Open-source alternatives to Vapi and Retell
Vapi and Retell are hosted voice AI platforms. Voxos and Dograh are open-source projects you run yourself, and they solve different problems.
This page is written by the Voxos project. The facts about other products come from their own pages on the date above, so check those pages before you decide.
At a glance
Section titled “At a glance”| Voxos | Dograh | Vapi | Retell | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Where it runs | Your infrastructure | Your infrastructure | Vapi’s managed platform | Retell’s platform |
| License | MIT | BSD 2-Clause | Not stated on its pricing or docs pages | Not stated on its pricing page |
| Listed price | Free software, plus your own providers | Free to self-host, plus your own providers | $0.05/min hosting, plus providers | $0.07 to $0.31/min pay as you go |
| Phone providers | Twilio, Telnyx | Twilio, Vonage, Telnyx, Plivo, Vobiz, Cloudonix, Asterisk ARI | Twilio, Vonage, Telnyx, Vapi telephony | Twilio, Telnyx, SIP, its own numbers |
Sources: Dograh, Vapi pricing, Retell pricing.
When a hosted platform fits better
Section titled “When a hosted platform fits better”Choose Vapi or Retell if you don’t want to run servers, patch anything, or be the one who gets paged. A hosted platform also makes sense if you’d rather have a vendor handle scaling and you’re fine paying per minute for it.
When Dograh fits better
Section titled “When Dograh fits better”Dograh describes itself as the open-source, self-hostable alternative to Vapi and
Retell. It’s the closer match if your goal is a voice agent product with more
telephony options than Voxos has. Its README notes telemetry is on by default,
with an ENABLE_TELEMETRY=false opt-out.
When Voxos fits better
Section titled “When Voxos fits better”Voxos is a whole agent rather than only a call pipeline. One agent has voice and phone calls, SMS and WhatsApp, text chat, memory and skills, schedules and MCP tools. It suits you if you want one agent that does things for you across all of those, on infrastructure you control.
Voxos places outbound calls to saved contacts with a stated goal. It isn’t built for bulk dialing campaigns.
You should also know that voice runs on OpenAI, Gemini or xAI realtime models, so self-hosting Voxos doesn’t make voice calls fully local. Setup needs a Firebase project for sign-in.
What about the cost?
Section titled “What about the cost?”Self-hosting removes the platform fee, but you pay for your own server and your own time. The voice agent cost calculator shows where that crosses over for your call volume.
If you want to write the agent yourself
Section titled “If you want to write the agent yourself”LiveKit Agents and Pipecat are open-source frameworks for building your own voice agent in code. Voxos uses LiveKit under the hood.
Try it
Section titled “Try it”Start with the Quick Start, then connect a number with the Twilio guide or the Telnyx guide.