Retell AI vs Thoughtly

Retell AI

One of the more honest voice-agent stacks: the pricing page breaks out infrastructure, TTS and LLM cost per minute so you can predict a call's cost instead of guessing. Telephony choice is wide and the concurrency allowance is generous. The catch is that per-minute billing plus add-ons makes a busy contact centre expensive fast, and the cheap end of the range only holds if you pick the cheap models.

Pros

• +Per-minute cost broken down by voice infrastructure, TTS provider and LLM on the public pricing page
• +Telephony via SIP trunking, Twilio and Vonage plus n8n, HubSpot, Make and Go High Level integrations
• +20 concurrent calls included before any concurrency charge
• +Voice, chat and SMS agents share one platform and API
• +HIPAA path exists via a signed BAA covered in the terms of service

Cons

• −Cost per minute more than quadruples between the cheapest and most capable model combinations
• −Knowledge base, denoising, PII removal and branded caller ID are all metered extras
• −No flat-rate plan, so a spike in call volume lands straight on the invoice

Thoughtly

Narrower than the general voice-agent platforms and better for it: this is speed-to-lead, with the phone call as the first touch and SMS, email and WhatsApp as the follow-through, all written back to the CRM. The $500 floor means it only makes sense where a recovered lead is worth real money.

Pros

• +Calls within about ten seconds of a form submission, then escalates across SMS, email and WhatsApp
• +All channels included in the plan price with no per-channel or per-seat surcharge
• +Automatic classification of call outcomes with CRM write-back to Salesforce and HubSpot
• +Public developer documentation and API for wiring it into your own stack

Cons

• −Entry price of $500 a month and no self-serve signup
• −No published per-minute rate, so cost at volume cannot be modelled before a sales call
• −Scale and Enterprise pricing is entirely opaque

Is Retell AI cheaper than Thoughtly?

They charge in different units, so there is no like-for-like answer: Retell AI starts at $0.07/min, Thoughtly at $500/mo. Entry price is the lowest paid plan as we last verified it.

Does Retell AI or Thoughtly have a free tier?

Retell AI has a free tier; Thoughtly has paid plans only.

Which has a public API, Retell AI or Thoughtly?

Both ship a public API, so either can be built on; the fact table above shows the platforms each one runs on.