Comparing Kore.ai and Vapi? 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.
| Attribute | Kore.ai | Vapi |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Paid · Custom | Paid · $0.05/min + provider costs |
| Founded | 2014 | 2020 |
| 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 Deepgram ElevenLabs PlayHT OpenAI Anthropic |
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 →
Vapi is a developer platform for voice AI agents. Rather than selling a finished support bot, it sells the orchestration layer: an API and SDKs that wire together speech-to-text (Deepgram and others), any major LLM (OpenAI, Anthropic), text-to-speech (ElevenLabs, PlayHT, Cartesia), and telephony (Twilio, Vonage, Telnyx) into a low latency phone agent. Support teams meet Vapi indirectly, as the engine behind custom-built inbound support lines, appointment desks, and agencies' white label voice products.
Founders Jordan Dearsley and Nikhil Gupta went through Y Combinator in 2021 with a productivity app called Superpowered, then pivoted to voice infrastructure in 2023 after Dearsley built himself an AI phone bot to think out loud with. It worked: Vapi reports over a million developers and a billion calls handled. It raised a $20 million Series A led by Bessemer in December 2024, then a $50 million Series B in May 2026 at a $500 million valuation, roughly $72 million total. Amazon chose Vapi for its Ring division after evaluating over 40 rivals.
Pricing starts at $0.05 per minute for the platform itself, with SMS at $0.005 per message. Provider costs (speech, LLM, voice, telephony) are passed through at cost, or drop to zero if you bring your own API keys. Realistic all in costs run $0.07 to $0.25 per minute. Ten concurrent calls are included, extra lines cost $10 monthly, and compliance add-ons are priced like enterprise software: HIPAA at $2,000 monthly, zero data retention at $1,000 monthly.
Choose Vapi if you have engineers and want maximum control over every layer of a support voice agent, with the freedom to swap providers as models improve. Skip it if nobody on your team writes code, or you want a vendor accountable for resolution rates rather than infrastructure.
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