Retell.ai vs Phonely Comparison (2025)

Retell AI offers fast, scalable voice agents with response times under a second and impressive developer flexibility. You can bring your own LLM, customize behavior deeply, and monitor everything through real-time dashboards. It’s well-suited for teams with in-house engineering that want control and scale. But the learning curve is real—getting up and running takes work, integrations often require custom scripts, and pricing isn’t transparent. While it performs well under the hood, Retell isn’t the most approachable platform for teams seeking simplicity or industry-ready templates out of the box.

Phonely AI bills itself as a half-price, real-time, human-sounding receptionist, but in practice its $45–$900/month tiers hide gates around voice cloning, advanced analytics, and telemarketing workflows, forcing you into Growth or Agency plans just to unlock basic follow-up features. The voice quality can still wobble into robotic stress when handles complex queries, and “0s time to lead” claims evaporate once you factor in the manual routing tweaks and context-handoff hiccups that surface in real deployments. Integrations are limited to Google Calendar, Zapier, and a handful of CRM connectors—anything custom means wrestling with their sparse API docs—while the dashboard feels cluttered and the documentation skimpy. For companies seeking a truly plug-and-play AI receptionist, Phonely delivers half the promise but twice the maintenance.