Kore.ai vs Retell AI (2026)

Comparing Kore.ai and Retell AI? Both are AI Agents & Chatbots and Voice & Phone AI tools in the directory, which is why buyers put them on the same shortlist. Below is a side-by-side look at how they price, what they integrate with, and when each is the better fit, so you can pick on the facts rather than either vendor's own sales page.

At a glance

Attribute Kore.ai Retell AI
Pricing Paid · Custom Paid · $0.07/min
Founded 2014 2023
Categories AI Agents & Chatbots Enterprise Voice & Phone AI AI Agents & Chatbots Voice & Phone AI
Integrations Genesys Amazon Connect Salesforce ServiceNow Twilio Zendesk Twilio Vonage Telnyx Cal.com n8n Make GoHighLevel custom SIP trunking

Choose Kore.ai or Retell AI?

Choose Kore.ai if

  • you need enterprise scale, security, and compliance

Choose Retell AI if

  • you want a newer platform built around modern AI agents

About Kore.ai

Kore.ai is an enterprise platform for building and orchestrating AI agents, with customer experience as one of its flagship uses. Teams design agents using no-code visual tools or pro-code SDKs, deploy them across web chat, messaging, voice, and contact-center channels, and manage them with the security and analytics a large organization demands. Its agentic contact-center suite spans intelligent self-service, AI-powered routing, and real-time agent assist, and a growing set of prebuilt vertical apps for banking, healthcare, retail, HR, and IT gives buyers a running start instead of a blank canvas.

The scale here is the headline. Kore.ai says its platform automates more than a billion interactions a year and has delivered over a billion dollars in cumulative customer cost savings, and it has been named a leader in independent analyst evaluations of conversational AI and cognitive search. Its newer generative application platform, GALE, and an AI-first agent platform push the product deeper into the agentic era.

There is a nice against-the-grain story to the company, too. Kore.ai was founded in 2014 by serial entrepreneur Raj Koneru, whose resume includes four earlier companies, and it grew up not in Silicon Valley but in Orlando, Florida, only later opening a West Coast office. It has raised well over four hundred million dollars across its rounds, including a 2026 growth investment, and became a launch partner for Microsoft's agent ecosystem while earning agentic credentials with AWS.

Big names like AT&T, Coca-Cola, and Airbus are among the hundreds of Global 2000 enterprises it serves, and pricing is entirely custom, scaled to the sessions, seats, and add-ons a given deployment needs. For large organizations that want a single, proven platform to build and run both customer-facing and employee-facing agents across every channel, without stitching together half a dozen point tools, Kore.ai is a serious heavyweight worth putting on the shortlist and taking for a proper test drive.

Read the full Kore.ai listing →  ·  See Kore.ai alternatives →

About Retell AI

Retell AI is a platform for building AI phone agents that answer and place calls. You compose an agent from interchangeable parts: a speech-to-text layer, your choice of LLM, a voice from providers like ElevenLabs, and telephony via Twilio, Vonage, Telnyx, or your own SIP trunk. The platform handles the hard real time bits, interruption handling, latency, call transfer, and IVR navigation, and adds testing, monitoring, and post call analysis aimed squarely at contact center and front desk workloads.

The company came out of Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch, founded in 2023, with Evie Wang among the cofounders. It grew unusually fast for a seed stage company: a $4.6 million seed led by Alt Capital in September 2024 arrived alongside a reported $3 million in annual revenue within months of launch. Named customers include telehealth company Ro, plus BPOs and contact center operators.

Pricing is published and usage based, which is refreshingly rare. Retell quotes $0.07 to $0.31 per minute all in, depending on your voice and model choices, with components itemized: text-to-speech from $0.015 per minute, LLM costs from $0.003 to $0.16 per minute, US telephony around $0.015 per minute. Every account includes 20 concurrent calls, extra concurrency is $8 per line monthly, phone numbers cost $2 monthly, and new accounts get $10 in free credits. Enterprise plans with dedicated infrastructure are custom.

Choose Retell if you have some technical ability, want a working phone agent this week, and value published per minute economics you can model before committing. Its contact center tilt (batch calling, warm transfer, IVR traversal) makes it a natural fit for support lines. Look elsewhere if you want a fully managed enterprise deployment with a vendor doing the tuning, or a pure no-code experience for a non-technical team.

Read the full Retell AI listing →  ·  See Retell AI alternatives →

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