Bold Agent Kit vs Retell AI, in one line: Retell AI is a platform for building and running voice and chat agents at call-centre scale, priced per minute; Bold Agent Kit is one agent that answers and places calls on your own Twilio number, replies to texts, email, website chat and eleven DM platforms, books real slots and follows up, for $25 a month with no per-minute charge from us.
7-day free trial · Cancel anytime
Retell AI is built around the phone call. Its site positions it as an AI voice agent platform for automating phone calls, with features for call transfer, IVR navigation, batch calls and post-call analysis, and its docs offer Retell numbers or your own telephony through SIP trunking or numbers imported from Twilio, Telnyx and Vonage. Bold Agent Kit does fewer things on the phone, and does them on your own Twilio number: it answers inbound calls and places outbound ones, with a separate switch for each.
On a call the agent hears and speaks in real time, using the fastest model your provider offers so it does not leave silences. Speech is transcribed by Google, or by Deepgram on your own key, and the voice is Google, Amazon Polly or ElevenLabs, or one from your own ElevenLabs or Fish Audio library, including a voice you cloned from a recording made in the browser. Every call lands in one inbox with its recording and transcript, tagged as a call and attached to the caller's contact record.
Retell's outbound feature is batch calling, which its site describes as high-volume outbound campaigns. Here outbound is a campaign that mixes channels: an email on day 0, a text on day 2, a call on day 5, each with its own delay and a send condition such as opened or did not open. By the time the phone rings the person has seen your name twice, and the number calling them is one that has already texted them.
Every campaign is created as a draft and shows its full plan, every contact and every step, on a review screen. Nothing sends or dials until you press Start. The days, hours and time zone are set once, calls and texts are paced per number per hour, and a reply, a booking or an opt-out on any channel ends the sequence on every channel and cancels the call that was queued.
Retell's appointment booking feature has you link a Cal.com account and event, and its integrations page lists Calendly and Cal.com as native calendars, alongside CRMs such as HubSpot, Salesforce and Go High Level and automation tools such as Zapier, Make and n8n. Bold Agent Kit connects eighteen tools natively: Google Calendar, Microsoft 365, Calendly, HubSpot Meetings, Zoho Bookings, Acuity Scheduling, Cal.com and Square Appointments for booking, and HubSpot, GoHighLevel, Housecall Pro, ServiceTitan, Jobber, Stripe, Shopify, WooCommerce, Wix and Squarespace for customers.
The agent is only ever given slots that are genuinely free, offers a few, and books the one the customer picks after checking it against what was offered, so it cannot invent a time or double-book you. The same booking works on a call, by text, in the website chat and in a DM. With a CRM or store connected it reads what the customer bought and what is still open before it answers, and writes the outcome back.
Retell prices voice agents by the minute, and the rate is assembled from parts: its voice infrastructure, the language model you choose, the text-to-speech provider and telephony. At the time of writing, its published rate for voice agents starts at $0.07 a minute and runs to $0.31 depending on those choices. Chat is charged per message, twenty concurrent calls are free with more charged per month, and Retell numbers carry a monthly fee. New accounts get $10 in free credits, and larger customers can agree custom enterprise pricing.
Bold Agent Kit is $25 a month or $200 a year for the whole account, with a 7-day free trial and unlimited agents. There is no charge per minute, per message, per concurrent call or per seat from us. The model runs on your own key with one of sixteen providers, and Twilio bills you for the number and the minutes; both bill you at cost. The dashboard counts people instead of minutes: how many the agent reached, how many replied, and what they were worth.
Retell AI is built for the scale of a contact centre. Its site describes an AI voice agent platform for automating phone calls, and lists the industries it serves: healthcare, financial services, insurance, logistics, retail and consumer goods, travel and hospitality, and debt collection. Its docs describe a platform to build, test, deploy and monitor voice and chat agents, with node-based conversation flows or single prompts, Node.js and Python SDKs, webhooks, live call monitoring and automated quality scoring.
That is a lot of machinery, and for a team running a large volume of calls it is the right machinery. Most businesses comparing Bold Agent Kit with Retell AI are smaller than that. They want the phone answered, the appointment booked and the lead followed up, and they want the customer who emails or messages on Instagram to get the same answer as the one who rang. A per-minute bill assembled from voice infrastructure, a model, a voice and telephony is also harder for them to predict than they would like, which is usually what starts the search for an alternative.
Bold Agent Kit is one agent that works every channel from one knowledge base. It answers and places calls on your own Twilio number, replies to texts on nine carriers, answers email from your own mailboxes, runs a chat widget on your site and handles DMs on eleven platforms. It books real open slots into eight calendars, reads HubSpot, GoHighLevel, Jobber, Housecall Pro, ServiceTitan or your store before it answers, and follows up with campaigns of email, text and call steps that stop on a reply, a booking or an opt-out.
It is priced like software, not like telephony. The plan is $25 a month or $200 a year for the account, with unlimited agents, and you bring your own AI key, so your provider bills you at cost. Twilio bills you for the number and the minutes. There are things Retell does that Bold Agent Kit does not: it transfers live calls to people, navigates IVR menus and offers a visual, node-based conversation flow builder. If those are the job, Retell fits. If the job is a business answered on every channel at a price that does not move, Bold Agent Kit does.
Retell AI is built to run phone operations at scale, and it says so. Four things about that shape send smaller businesses and agencies looking elsewhere.
A Retell voice minute is voice infrastructure plus the model, plus the text-to-speech provider, plus telephony, and its pricing page shows the total moving with each choice. Concurrency above the twenty included and Retell phone numbers are charged monthly on top. For a contact centre with a budget per call, that breakdown is useful. For a business owner, it is one more thing to work out before knowing what next month will cost.
Its homepage talks about an AI call centre; its features include batch calls, IVR navigation, live monitoring and quality assurance at scale; its docs cover SIP trunks, SDKs and webhooks. None of that is wasted on a large operation. A plumber who needs the phone answered while on a job, or an agency serving twenty local clients, pays for that depth in setup time and in decisions they did not need to make.
Retell lists its channels as voice calls, web and in-app chat, SMS and its API. The customer who emails your info@ address, or sends an Instagram or WhatsApp message at 10pm, reaches a different system, or nobody. The same person turns up in three tools as three strangers, and nobody can see that the caller on Monday is the DM on Thursday.
Retell's outbound feature is batch calling for high-volume campaigns. A cold or lapsed lead rarely books on the first call from a number they do not know. What books them is the email on day 0, the text on day 2 and then the call, with the whole sequence stopping the moment they reply anywhere, and that is a different kind of tool from a batch of calls.
You build the agent once from what you already know. From then on it answers and follows up everywhere your customers are, and the bill does not change with the minutes.
Calls on your own Twilio number in real time, in a voice you chose or cloned; texts on nine carriers; email from your own mailboxes; a chat widget on your site; eleven DM platforms. Every reply comes from the same knowledge base, your documents, Q&A pairs, prices and hours, and is stored with the material it used, so you can read back where an answer came from.
Real open slots from Google Calendar, Microsoft 365, Calendly, HubSpot Meetings, Zoho Bookings, Acuity, Cal.com or Square, offered and booked on the call or in the thread. With HubSpot, GoHighLevel, Jobber, Housecall Pro, ServiceTitan or your store connected, it reads the customer before it answers and writes the outcome back.
Campaigns of email, text and call steps, each with a delay and a send condition, inside the days and hours you set. Created as a draft, shown in full on a review screen, and started only when you press Start. A reply, a booking or an opt-out on any channel stops the sequence everywhere and cancels anything queued.
This is the difference that matters most when you compare Bold Agent Kit with Retell AI. Retell gives you a voice agent, and chat agents that can answer on the web, in an app or by SMS. Bold Agent Kit gives you one agent that also sends and answers email from your own mailboxes, warmed up and health-scored so it lands in the inbox, and that joins every channel into one follow-up sequence run by the same agent from the same knowledge base.
A lead who does not pick up gets the email on day 2 and the text on day 4, from the same agent, saying the same things. A lead who replies to the email is not called. A lead who books on the call is not emailed again. A STOP on the text cancels the call. The mailbox health score, the SPF, DKIM and DMARC checks and the automatic resting of a failing address keep the email half of the sequence out of spam, so the call is never the first thing they hear from you.
Each one answers a problem above, and none of them needs anybody to run a call centre.
$25 a month or $200 a year for the account. Nothing per minute, per message or per concurrent call from us, however busy the phone is.
A knowledge base, instructions and a voice. No flow diagram to draw and no telephony to engineer, and a change to a price is one data point.
The caller, the emailer and the Instagram DM get the same answers from the same agent, and one person stays one contact with one history.
Email, text and call on a schedule you set, ended the moment the person replies, books or opts out on any channel.
Every call, text, email, chat and booking is recorded against a person and reported as a funnel, per agent and across all agents. This is the part that tells you whether the phone or the follow-up produced the booking.
The funnel counts people rather than minutes: reached, replied on any channel, visited your site, converted, with the value won and the median time from first contact to conversion. Goals carry a dollar value, set by a page rule or by marking a deal won, so an agent reports what it earned rather than how many minutes it used. For an agency, that is the number a client renews on.
A channel table shows where each person first made contact and which channel they were on when they converted, so you know whether callers book on the call or come back by text. One row per person shows the call with its recording, the texts, the emails and the DMs, in order. Visit triggers close the loop: when a known contact returns to your pricing or booking page and leaves, the agent tells you, or follows up after a delay on the channel they last used.
Built from the cookie, email address and phone number attached to that contact, so activity months apart on different channels appears on one row.
Page goals and visit triggers require a one-line snippet on your website. Conversations, bookings and manually marking a deal won work without it.
What each product does for the jobs a business buys a phone agent for. The Retell AI column is taken from Retell AI's own website and documentation on the date shown below.
| The job | Retell AI | Bold Agent Kit |
|---|---|---|
| Building the agent | A node-based conversation flow or a single prompt, in its dashboard or through its API and SDKs | A knowledge base, instructions and saved call scripts, in a dashboard |
| Phone numbers | Retell numbers at a monthly fee, or your own telephony by SIP trunk or numbers imported from Twilio, Telnyx or Vonage | Your own Twilio number, billed to you by Twilio at its rates |
| Text messages | SMS on Retell Twilio numbers or custom telephony numbers with approved A2P, answered by a chat agent | Replies and campaign texts on nine carriers, from the same agent |
| Email and social DMs | Its listed channels are voice calls, web and in-app chat, SMS and its API | Your own mailboxes with warm-up, and eleven DM platforms |
| Outbound | Batch calls for high-volume outbound campaigns | Campaigns of email, text and call steps, with conditions, a schedule and stop rules |
| Booking appointments | Calendly and Cal.com listed as native calendar integrations | Eight calendars, plus Jobber, Housecall Pro and ServiceTitan |
| Handing a call to a person | Call transfer between AI and human agents | No live transfer: details taken, and the call in your inbox with its recording |
| The price | Per minute, built from voice infrastructure, model, voice and telephony, with 20 concurrent calls free and more charged monthly | $25 a month or $200 a year for the account; Twilio and your AI provider bill you at cost |
Retell AI is a voice and chat agent platform built for phone operations at scale, with conversation flows, call transfer, IVR navigation, batch calls, SIP trunking, SDKs and webhooks, priced per minute from its components, with custom enterprise pricing above that. Bold Agent Kit is one agent for businesses and agencies, on calls, texts, email, website chat and DMs, with booking, CRM connections, campaigns and one inbox, at $25 a month for the account. If you run a contact centre, Retell AI is made for you; if you want a business answered everywhere at a flat price, Bold Agent Kit is.
We checked Retell AI’s public website on 11 September 2026 for this comparison. Plans and features change, so check retellai.com for the current detail. Retell AI is a trademark of its owner, and Bold Agent Kit is not affiliated with or endorsed by it.
Most people comparing the two are in one of three positions. Here is what each one looks like in practice.
You run a Retell agent on your business line, or trialled one, and the calls work, but you want the same agent on email and DMs, a follow-up that does not stop at the call, and a bill that does not move with the minutes. You rebuild the prompt or the flow as a knowledge base, connect a Twilio number, and switch answering on.
A business with high-volume calls running on Retell that also wants its email, website chat and social DMs answered, and its lapsed customers followed up. Leave the phone operation where it is, and put a Bold Agent Kit agent on info@, the website and Instagram, with its own knowledge base and a campaign that works a segment pulled from the CRM.
Choose Retell AI if you run phone operations at contact-centre scale: large volumes of inbound and outbound calls, live transfers between AI and human agents, IVR menus to navigate, conversation flows designed node by node, SIP trunks into an existing phone system, and developers working with its SDKs and webhooks. Its enterprise plan is priced to that scale, and its partner programme serves agencies and developers building voice solutions on it. Bold Agent Kit is not built for that job.
Connect the tools you already run and the agent works them like an assistant would: it takes appointments straight into your calendar, writes notes and outcomes back to the CRM, and reads your store to see what somebody has bought before it answers them.
Bookings are real, not guesses. It is only ever given slots that are genuinely free, and it can only take one it actually offered — so it cannot invent a time or double-book you. The same connection pulls a segment of past customers into a list when you want to run a campaign at them.
HubSpot
GoHighLevel
Housecall Pro
ServiceTitan
Jobber
Google Calendar
Microsoft 365
Calendly
HubSpot Meetings
Zoho Bookings
Acuity
Cal.com
Square
Stripe
Shopify
WooCommerce
Wix
SquarespaceEach agent uses a model on your own API key, in the same way it sends from your own mailbox and your own phone number. Sixteen providers are supported: OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, xAI and Mistral; DeepSeek, GLM, Kimi, Qwen and MiniMax; Groq, Together, Fireworks and OpenRouter; and Ollama or any other OpenAI-compatible endpoint you host yourself.
Bring your own credentials and you own the whole stack: your model provider, your mailboxes, your carrier, your CRM. We charge for the software and nothing else — no token markup, no metering, no credit packs — so your provider bills you direct at their rates, usually a few dollars a month per agent.
OpenAI
Anthropic
Gemini
xAI
Mistral
DeepSeek
GLM
Kimi
Qwen
MiniMax
Groq
Together
Fireworks
OpenRouter
Ollama
Any OpenAI APIA new address sending forty cold emails a day gets filtered, and takes the domain with it. Mailboxes that opt into warm-up send each other ordinary mail on a ramp, starting at five a day. The receiving mailbox finds each message, moves it out of spam if it landed there, marks it read and replies to a share of them.
Each mailbox carries a health score out of 100 — SPF, DKIM and DMARC on the sending domain, seven days of real sends and bounces, and where its own warm-up mail is landing — with the reasons listed. A mailbox whose bounce rate or spam placement passes a threshold is pulled out of campaign rotation automatically, before it damages the domain.
Three steps. Nothing dials or sends until you switch it on, and you can ring the new agent yourself before any customer does.
Open your Retell agent next to a new agent here. If it is a single-prompt agent, take the prompt apart: facts become data points, scripted answers become Q&A pairs, longer material becomes documents, and the rules become instructions. If it is a conversation flow, walk the nodes: each question the flow asked becomes something the agent is told to find out, and each branch becomes a rule about what to offer or when to hand over.
Name the agent, choose a model on your own key, and choose a voice from Google, Amazon Polly or ElevenLabs, or one from your own ElevenLabs or Fish Audio library, including a clone. Save any outbound script as a call template, ready to use as a step in a campaign.
Add your Twilio account and the number customers call. If your Retell number is a Twilio number you imported, it already lives in your own Twilio account; if you rented it from Retell, check with Retell what moving it involves, or start on a new Twilio number. Switch answering on and leave dialling off until you want outbound.
Connect the calendar and the CRM, then the channels you are adding: a mailbox, the chat snippet, your social accounts. Import contacts as a CSV, or pull a segment from HubSpot, GoHighLevel, Jobber or another connected CRM.
Ring the new agent yourself and ask it what callers ask your Retell agent. Read the transcript in the inbox a minute later, adjust a data point or an instruction, and ring again. When it answers the way you want, move the traffic.
Then replace any batch call with a campaign: the email, the text, then the call, created as a draft and reviewed on one screen before you press Start.
One account runs unlimited agents, one per client, and nothing is shared between them. A knowledge base belongs to a single agent, and content from one agent is never used to generate replies for another.
Invite a client by email address and they get their own login, which opens onto the one agent you gave them: its conversations, its numbers, its analytics and a reply box. They cannot see your other clients, your API keys, your settings or your billing. Access is deny-by-default.
No seat tiers, no credit packs, no per-agent or per-channel pricing, and nothing held back behind an enterprise call.
| Agents | |
|---|---|
| How many | Unlimited — one per business, brand or job |
| Shared brain | The same identity, instructions and knowledge on every channel |
| Knowledge base | Documents, Q&A pairs, data points and pages of your own site |
| Isolation | One agent's content is never used to reply for another |
| Client seats | Invite a client into one agent, with their own login |
| Channels | |
| As many mailboxes per agent as you connect, rotated by campaigns | |
| Text messages | Nine providers — Twilio, Telnyx, SimpleTexting, Plivo, Vonage, Sinch, Bandwidth, MessageBird, ClickSend |
| Phone calls | Answering and dialling, with recordings and transcripts |
| Transcription | Google, or Deepgram nova-3 on your own key |
| Voices | Google, Amazon Polly and ElevenLabs, or your own ElevenLabs / Fish Audio account |
| Voice cloning | Record a voice in the browser and clone it on your ElevenLabs or Fish Audio key |
| Website chat | A widget on your site with your colour, image and greeting |
| Social DMs | Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram, LINE, Viber, Slack, Discord, Bluesky, Reddit, X |
| Inbox | |
| One list | Every channel's conversations together, newest first, tagged by channel |
| Filters | By channel, by mailbox or number, or by agent |
| Takeover | Reply yourself and the agent stands down on that thread |
| Hand back | Return the thread to the agent when you are done |
| Campaigns | |
| Multichannel sequences | Email, text and call steps in one campaign, each with its own timing |
| Send conditions | Send a step only if they opened, did not open, clicked or did not click |
| Schedule | The days, hours and time zone anything may be sent |
| Stop rules | A reply, a booking or an opt-out on any channel ends the sequence |
| Pacing | Per-mailbox and per-number hourly limits, pausable and resumable |
| Review before start | The full plan is shown; a campaign sends nothing until you start it |
| Templates | Email, text and call scripts, saved once and reused |
| Analytics | |
| Funnel | Reached, replied, visited, converted, plus value won and time to convert |
| By channel | Where each person started, and the channel they converted on |
| Pages | Which pages known people read, and how many of them converted |
| Journeys | One row per person: every message, visit, call and booking in order |
| Goals | A page rule or a manual "won", each with a dollar value |
| Triggers | A known person returns to a page — notify you, or send a follow-up |
| Open and click tracking | Recorded per campaign and added to that person's history |
| Integrations | |
| Calendars | Google, Microsoft 365, Calendly, Cal.com, Acuity, Zoho, Square, HubSpot Meetings |
| CRMs and commerce | HubSpot, GoHighLevel, Housecall Pro, ServiceTitan, Jobber, Stripe, Shopify, WooCommerce, Wix, Squarespace |
| Booking | Real open slots offered, and only an offered slot can be booked |
| CRM import | Import a segment of customers into a contact list |
| Deliverability and compliance | |
| Mailbox warm-up | Ramped sending across the network, with spam rescue and replies |
| Health score | SPF, DKIM, DMARC, bounce rate and inbox placement, with reasons |
| Auto-rest | A failing address is removed from rotation automatically |
| Unsubscribes | One click, honoured automatically, including on queued mail |
| Reply limits | One reply per thread, per-sender daily and per-channel hourly caps |
| Filtering | Bounces, out-of-office and no-reply addresses ignored |
| List building | |
| Contact extraction | Emails, phone numbers and social profiles, on any site. Unlimited. |
| Deep scan | Follows the pages of a domain most likely to carry contact details |
| Domain queue | Load a CSV of sites and work through them one at a time |
| Contacts and lists | Unlimited, by email or phone, with CSV import and export |
| AI | |
| Your own key | Sixteen providers, including any OpenAI-compatible endpoint you host |
| What we charge for AI | Nothing — no markup, no metering, no credit packs |
| On calls | Uses your provider's fastest model automatically |
| Account | |
| Platforms | Chrome side panel and web dashboard on one login |
| Members' forum | Six boards, visible only once you are signed in |
| Referral program | $50 a year per referral ($5 a month), recurring for the life of the account |
| Support | support@boldagents.co |
Billed monthly. No add-ons, no seat tiers. Cancel anytime.
$16.67 a month, billed once a year. No add-ons, no seat tiers. Cancel anytime.
For some buyers, yes, and for others, no. For a small or mid-sized business, or an agency running agents for local clients, that wants calls, texts, email, website chat and DMs answered by one agent, with booking, follow-up campaigns and a flat $25 a month, Bold Agent Kit is the better fit. For a contact centre running large call volumes, with live transfers to human agents, IVR navigation, conversation flows designed node by node, SIP trunks and developers working with SDKs and webhooks, Retell AI is the better fit. They are built for different sizes of phone operation.
Retell AI is a platform for building, testing, deploying and monitoring voice and chat agents, with conversation flows or single prompts, Retell numbers or your own telephony, call transfer, IVR navigation and batch calls, priced per minute from its components. Bold Agent Kit is one agent for a business: a knowledge base and instructions that answer calls on your own Twilio number, texts on nine carriers, email from your own mailboxes, website chat and eleven DM platforms, with booking into eight calendars, native CRM and store connections, and campaigns across email, text and call. It is one flat plan.
Retell AI charges per minute, and the rate is built from its voice infrastructure, the model, the voice and telephony. At the time of writing, its published rate for voice agents starts at $0.07 a minute and goes up to $0.31 depending on those choices. Chat is charged per message, twenty concurrent calls are free with more charged monthly, and Retell numbers have a monthly fee. Bold Agent Kit is $25 a month or $200 a year for the account, with unlimited agents and nothing per minute, per message or per concurrent call from us. Twilio and your AI provider bill you directly at cost.
You rebuild rather than import, usually in an afternoon. A single-prompt agent is taken apart into a knowledge base: facts become data points, scripted answers become Q&A pairs, longer material becomes documents, and the rules become instructions. A conversation flow is walked node by node: each question becomes something the agent is told to find out, and each branch a rule. Connect your Twilio account, calendar and CRM, import contacts as a CSV or a CRM segment, then ring the number yourself and read the transcript before you move any traffic.
When the job is a call operation at scale. Retell AI is built for teams running large volumes of calls, in industries it names from healthcare and insurance to logistics and debt collection, and it offers what those teams need: call transfer between AI and human agents, IVR navigation, batch calls, live monitoring and quality scoring, SIP trunking into an existing phone system, SDKs and webhooks for developers, and custom enterprise pricing. Its partner programme also serves agencies and developers building voice solutions on it. If that is your world, Retell AI fits better.
It places outbound calls, but as steps in a campaign rather than a batch on their own. A campaign can send an email on day 0, a text on day 2 and place the call on day 5, from your own Twilio number, each step with its own delay and a condition such as opened or did not open. Calls are paced per number per hour, inside the days, hours and time zone you set. The campaign is created as a draft, shown in full on a review screen, and dials nothing until you press Start. A reply, booking or opt-out anywhere cancels the queued call.
No. Bold Agent Kit cannot put a live call through to another number, and Retell lists call transfer among its features. What the agent does instead is take the caller's name, number and reason for calling, tell them what will happen next, and put the recording and transcript in your inbox, tagged as a call, on their contact record. You name in its instructions which calls get that treatment. If your operation depends on handing live calls to a team of people, that is a good reason to stay with a platform built for it.
Yes, and on one plan. Unlimited agents are included, so an agency builds one per client, each with its own number, voice, knowledge base, calendar and channels, and nothing is shared between them. Invite a client by email and they get their own login onto their one agent: its conversations, numbers, analytics and a reply box, without sight of your other clients, keys, settings or billing. Each agent has its own funnel, so the client sees what it produced. The cost to you stays $25 a month or $200 a year, however many clients you add.
How Bold Agent Kit compares with the other tools people shortlist for the same job.
Rebuild the agent, connect your Twilio number and ring it yourself. Then let the same agent answer the email and the DMs, for $25 a month.
7-day free trial · Cancel anytime