Skip to content
effecthub

Bolna vs Vapi

Two fact sheets from our own research, side by side — pricing, platforms, API access and status re-checked by us rather than quoted from the vendors. Bolna starts at $0.06, Vapi at $0.05. Both ship a public API.

Side by side

FactBolnaVapi
CategoryVoice Agents & Phone AIVoice Agents & Phone AI
Pricing modelPaidPaid
Starts at$0.06 minute$0.05 minute
Public APIYesYes
PlatformsWeb, APIWeb, API
CompanyWhismurwave Inc.Vapi Inc.
Launched2020
Last verifiedSep 6, 2026Sep 6, 2026

What our research says

Bolna

Bolna competes on two things Western voice-agent platforms handle badly: Indian language coverage and per-minute price. Being able to swap the recognition, language and speech models independently is genuinely useful when one vendor's accent handling fails on your callers. It is a developer product first — the playground exists, but the APIs and telephony wiring are where the work is.

Pros

  • Over ten Indian languages plus English, an area most voice platforms cover poorly
  • Twenty-plus interchangeable ASR, LLM and TTS models rather than a single fixed stack
  • APIs for agents, calls, numbers, knowledge bases and batch dialling, plus n8n, Make and Zapier
  • 6 cents a minute billed in 30-second increments, with volume rates down to about 4.5 cents

Cons

  • Purely metered, so a bad prompt loop turns directly into spend
  • Telephony charges from Twilio, Plivo or Vobiz are additional and not included in the quoted rate
  • Pay-as-you-go requires a credit purchase of at least $10 up front
  • Concurrency and support levels are tied to the Pilots or Enterprise commitments

Vapi

The default answer when a developer needs a voice agent on a phone line rather than a chat widget: it handles the hard real-time parts — barge-in, latency, turn-taking, telephony — and lets you swap in your own models. Enterprise adoption at Ring and Intuit is real validation. Cost forecasting is the hard part, because the platform fee is only one of four meters running.

Pros

  • Handles real-time voice mechanics: turn-taking, interruptions, latency and telephony
  • Bring-your-own-key support across OpenAI, Anthropic and Google avoids double model markup
  • CRM and helpdesk integrations for Salesforce, HubSpot and Zendesk
  • SOC 2, HIPAA and PCI compliance plus SSO and RBAC on the enterprise tier
  • Proven at scale, with Amazon Ring routing inbound support volume through it

Cons

  • The $0.05/minute platform fee sits on top of speech, model and voice provider costs
  • Concurrency beyond ten lines costs $10 per line per month
  • Enterprise compliance features require an annual Scale contract
  • It is a developer platform, so there is no usable no-code path

Which one fits

Choose Bolna if you need

  • Teams running call operations in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu or other Indian languages
  • Developers who want to choose their own ASR, LLM and TTS combination per agent
  • High-volume outbound campaigns where a per-minute rate under 6 cents matters

Choose Vapi if you need

  • Developers building phone-based support, booking or qualification agents
  • Replacing IVR trees with something that actually listens
  • Teams that want to bring their own model and voice provider keys

All Bolna alternatives →Browse all Voice Agents & Phone AI