Bland alternatives

I run Reachkit, which makes cold email software rather than phone agents, so it isn’t one of the seven below. I checked every price on this page in October 2026, on each vendor’s own site or docs unless another source is named.

Bland sells one per-minute rate that bundles its own speech recognition, language model and voice. That works well until you outgrow the Start plan’s 100 calls a day, need texting or warm transfers (listed under Enterprise), or have to move production agents to the new Bland Agents builder by November 15, 2026. The right alternative depends on which of those pushed you:

• No platform fee, more calls at once: Retell AI, with 20 concurrent calls included.
• Your own pick of model and voice: Vapi, which bills providers at cost.
• A phone receptionist with no developer: Lindy.
• Calling as one agent in a wider sales setup: Relevance AI.
• Reps dialing inside email and LinkedIn sequences: Reply.io.
• AI that prospects by email while reps handle calls: Artisan.
• A large sales team on one contract: Outreach.

If you haven’t decided to leave yet, the Bland profile has its full price list and fees.

Retell AI is a voice agent platform for inbound and outbound phone calls, with chat and SMS agents on the side. It’s named in all seven roundups on Google’s first page for “bland ai alternatives” in October 2026, one of them Retell’s own. It fits a team that likes how Bland works but has hit Start’s daily cap and doesn’t want a $299 fee to lift it.

Price (October 2026): Retell charges per minute with no plan fee or seat fee, and its pricing page promises “no feature gating”. Each minute stacks four parts: voice infrastructure at $0.055, a standard voice at $0.015, whatever the chosen model costs, and $0.015 for US calling on a Retell number. Retell advertises $0.07 to $0.31 a minute overall. Numbers are $2 a month, texts $0.01 each plus $20 a month per number for Retell SMS, and each new email address gets $10 of credit once.

Strengths:

• 20 calls at once are included, then $8 a month per extra line. Bland’s Start allows 10.
• You choose the model (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or your own) and the voice, and every component rate is on the public page.

Drawbacks: since September 30, 2026, Retell runs on prepaid credits, and calls stop at a zero balance unless auto recharge is on. Prompts over 4,000 tokens stretch the billed time, and test calls cost the same as real ones.

Versus Bland: take one speed-to-lead month, 3,000 dials with 40% answered for two minutes each. My math from list prices gives about $317 on a lean Retell setup, against about $363 on Bland’s Start (right at its daily cap) or $614 on Build, before any separate phone charges Bland may bill. See the Retell AI profile.

Vapi is a developer platform for voice agents where you choose each piece yourself: the transcriber, the language model, the voice and the phone carrier. It fits a team whose problem with Bland is that Bland runs only its own models, and that has an engineer to wire the parts together.

Price (October 2026): Vapi takes $0.05 a minute for hosting, and the transcriber, model and voice are billed at each provider’s listed price with no markup, or through your own keys. Its calculator puts 1,000 minutes at $82 to $129 a month before carrier fees, and outbound calls over Twilio add $0.014 a minute. Without a paid package you start with $5 of credits, 4 concurrent calls and Discord or email support with no SLA. The Core package is $29 a month for 10 lines.

Strengths:

• Bring API keys for OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Groq, DeepSeek and others, and pay those providers directly.
• HIPAA has a public price: a $2,000 monthly add-on per organization that comes with a BAA. Bland offers its BAA on Enterprise, which has no list price.

Drawbacks: free Vapi numbers are US, inbound-only and can’t run outbound campaigns, so dialing out means importing a number from a carrier. Trustpilot shows 2.4 from 15 reviews on an unclaimed profile, with complaints about pauses between turns.

Versus Bland: Bland makes the model choices and prices them into one rate. Vapi hands you every choice and every line item. See the Vapi profile or the full list of Vapi alternatives.

Lindy is a per-seat AI assistant that works in Slack, email and iMessage, and one of its ready-made roles is a receptionist that picks up calls, books appointments and confirms them by text. It fits a small business that tried Bland for a single phone line and found the builder more than it needed.

Price (October 2026): Lindy’s pricing page lists $49.99 per user a month for 5,000 credits; earlier in October it also showed some visitors $29.99 for 3,000. Anyone who uses it takes a paid seat, even a colleague who @mentions it once in Slack. A 7-day trial comes with $50 of credits and no card. Lindy doesn’t publish how many credits a phone minute uses or what a number costs.

Strengths:

• Setup is a conversation in plain English, and in shared Slack threads you can make an integration’s actions wait for approval before they go out.
• Running out of credits pauses tasks until the next cycle instead of adding an overage charge.

Drawbacks: one task can take anywhere from 2 to 2,500 credits, so the monthly cost is hard to predict. Lindy’s Trustpilot page holds about 40 reviews, mostly one-star and largely about credits and billing, and the product has changed shape several times.

Versus Bland: Bland prices every minute and is built for high call volumes. Lindy prices seats and credits and is built for a small team’s daily work, with answering the phone as one job among many. See the Lindy profile.

Relevance AI is a platform for building AI agents and multi-agent “Workforces” across sales, support and operations, and calling agents are one of the types it builds. It fits a team that used Bland for one step, such as qualifying inbound leads, and wants the research, follow-up and meeting agents in the same place.

Price (October 2026): the public pricing page shows a single Enterprise card with “Talk to sales”. In the docs, Team costs $349 a month or $234 billed yearly, and it’s the lowest tier with Calling & Meeting agents; Pro, at $29 or $19 yearly, has none. Call minutes have no published rate. Usage runs on two meters: Actions, one per tool run with failed runs counted, and Vendor Credits for model costs. Extra Actions are $80 per 1,000.

Strengths:

• Any model through Vendor Credits passed through without markup, or your own API keys on every plan.
• An API, a JavaScript SDK and a hosted MCP server for Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor. (MCP lets AI assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT work inside other apps.)

Drawbacks: with two meters and no published call rate, a calling budget is guesswork until you’ve tested. The free plan is retired, and reviews are few: about 4.3 from roughly 20 on G2.

Versus Bland: Bland is built around the phone call and its own models. Relevance AI is built around the sales process, with the call as one step and the model up to you. See the Relevance AI profile.

Reply.io is a sales engagement platform whose sequences combine email, LinkedIn, calls, SMS and WhatsApp tasks, with an AI SDR called Jason sold on top. It fits a sales team that used Bland for outbound calls and decided a rep should be the voice on the line, with software deciding who to call next.

Price (October 2026): each Multichannel user costs $99 a month ($89 on yearly billing) and gets a LinkedIn seat plus Calls & SMS. Email Volume plans can add Calls & SMS for $29 a month, per account on the plan card and per user in the page’s comparison table. Phone usage (numbers, minutes, texts and phone checks) draws on a wallet you top up. Jason starts at $500 a month on a yearly plan. There’s a 14-day trial and no free plan.

Strengths:

• Call steps sit in the same sequence as email and LinkedIn steps, with conditional branches, and a Power Dialer shipped on October 6, 2026.
• 4.6 on Capterra from 95 reviews (September 2026), and an official MCP server with 70 tools.

Drawbacks: the per-user price grows with the team, and numbers, minutes and texts come out of the wallet on top of each seat.

Versus Bland: Bland’s agent is the caller. Reply.io puts a person on the call and automates the list, the order and the follow-up around it. See the Reply.io profile or Reply.io alternatives.

Artisan sells Ava, an AI BDR that finds leads, writes and sends email, answers replies and books meetings, along with a dialer for your human reps. It fits a team that hoped Bland would open sales conversations and is fine with the AI working over email while people take the calls.

Price (October 2026): the default pricing tab is quote-only. Artisan’s Startups tab shows two self-serve plans: Intern, 10,000 credits (roughly 500 leads) for $280 monthly or $250 on a yearly plan, and Employee, 25,000 credits for $660 or $600. Dialer seats are $75 monthly or $67 on yearly billing. Mailboxes and phone numbers cost extra, at prices Artisan doesn’t publish. There’s a free trial with no card.

Strengths:

• Contact data, 14 signal types and website-visitor identification are built in and paid with the same credits, so there’s no separate data contract.
• The dialer runs parallel lines and adds AI talking points, transcripts and drafted follow-ups.

Drawbacks: the terms auto-renew and make purchases non-refundable, while some Artisan marketing says “cancel anytime”. Credits per plan were cut during 2026, and one Trustpilot reviewer reported “only about a 0.07% positive response rate”.

Versus Bland: Artisan states that “Ava cannot legally make calls”, so its AI never speaks on the phone. With Bland, the AI is the one talking. See the Artisan profile.

Outreach (outreach.ai) is a sales engagement platform for B2B teams: sequences, the Outreach Voice dialer, call recording and coaching through Kaia, AI agents, deals and forecasting. It fits a larger sales org that tried AI calling and is moving the calls back to reps, with AI preparing and reviewing them.

Price (October 2026): quote only, priced per seat plus AI credits. Outreach lists no seat prices. An AWS Marketplace listing, under a package name it no longer uses, shows 50 seats for $108,000 a year (about $180 a seat monthly), and Vendr’s February 2026 data puts the median deal at $45,600 a year. Credits beyond what you bought cost $1.40 each, billed monthly with no hard stop. Outreach Voice’s standard plan includes 1,000 minutes per user a month; premium covers unlimited calling within reasonable use.

Strengths:

• Prospecting, calls, meeting recordings, deals and forecasts under one contract, with deep Salesforce sync.
• 4.3 on G2 from about 3,570 reviews, and an MCP server that works with Claude, ChatGPT and Copilot.

Drawbacks: the standard terms make orders prepaid and non-cancelable with 12-month auto-renewal, and there’s no free plan or trial. In a TrustRadius summary, 7 of 12 reviewers called the interface cluttered and complex.

Versus Bland: Bland takes people off the call. Outreach keeps people on it and uses AI for the research before and the coaching after. See the Outreach profile.

Work back from the reason you’re leaving, and run real test calls before you move a phone number.

• The bill. Price one real month on Retell AI’s line items against Bland’s Build plan. If Start’s 100 calls a day is your one problem, weigh Build’s $299 fee against Retell’s 20 included lines.
• Texting, transfers or guardrails. Retell AI sells SMS and safety guardrails as add-ons on pay as you go, without an enterprise contract.
• Model choice. Vapi or Relevance AI, both of which take your own API keys.
• The November 15 migration. If you’re rebuilding agents anyway, build one of them on an alternative at the same time and compare the calls.
• No engineer. Lindy, for a single receptionist line.
• Outbound sales. US consent rules make AI calls to cold lists risky, so Reply.io, Artisan or Outreach, with people making the calls, are the safer setup.

Bland may still be the right home if you need its FedRAMP 20x Class A status, on-prem or VPC hosting on Enterprise, or one bundled rate with no model decisions to make.

Bland is a serious platform for large call operations, and one bundled rate is easy to forecast once you’re on the right plan. Where it pinches is in between: past 100 calls a day but short of an Enterprise contract. For a like-for-like move I’d test Retell AI first, and Vapi if you want to pick the model yourself. If the November 15 migration means a rebuild anyway, run the same script on one of them in parallel.

If you were using Bland to reach people who never asked to hear from you, I’d change the approach rather than the platform: open the conversation by email, which is what I built Reachkit for, and save the voice agent for the people who reply. More in the Bland, Retell AI and Vapi profiles.