Retell AI vs Sesame
A side-by-side comparison of Retell AI and Sesame, two Voice tools, drawn from Ignaite's continuously-verified listings.
Compared from listings verified as of
At a glance
The honest brief
Retell AI
Bring your own LLM behind the voice agent, so it isn't locked to a single model like most all-in-one voice platforms.
- Inbound and outbound call handling
- SIP/Twilio telephony built in
- Low-latency turn-taking model
- No-code builder plus API
- Per-minute costs stack with LLM/TTS
- Voice quality depends on chosen vendors
- Cloud-only, no self-host
Sesame
Open-sourced its CSM-1B voice model under Apache 2.0 while keeping the viral Maya/Miles companions a hosted demo.
- Open Apache-2.0 CSM-1B base model
- Lifelike, natural conversational pacing
- Free real-time web demo
- Founder pedigree (Oculus co-creator)
- Demo only; no production API yet
- Companions not self-hostable
- Early-stage product