Pick Pipecat if
voice engineers who will run OSS for $0 (you pay Deepgram / OpenAI / Cartesia) and only open Cloud when they want pipecat cloud deploy instead of a box.
Read the Pipecat pagePipecat vs Vapi
Our take
Pick Pipecat if voice engineers who will run OSS for $0 (you pay Deepgram / OpenAI / Cartesia) and only open Cloud when they want pipecat cloud deploy instead of a box. Pick Vapi if builders who want a voice agent with a Dashboard plus an API, and will pay hosting + provider pass-through. Skip Vapi if teams that want one all-in per-minute rate with LLM/STT/TTS included (Bland).
Best for
Pipecat Orchestrate providers you already pay
Vapi A phone or web voice agent you can publish
Free plan
Pipecat $0 · you pay the providers you plug in
Vapi No free plan
Lowest paid
Pipecat Transport $0.001
Vapi No Success Package $5
Next step up
Pipecat Krisp VIVA $0.0015
Vapi Pro $999/mo
Coding agent
Pipecat Agent + Tab inside the editor
Vapi
Runs where
Pipecat Hosted
Vapi
Watch out
Pipecat OSS is $0
Vapi Hosting is $0.05/min plus providers
Last checked
Pipecat 2026-10-22 · daily.co/pricing/pipecat-cloud
Vapi 2026-10-22 · vapi.ai/pricing
Which one, then?
Pick Vapi if
builders who want a voice agent with a Dashboard plus an API, and will pay hosting + provider pass-through.
Read the Vapi page