Bland AI vs Voiceflow: Own Models or Your Pick of Providers

Bland AI and Voiceflow are both hosted, closed-source platforms. Bland runs its own models inside one rate: $0.14 a minute on Start, or $0.12 on Build plus $299 a month. Voiceflow lets you pick the providers, with a $0.05 phone minute plus credits. For code you can run yourself, there is Dograh, an open-source, self-hostable voice agent platform.

Key Takeaways

• Bland's rate includes its own models, while Voiceflow's $0.05 phone minute adds model credits.
• Bland Start allows 100 calls a day, and Voiceflow's own numbers can't place outbound calls.
• To choose every model and self-host without a contract, run Dograh, which is open source.

This post is part of our guide to Voiceflow alternatives. The guide's section "Hosted voice platforms: Vapi, Retell, Bland, Synthflow" says Bland AI "runs its own speech and language models and folds them into one rate." This post puts the two side by side on that design, plus every other point that changes a buying decision.

Bland's own models against your pick of providers

Bland sells one stack it builds itself, while Voiceflow lets you assemble the speech, model and voice from providers you choose. Most rows below follow from that.

What each one costs at your volume

Bland's bill is easy to work out from its rate and caps, while Voiceflow's depends on the credits your chosen models use.

Bland's pricing page says the per-minute rate covers the language model, speech-to-text and text-to-speech, with "No token charges." By our arithmetic from its list prices, 10,000 minutes a month cost $1,499 on Build ($299 plus $0.12 a minute). Start would come to $1,400, but its cap of 100 calls a day only fits 10,000 minutes if calls average more than three minutes.

Phone time sits on top of Bland's rate, on your own carrier or on Bland's at pass-through cost. On Bland's own telephony, each outbound attempt and each failed call carries a $0.015 minimum.

On Voiceflow, $0.05 is the phone usage charge on self-serve plans. Voiceflow's billing page says a bill is "made up of a monthly plan fee, optional add-ons like editor seats and phone numbers," plus credit-based usage. At 10,000 minutes the phone usage alone is $500, and the speech, voice and model credits come on top at rates set by the providers you pick.

So Bland's figure includes the models and Voiceflow's does not, and the two only compare once you price those credits. Our breakdowns of Bland AI pricing and Voiceflow pricing price every line.

Outbound calls, caps and phone numbers

Bland is set up for outbound lists within daily caps, while Voiceflow places outbound calls one API request at a time from your own carrier's number.

Bland's caps are the first thing an outbound team should check. Start allows 10 calls at once, 100 a day and 100 an hour. Build allows 50 at once, 2,000 a day and 1,000 an hour, and Enterprise has no caps. Bland runs outbound lists as batches, and its numbers cost $15 a month in the US and Canada. Time after a transfer to a person costs $0.05 a minute on Start and $0.04 on Build on Bland's telephony, and nothing on your own Twilio account.

Voiceflow can provision one US or Canadian number per workspace with your plan, with more as an add-on, and you can connect your own Twilio, Vonage or Telnyx number. Voiceflow phone numbers currently don't support outbound calling, so outbound calls go out through your own carrier's number. Each call starts with one API request to that number's endpoint, with answering machine detection as an option, and outbound calls share one concurrency pool with inbound. To reach a person, Voiceflow's Call forward step transfers the caller to a phone number, an international number or a SIP address.

Building an agent: Bland Agents or playbooks

Bland is partway through moving to a new builder, while Voiceflow builds around playbooks, workflows and ready-made support tools.

Bland's original builder, Conversational Pathways, is being replaced by Bland Agents. Bland's migration guide says "All production agents need to be migrated to the new agent architecture by November 15." Pathways still handling traffic after that date are migrated automatically. Agents add environments, which pin a version to staging or production, and evaluations, which score the agent and can gate a publish.

A Voiceflow agent combines a global prompt with playbooks, each pursuing one goal, and workflows for steps that must run the same way every time. Native Zendesk, Salesforce, HubSpot and Shopify tools come ready to use, and a traffic split sends a share of traffic to each version of the agent for A/B tests. For models, you choose speech-to-text from Deepgram, Gladia, Cartesia, AssemblyAI or Google, voices from ElevenLabs, Cartesia, Rime, Google, Amazon or Microsoft, and a language model from Voiceflow's list or your own.

Teams already on Bland have to move each production agent to Bland Agents anyway, which makes the rebuild a natural point to compare.

Open Source Alternative to Vapi / Retell

Self-hosted voice agent platform — no per-minute fees

dograh-hq/dograh

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HIPAA, private hosting and certificates

Bland keeps its BAA and private hosting for Enterprise, while Voiceflow arranges its BAA through its security team and keeps private cloud for Enterprise.

Bland signs a business associate agreement (BAA), the contract HIPAA requires before a vendor handles patient data, on Enterprise only, along with single sign-on and data residency. Voiceflow "supports HIPAA-compliant deployments," and asks you to contact its security team about the BAA for your use. Generally, whichever vendor signs, a BAA hands it obligations while your own HIPAA duties stay with you; confirm your position with counsel.

For private hosting, Bland lists on-prem or VPC (virtual private cloud) deployment on Enterprise, and the software stays closed source. Voiceflow's pricing page says "All hosted on Voiceflow," and its billing page lists private cloud hosting on Enterprise. Bland lists a 99.9% uptime SLA on every plan.

For certificates, Bland lists SOC 2 Type I and Type II, HIPAA, GDPR, PCI DSS (self-attested), ISO 27001 and FedRAMP 20x Class A. Voiceflow lists SOC 2 Type II, ISO/IEC 27001:2022 and GDPR.

Bland AI vs Voiceflow: picking between them

Pick Bland if you want one rate that includes the models and your daily outbound volume fits its caps. Pick Voiceflow if one agent has to answer on chat and phone, or your support team relies on its native helpdesk and CRM tools. It also suits teams that want to choose the speech, model and voice providers.

High-volume outbound teams should check Bland's caps before its rate, and on Voiceflow they need their own carrier number for every outbound call. Teams weighing another hosted option can read Vapi vs Voiceflow and Retell AI vs Voiceflow.

Run the same call script on both over a real phone line before you sign. Most phone calls still reach the agent as 8 kHz audio, while a browser demo runs at 16 kHz, so a demo that sounds sharp can mishear callers on the phone.

Where an open-source platform fits

Both are hosted and closed source, and both keep private hosting behind an Enterprise contract. Neither gives you code you can run without a contract, and that is where Dograh fits.

Dograh is open source under BSD-2-Clause, and its GitHub repository, with more than 5,900 stars, holds the whole platform. Its visual workflow builder joins nodes with pathways, each with a written condition the AI reads, so a team used to Bland's pathways will find it familiar. Campaigns run outbound lists, and self-hosted Dograh runs 10 calls at once by default, a limit you can raise.

Dograh is the orchestration layer: it runs the call flow, tools and telephony, and the speech and language models are a separate layer you choose. That can be Dograh's own models, any supported provider on your own key, or open-weight models you host. The call audio stays in-house only when the speech and language models run on your own servers too.

Dograh starts every account on its own managed models. To keep call audio away from Dograh, open Models, switch the Organization default to BYOK with your own speech and language providers (or local models), and check that no agent has its own model override.

Your numbers stay with your carrier, such as Twilio, Vonage, Plivo or Telnyx. Transfer Call works on Twilio, Telnyx and Asterisk ARI. It passes no summary by default; on Twilio it can play a short spoken introduction to both people. Write the details to your system with an HTTP API tool before the transfer.

Dograh is built for phone calls and also offers a text chat widget for websites, though teams whose main channel is text chat may prefer Voiceflow.

Self-hosted Dograh has no per-minute platform fee (servers, model keys and phone minutes still cost); Dograh Cloud has a 1¢-a-minute platform fee, with 10 concurrent calls included. Self-hosting puts uptime in your team's hands, and there is no one-click import from Bland or Voiceflow, so each agent is rebuilt.

Dograh is the strongest fit when you want to choose every model and run outbound lists on your own servers without an Enterprise contract, because the code is yours to run. To try it, self-host it with Docker Compose, or start on Dograh Cloud.