Bland alternative
Crackle vs Bland AI.
Bland AI is built for phone calls: inbound numbers, outbound and batch calling, with talk time at $0.14 a minute on its free Start plan or $0.12 on Build at $299 a month, and telephony billed on top. Crackle is for agents in your website or app, at one lower rate with nothing added. Choose Bland for phone campaigns and flow diagrams; choose Crackle for web and app calls and Indian-language voices.
Bland AI’s facts are from its own pages, checked on 14 October 2026. Prices change; the sources are at the foot of the table.
Side by side.
| What | Crackle | Bland AI |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $0.07 a minute | $0.14 a minute on Start, $0.12 on Build |
| What the price covers | Voice, transcription and model, whichever you choose | Voice and model included; telephony billed separately |
| To start | Free plan with sign-up credit; plans from $29 a month include call credit | Free Start plan with an inbound number; Build is $299 a month |
| Calls at once | 2 on the free plan; 5, 20, 75 on paid plans | 10 on Start (100 calls a day), 50 on Build |
| Billed by | The second; a call nobody joins costs nothing | Not stated on their pricing page |
| Phone numbers | Not yet | Yes: inbound, outbound and batch calls |
| Web and mobile apps | Web, iOS, Android and React Native, through LiveKit | Web agent SDK |
| Talk button for a website | Yes: one line of HTML | A voice and chat widget; web chat is listed under Enterprise |
| Languages | 44, with voices recorded in Hindi, Hinglish, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati and Punjabi | 40+, per their docs |
| Answers from documents | Yes: PDF, Word and text, up to 500 documents | Yes: 10 knowledge bases on Start, 50 on Build |
| Calls your APIs | Yes: your HTTP endpoints, during a call or before it | Yes: tools that call your API |
| How an agent is built | A studio: write instructions, pick a voice, press Test agent; or the API | Conversational Pathways, a visual flow designer |
Sources: Bland AI pricing, Bland AI docs index, read on 14 October 2026. Crackle’s figures are from its live price list.
When Bland AI is the better choice.
- Your calls are on the phone: inbound numbers, outbound calls and batches from a list.
- You want to draw the conversation as a branching flow.
- You need on-premises deployment, or SOC 2, HIPAA and PCI DSS on Enterprise.
When Crackle is the better choice.
- Your calls are in a website or an app, at a lower rate with nothing added for telephony.
- Your callers speak Hindi, Hinglish or another Indian language and you want a voice recorded in it.
- You would rather describe the agent in plain instructions than draw a flowchart.
Moving from Bland AI.
Most of an agent carries straight across. Their names for things, and Crackle’s.
- Agent or pathway
- Agent: write the pathway’s steps into its instructions
- Task or prompt
- Instructions
- Custom functions or tools
- Tools: the same HTTP endpoints, described in plain words
- Knowledge base files
- Knowledge: upload the same PDFs, Word and text files
- Web agent SDK
- Start a call from your server and join it with LiveKit, or paste the talk button
- Call events to your server
- Webhooks, signed, for each call’s start, lines and end
Other comparisons.
Try Crackle on your own agent.
Paste in the instructions you already have, pick a voice and talk to it. Sign-up credit is there for your first test calls.