AI agent comparison: Performance, pricing, and control

The voice AI space is growing fast, and the right platform choice can make or break your deployment. This voice AI agent comparison explores Telnyx, ElevenLabs, and Vapi, three providers taking very different approaches to conversational AI. Some focus on expressive text-to-speech, others prioritize infrastructure and latency, while some give developers freedom to mix and match tools. By the end of this article, you will have a clear picture of how these platforms compare, what trade-offs to expect, and which option best fits your goals for real-time, scalable AI agents.

AI agent comparison: Platform capabilities overview

The most important differences between providers come to light when you look closely at their underlying capabilities. How they handle infrastructure, telephony, and AI pipelines reveals what they can deliver in practice.

Telnyx

Telnyx is a full-stack voice AI platform that combines telephony with GPU-powered AI infrastructure. Unlike competitors that abstract away telephony, Telnyx owns and operates its own private, global IP backbone with 16 Points of Presence (PoPs) across more than 140 countries. This allows Telnyx to deliver sub-200 millisecond round-trip times, high reliability, and predictable quality worldwide.

The Telnyx Mission Control Portal provides developers with APIs for number provisioning, SIP trunking, porting, streaming, and AI orchestration. For teams that prefer a no-code approach, the AI Assistant Builder makes it easy to create Voice AI Agents using natural language prompts. Telnyx also maintains strict compliance with STIR/SHAKEN, SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI, and GDPR standards.

What sets Telnyx apart is its unified pipeline: integrated speech-to-text, text-to-speech, contextual memory, model orchestration, and direct telephony in one platform. Customers can deploy enterprise-grade, low-latency AI agents in minutes with transparent pricing starting at $0.06 per minute for TTS, STT, and AI orchestration. Open-source LLM processing runs at $0.025 per minute on Telnyx-owned GPUs.

ElevenLabs

ElevenLabs is a leader in synthetic speech and is best known for its lifelike, expressive voices. Its models support more than 70 languages and offer advanced emotional control, making it a strong choice for media, branding, and immersive conversational experiences. ElevenLabs also offers transcription through Eleven Scribe and has recently expanded into AI music generation.

ElevenLabs uses a tiered subscription model that starts at $11 per month for a limited allotment of minutes. At higher tiers, effective rates range from about $0.12 down to $0.096 per minute, depending on volume. As a result, customers can pay up to 2.4 times more for their conversational AI compared to Telnyx. Once the included minutes are consumed, additional usage incurs overage charges, further increasing costs.

ElevenLabs does not provide its own telephony or global infrastructure. This limits its ability to deliver end-to-end AI agents without additional vendors. To bridge this gap, Telnyx has built direct integrations with ElevenLabs voices. Customers can bring ElevenLabs’ high-quality audio into Telnyx Voice AI Agents with a simple API key, combining expressive speech with carrier-grade routing, compliance, and orchestration.

Vapi

Vapi positions itself as an API-native platform for building AI agents quickly. It allows developers to bring their own speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and LLM providers, while offering orchestration and testing tools. This flexibility makes Vapi attractive for prototyping and early experimentation.

Pricing starts at $0.05 per minute as a base, but costs quickly increase as additional charges for STT, TTS, LLM, and telephony stack up. Pay-as-you-go models have limitations, and most enterprise use cases require contracts for stability.

The challenge is that Vapi does not own telephony infrastructure. Instead, it relies on third-party providers, including Telnyx, to deliver call routing and number services. This dependence makes latency less predictable, increases costs as vendor fees stack up, and complicates compliance. Vapi claims sub-500 millisecond latency, but without a private backbone and co-located compute, performance is tied to the public internet.

Vapi’s abstraction model is ideal for quick prototypes, but enterprises needing carrier control, in-region data residency, and predictable costs are better served by Telnyx.

Head-to-head AI agent comparison

Which platform is right for you?

Selecting a voice AI platform affects both customer experience and operational cost. With the wrong provider, you risk latency issues, fragmented integrations, and unpredictable pricing.

• Performance and latency: Telnyx minimizes delays by owning the entire infrastructure stack, which keeps conversations smooth and lifelike.
• Voice fidelity: ElevenLabs sets the benchmark for expressive speech, helping brands sound authentic and engaging.
• Flexibility and speed: Vapi enables rapid prototyping and testing, though it depends on Telnyx and other providers for delivery at scale.

Platform choice is not one-size-fits-all. Businesses should align their priorities with each provider’s strengths to deliver reliable and engaging voice AI experiences.

• Choose Telnyx if you need a reliable and unified solution that handles telephony, AI, and orchestration together with predictable latency and scale.
• Choose ElevenLabs if your priority is voice quality, emotional nuance, and multilingual delivery, and you are comfortable managing telephony separately.
• Choose Vapi if you want the flexibility to experiment with models and integrations, and you do not mind managing the challenges third-party infrastructure introduces.

Deploy real-time Voice AI Agents with Telnyx

Now that you understand the differences highlighted in this AI agent comparison, you can see how voice quality, infrastructure, and integration strategies shape performance. Telnyx stands apart as the only provider that combines telephony, global infrastructure, GPU-powered AI inference, and orchestration tools in one platform.

Organizations that adopt Telnyx avoid the complexity of leveraging multiple vendors for one AI agent. They gain reliability, low latency, and an uncomplicated ability to scale with their needs. With Telnyx, you can even bring your agents over from ElevenLabs and Vapi in one click with minimal to no rebuilding necessary. Experience the difference that a full stack conversational AI platform provides.