Best AI Voice Agents · head-to-head
ElevenLabs Agents vs Cartesia
A sourced, side-by-side comparison for ai voice agents. ElevenLabs Agents has the lower entry price. Every figure links to the public page it was captured from — the vendor's own wherever the vendor publishes the number, otherwise the named public source — with the date we captured it.
ElevenLabs Agents has the lower entry price — ElevenLabs Agents starts at $0/mo, Cartesia at $0/mo. Free tier: ElevenLabs Agents Yes, Cartesia Yes. HIPAA: ElevenLabs Agents Yes, Cartesia Yes.
As of 2026-09-10 · figures link to their source below
Side by side
ElevenLabs Agents
$0/mo entryCartesia
$0/mo entrySources — ElevenLabs Agents: elevenlabs.io (verified 2026-09-10) · Cartesia: cartesia.ai (verified 2026-09-10)
Key features
ElevenLabs Agents: Agents are built on ElevenLabs' own TTS, so voice quality and latency are first-party rather than stitched from a third-party vendor; Generous included-minute bundles at the low end (275 minutes for $22) make prototyping cheaper than pure pay-as-you-go rivals; Text-message channel priced separately at $0.003/message, so one agent can serve voice and chat; Annual billing is a clean two-months-free structure rather than an opaque discount
Cartesia: Sonic state-space TTS built for very low time-to-first-audio, the specific problem Cartesia was founded on; First-party STT (Ink) alongside first-party TTS, so one vendor covers both legs of the pipeline; Voice agents at $0.06/min with optional $0.014/min first-party telephony, cheaper than bolting on a third-party carrier; Optional Zero Data Retention plus SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, PCI-DSS (service level provider) and GDPR compliance; Entry paid tier at $5/month is the lowest in this set, so the step off free is nearly free