Best for
Best for organisations that want meetings, email and messages searchable in one place, and metrics on how the meetings themselves are being run.
- Freelancers
- Small and mid-sized
- Enterprise
AI Voice & Speech Comparison
Read AI vs. Retell AI
At a glance
At a glance
Best for
Best for teams putting AI voice agents on real phone lines and testing them before they meet customers.
- Small and mid-sized
- Enterprise
Cataleo does not name a winner. Both statements come from the vendors themselves.
Full Comparison
| Criterion | Read AI | Retell AI |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | Free plan; Pro $19.75 / user / month Pro is $15 per user per month billed annually. Enterprise is $29.75 monthly or $22.50 annually, Enterprise+ $39.75 monthly or $29.75 annually and requires five or more licences. Every plan is measured on 30 meetings a month. | lower value From $0.07 / minute of calls Pay as you go, quoted by the vendor as $0.07 to $0.31 per minute for voice agents depending on the models, telephony and add-ons chosen, plus from $0.002 per message for chat agents. Enterprise is quoted by sales. |
| Free trial | Free plan with 5 meeting transcripts a month | $10 in free credits, no contract and no commitment; 20 concurrent calls are included |
| Commercial use | Not stated | Yes, usage-based |
| Output | Meeting reports with summary, topics, action items, key questions and a speaker-separated transcript | Voice agents for inbound and outbound phone calls and web calls, plus chat agents over SMS and a web widget |
| API | Yes, plus an MCP server and Claude and ChatGPT connectors | Yes, REST API with Node.js and Python libraries, webhooks and an MCP server |
| Languages | Meeting reports in 16+ languages | 57 languages listed for text-to-speech and 55 for speech recognition, each with the providers that cover it |
| Hosting | Cloud, with Windows, macOS, Android and iOS apps and a Chrome extension | Cloud on AWS; the vendor states it does not currently operate services within the European Union |
| Voice cloning | No, Read AI transcribes, summarises and measures meetings and does not synthesise or clone voices | Yes, custom voices can be added by searching ElevenLabs community voices, importing an existing clone or training one from uploaded recordings, with Inworld, Cartesia, MiniMax, ElevenLabs and Retell's own platform clones as providers; up to 100 custom voices per account |
| Real-time use | Yes, an in-meeting dashboard with live notes, transcription, summaries and meeting metrics as the call runs, on Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet | Yes, live inbound and outbound phone calls and browser web calls, with a proprietary turn-taking model, batch calling for campaigns and live monitoring that lets a human listen in or step in |
| Speech-to-speech and dubbing | No dubbing or speech-to-speech translation | A call runs as spoken conversation by chaining speech recognition, a language model and text-to-speech; dubbing of existing recordings is not part of the product |
| Editing and controls | Meeting reports with summary, topics, action items and key questions, a meeting coach scoring talking speed, filler words, bias and charisma with coaching trends, audio and video playback with highlights from the Enterprise plan, Ask Read search across meetings, email and messages with direct access to Anthropic and OpenAI models, audio and video uploads, and workspace rules controlling which meetings Read joins | Single and multi-prompt agents or node-based conversation flows, knowledge bases, expressive mode for emotion and emphasis, custom pronunciation with IPA, CMU, Pinyin or Jyutping, denoising and interruption sensitivity, voicemail and IVR handling, plus a playground, simulation tests, A/B testing and post-call analysis |
| Consent and trust | Custom assistant branding, naming on all platforms and a logo on Zoom, plus workspace distribution and sharing rules; Enterprise+ adds SAML SSO, SCIM provisioning, domain capture, a custom data retention policy and HIPAA compliance support | HIPAA compliant, SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2 certified and GDPR compliant, with a BAA and a DPA including EU standard contractual clauses available for self-signing at no extra fee. Per-agent data retention runs from 1 day to 2 years, PII can be excluded from what is stored, and recording URLs can be signed. Services are not currently operated inside the EU |
| MCP-ready | Yes | Yes |
| Deployment | Cloud (SaaS), Browser-based | Cloud (SaaS), Browser-based |
| Support | Email helpdesk | Not stated |
| Onboarding | more entries Documentation and knowledge base, Guided onboarding | Documentation and knowledge base |
| Company size | more entries Freelancers, Small and mid-sized, Enterprise | Small and mid-sized, Enterprise |
| Integrations | more entries Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, HubSpot, Salesforce, Jira, Confluence, Notion, Asana, Slack, Zapier, ChatGPT, Claude | Twilio, Telnyx, Vonage, Genesys Cloud, Five9, Avaya, Amazon Connect, HubSpot, Make, n8n, GoHighLevel |
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The short version
Key Differences
- Starting price Read AI Free plan; Pro $19.75 / user / month Retell AI From $0.07 / minute of calls
- Free trial Read AI Free plan with 5 meeting transcripts a month Retell AI $10 in free credits, no contract and no commitment; 20 concurrent calls are included
- Company size Read AI Freelancers, Small and mid-sized, Enterprise Retell AI Small and mid-sized, Enterprise
- Hosting Read AI Cloud, with Windows, macOS, Android and iOS apps and a Chrome extension Retell AI Cloud on AWS; the vendor states it does not currently operate services within the European Union
- Languages Read AI Meeting reports in 16+ languages Retell AI 57 languages listed for text-to-speech and 55 for speech recognition, each with the providers that cover it
Every line is one datapoint from the table above, picked automatically. Nothing here is written text.
The trade-offs
Strengths and Limitations
Read AI
Strengths
- Live notes and meeting metrics while the call is still running
- Meeting coach and trend reporting on how meetings themselves are run
- Search spans meetings, email and messages rather than calls alone
- MCP server with Claude and ChatGPT connectors
Limitations
- Free plan is capped at five meeting transcripts a month
- Audio and video playback only from the Enterprise plan up
- Meeting length is capped by plan, from one hour on Free to eight on Enterprise+
- SSO, SCIM, HIPAA support and data retention policies need Enterprise+ and five or more licences
Retell AI
Strengths
- Usage-based per-minute pricing with no contract and $10 in free credits to start
- Testing tooling built into the product: playground, simulation runs, batch tests and A/B splits of live traffic
- Custom voices can be cloned or imported across several voice providers
- HIPAA, SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2 and GDPR, with BAA and DPA available for self-signing at no extra fee
Limitations
- The per-minute rate varies widely with the models, telephony and add-ons chosen, so the entry rate is not the rate to budget with
- The vendor states it does not currently operate services within the European Union
- Retell-managed phone numbers cover the US and Canada only; elsewhere a number has to be brought in
- Building and running an agent assumes developer work; there is no packaged seat-based plan
Plans
Pricing
Read AI
- Free $0 Five meeting transcripts a month, best-in-class summaries for meetings, email and messaging, personalised meeting coach, basic integrations, topic readouts and one-hour maximum meeting length.
- Pro $19.75 Per user per month, $15 billed annually. Unlimited meeting transcripts and reports, priority report processing, 100 file upload credits a month and premium integrations including Notion, Salesforce, HubSpot, Jira, Confluence, Zapier and webhooks.
- Enterprise $29.75 Per user per month, $22.50 billed annually. Adds audio and video playback, video highlights, 200 file upload credits a month and premium support.
- Enterprise+ $39.75 Per user per month, $29.75 billed annually, five licences or more. Adds HIPAA compliance, SAML and SCIM, domain capture, a custom data retention policy, 300 file upload credits a month and workspace onboarding.
Retell AI
- Pay as you go $0.07 Per minute and up, quoted by the vendor as $0.07 to $0.31 per minute for voice agents and from $0.002 per message for chat agents. Includes $10 in free credits and 20 concurrent calls, with no contract.
- Enterprise Not stated Contact sales. Custom pricing for higher volumes, with dedicated support and implementation, custom compliance terms covering HIPAA, SSO and a DPA, no cap on concurrent calls and a dedicated server option.
What users say
Review Scores · opens after launch
Read AI
- Ease of use
- Not rated yet
- User interface
- Not rated yet
- Onboarding
- Not rated yet
- Support and service
- Not rated yet
- Value for money
- Not rated yet
- Features
- Not rated yet
No reviews yet. Be the first to review this tool. Every review is checked for fairness before it appears, and the vendor cannot have one removed.
Retell AI
- Ease of use
- Not rated yet
- User interface
- Not rated yet
- Onboarding
- Not rated yet
- Support and service
- Not rated yet
- Value for money
- Not rated yet
- Features
- Not rated yet
No reviews yet. Be the first to review this tool. Every review is checked for fairness before it appears, and the vendor cannot have one removed.
Where this comes from
Where this comes from
Read AI https://www.read.ai · checked against the official source on 2026-09-16
Retell AI https://www.retellai.com · checked against the official source on 2026-09-13
This table lists factual criteria taken from information the vendors publish themselves. For how we put it together, see the methodology.