the phone system that a voice plugs into. ElevenLabs sells you narration for a video, an audiobook or a podcast, priced by the character, and it also sells its own conversational agents that talk on a live line. Retell sells you the call infrastructure: it hears the caller, decides what to say (with an AI model you pick), speaks back, handles the transfer to a human, and runs the outbound campaign. So they overlap in exactly one place, the live conversational agent, and everywhere else they do different work.
Here is the part people miss. An ElevenLabs voice can sit inside a call platform. Retell itself lets you choose your text-to-speech provider, so the two can be complementary rather than rivals. If your priority is the sound, you might run ElevenLabs voices through a platform like Retell and get the best of both. Keep that in mind as you read, because “which one wins” is the wrong frame for half of you. The right frame is “which job am I solving first.”
The price, told honestly
These two bill so differently that I want to handle them one at a time, then tell you why you cannot line the numbers up directly.
ElevenLabs has two price shapes depending on what you are doing. For narration and video, you pay by the character on a subscription. Creator is $11 a month for 121,000 credits, Pro is $99 for 600,000, Scale is $299 for 1.8 million, and Business is $990 for 6 million, with a Free tier giving 10,000 credits a month to try it. That works out at roughly $0.09 to $0.20 per 1,000 characters depending on the tier and the model. One character is one credit on the v2 models; the faster Flash and Turbo models can cost less. For a live voice agent, ElevenLabs bills by the minute instead: about $0.08 for the premium voice, plus your own AI model and about $0.02 for the phone line, so a realistic all-in lands $0.10 to $0.30 a minute.
Retell bills by the minute, with most of the real-time pipeline bundled into one engine rate. The voice engine, the part that hears the caller and the part that speaks back, comes to $0.055 plus $0.015, together the $0.07 headline. What it does not bundle is the AI model, the bit that decides what to say. You pick that and pay for it: GPT-4.1 is the recommended default at $0.045 a minute, Gemini Flash is cheaper, Claude Sonnet dearer. Add the phone line at about $0.015, and a realistic all-in sits $0.13 to $0.31 a minute. Add-ons stack quietly on top: a knowledge base adds $0.005, denoising $0.005, stripping out personal details $0.01, and automatic quality checks $0.10 a minute once you pass the first hundred free.
Now the honest bit. You cannot put “$0.11 per 1,000 characters” next to “$0.07 a minute” and call one cheaper, because they measure different things. Characters are for written-script narration where you know the word count in advance. Per-minute is for a live conversation where you do not, because the caller controls how long they talk. The only place the two meet on the same footing is the conversational agent, and there they land in nearly the same per-minute band: ElevenLabs at $0.10 to $0.30, Retell at $0.13 to $0.31. So if you are picking purely on the live-call price, there is not much in it. The decision is about everything around the price.
| What you are buying | ElevenLabs | Retell |
|---|---|---|
| Narration / video (per script) | Per character, from $0.09 to $0.20 per 1,000 chars | Not offered |
| Live phone agent (per minute) | $0.10 to $0.30 all-in | $0.13 to $0.31 all-in |
| Entry subscription | Creator $11/mo (Free tier available) | Pay as you go, $10 free credits |
| Voice engine bundled into one rate | No, voice is the product itself | Yes, $0.07 voice engine |
Who each one is built for
Two clean use-case fits, and they fall out of the category split above.
- You are making content where the voice is the star: a video voiceover, an audiobook, a podcast, ads, or you want a branded clone of a specific voice across everything. ElevenLabs. The library, the cloning and the per-character billing are all built for exactly this, and nothing Retell does touches it. This is also the pick if you want a high-quality voice layer to drop into something else you are building.
- You are an ops team or a contact centre that wants a phone agent answering real calls this week, without standing up a stack yourself. Retell. The bundled engine, the dashboard, the warm transfer to a human and the batch outbound calling are doing the work, and you get a live agent in days rather than wiring one together from parts.
If you are somewhere in the middle, running a live conversational agent and you care a lot about how it sounds, that is the overlap zone, and you may end up using ElevenLabs voices inside a call platform. More on that in the worked example.
Where ElevenLabs wins
ElevenLabs wins anywhere the sound itself is the deliverable, and it wins by a clear margin.
The first card is raw voice quality. We have not run our own listening tests yet, so treat this as an editorial read rather than a measured score, but the public reputation is strong and consistent: on a blind listen, ElevenLabs is the one most people cannot pick apart from a human. If you are putting a voice in front of paying listeners, that gap matters.
The second is the library and the cloning. Over 10,000 voices is not a number Retell competes with; Retell gives you a handful of platform voices plus a few third-party engines, which is plenty for a phone agent but nowhere near a content library. And ElevenLabs cloning is the best around: instant cloning for speed, professional cloning for a long-term brand voice you will reuse for years.
The third is languages, and this one is decisive for a lot of buyers. ElevenLabs covers around 70 languages. Retell, by its own listing, covers two: English and Spanish. If you need a French, German or Hindi voice, ElevenLabs is not just ahead, it is the only one of the two that does the job at all.
The fourth is narration, which Retell simply does not offer. If your work is scripted audio billed by the character, ElevenLabs is the whole answer and Retell is not in the conversation. The model line-up backs this up: Multilingual v2 and the newer v3 trade a little speed for richer, more emotional delivery, which is what you want for a voiceover, while Flash v2.5 is the one tuned for real-time agents.
Where Retell wins
Retell wins on getting a working phone agent into production fast, and on everything a contact centre needs around the call.
The headline win is turnkey speed. Retell’s own pitch is a working phone agent live in days, not months, and the bundled voice engine is why. Fewer providers to choose, fewer keys to manage, fewer bills to reconcile. ElevenLabs gives you a superb voice, but if you want a full inbound-support or outbound-sales phone operation, you are assembling more of the surrounding pieces yourself. Retell hands you most of them.
The second is the contact-centre dashboard and the operational kit. Retell ships a fuller console for building and watching agents, so a less technical ops lead can get a long way before hitting a wall. It carries SIP trunking, so you plug in your own phone-number supplier instead of using Retell’s numbers. It does warm transfers, handing a live call to a human with the AI’s summary read to them first. And it runs batch outbound calling from an uploaded spreadsheet with no cap on how many calls run at once.
The third is a clear path to a signed healthcare agreement, which I will cover in the compliance section, plus real customers to point to. Retell features Everise, a large customer-experience operator, and GiftHealth among its case studies, and says more than 3,000 businesses use it. A caution worth stating plainly: those headline outcomes, Everise reporting it contained 65% of internal service-desk tickets, GiftHealth reporting 4x operational efficiency, are Retell’s own reported figures, not anything we have independently checked. Read them as the vendor’s claim, not as proof.
One real gap to flag on both sides of this section. Retell covers only English and Spanish, so for any multilingual phone operation it falls down where ElevenLabs walks away with it. And Retell does not support MCP, the connection that lets other AI tools trigger and orchestrate calls, where ElevenLabs does. If letting other AI tools drive your calls is on your roadmap, that is a real difference. If it is not, you will never notice it.
| Capability | ElevenLabs | Retell |
|---|---|---|
| Voice count | 10,000+ | Handful of platform + third-party engines |
| Languages | ~70 | 2 (en, es) |
| Voice cloning | Instant + professional | Not a focus |
| Per-character narration | Yes | No |
| Turnkey phone agent + dashboard | Lighter, more assembly | Yes, the core product |
| SIP trunking / warm transfer / batch calling | Yes | Yes |
| MCP support | Yes | No |
A worked example, so it feels real
Say you are launching a Spanish-and-English support line for a clinic, 1,000 minutes of calls a month. Retell is the natural fit: it covers both languages, the engine rate starts at $0.07, and once you add a model, a voice and a line the month lands roughly between $130 and $310 all-in. You get a dashboard, warm transfer to a nurse when the bot is out of its depth, and a phone agent live in days. That is the turnkey path.
Now say your job is different: you are producing a 50-episode Spanish-language audio course, all scripted. Retell cannot do this at all, because it does not sell narration and does not bill by the character. ElevenLabs is the whole answer. You write the scripts, pick a v3 or Multilingual voice for the warmth, and pay by the character on a Pro or Scale subscription. Same brand, completely different tool, because the job changed from a live call to scripted audio.
And the overlap case: you want a live phone agent, but the stock platform voices sound flat to you and the brand depends on the voice. Here you might run an ElevenLabs voice inside a call platform, paying ElevenLabs for the sound and the platform for the call handling. That is the “use both” answer, and it is a real option, not a fudge. Run your own minutes and character counts through the cost calculator before you commit, because your call mix and script length, not our ranges, decide the real number.
Compliance and trust
If you are in healthcare, finance or anywhere regulated, this may decide it, so here are the specifics from each vendor.
ElevenLabs offers HIPAA, SOC 2 and GDPR, with EU data residency and a zero-retention mode, but all of that sits on the Enterprise plan. You cannot self-serve those guarantees on the Creator, Pro or Scale tiers. If you are in healthcare or the EU and need them, budget for an Enterprise contract rather than the published subscription prices.
Retell holds SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2, GDPR, and HIPAA, and the legal data-handling agreement that comes with HIPAA, the BAA, is available. The catch is the same shape as ElevenLabs: HIPAA and the BAA are Enterprise-plan only. You cannot switch them on from the pay-as-you-go tier; you have to contact sales. So if a signed BAA is a gating requirement, both clear the bar, and both put it behind an Enterprise conversation. Neither lets you self-serve a compliant healthcare setup on the cheap plan, so plan for that call early either way.
What we have not tested yet
Time for the honest limit. ElevenLabs says its Flash v2.5 model runs at about 75ms for real-time agents, and low latency is the thing that makes a voice agent feel human rather than awkward. But that is ElevenLabs’ own published figure, not a number we measured. We have not placed our own timed test calls to either ElevenLabs or Retell yet, so you will not find a Voxrater latency figure for either on this page. When the test rig ships, we will run the same outbound scenarios against both and publish p50, p95 and the dates, and if the measured numbers contradict the marketing, the measured numbers win. Until then, treat any latency claim on either site as a claim.
The voice-quality and range scores in the tables above are an editorial preview too. They are our provisional read from public information and reputation, not yet from blind listening tests. They put ElevenLabs clearly ahead on voice quality and range, which matches everything in the public record, but “clearly ahead on the thing we have not measured ourselves yet” is exactly the kind of claim we want to label honestly rather than dress up as a result.
Three questions that decide it
If you want to skip the prose, answer these.
- Is the voice itself the product, or is it the phone system? Voice as the product, a voiceover, an audiobook, a clone, leans ElevenLabs. A working phone line answering calls leans Retell.
- Do you need more than English and Spanish? Yes means ElevenLabs, because Retell covers only those two. No, and that gap disappears.
- Do you want it live this week with a dashboard, or are you happy assembling the voice layer yourself? Live and turnkey leans Retell. Assembling the best-sounding voice layer, possibly to drop into another platform, leans ElevenLabs.
Bottom line
Pick ElevenLabs when voice quality, the size of the library, languages or narration is what you care about, or when you want the voice layer itself to drop into something else. You get over 10,000 voices, the best cloning around, about 70 languages, per-character narration that Retell does not offer, and MCP support. The cost is that you are not buying a finished phone operation; for a full contact centre you assemble more of the surrounding stack yourself.
Pick Retell when you want a turnkey contact-centre phone agent live in days, with the call handling, the dashboard, warm transfer and batch calling built in. You give up the big voice library, the cloning, the roughly 70 languages (Retell does two), narration entirely, and MCP. In return you give up far fewer evenings, and you get a working phone line fast.
And do not forget the third answer: for a live agent where the sound is the brand, you can run ElevenLabs voices inside a call platform and use both. Then read the full ElevenLabs review and Retell review for the per-plan detail, and run your own numbers in the cost calculator with your real call volume or script length before you sign anything.