Pipecat vs Tone
Pipecat
pipecat.ai
Tone
trytone.aiSide by side
| Figure | Pipecat | Tone |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $0.01/mo | $0.09/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| iOS | Yes | — |
| Android | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 7 | 3 |
| Spec score · AI Voice Agents | 9.0 (#3) | 7.9 (#16) |
| Integrations | LinkedIn describes 60-plus LLM and service integrations, multi-vendor telephony, function calling, cross-platform libraries and HTTP, WebSocket and WebRTC networking. | Listed integrations include OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, Mistral, Llama, ElevenLabs, Cartesia, PlayHT, Deepgram, Whisper, AssemblyAI, Twilio, Telnyx, Plivo, LiveKit, HubSpot, Salesforce, Zapier, n8n, Slack, Notion, Confluence, and GoHighLevel. |
| Self-hosting | Pipecat runs wherever Python runs and can be deployed on the user's own infrastructure. | Tone can be started with Docker Compose and includes a Kubernetes Helm chart, with Postgres, Redis, and ClickHouse in the example stack. |
| Support | The Pipecat homepage offers enterprise support and FDE hours for architecture reviews, latency tuning, and custom deployments. | Self-host customers receive community Discord support, Cloud customers receive email and chat support, and Enterprise customers receive dedicated support with a Slack channel. |
| What it does | Pipecat is an open-source Python framework for real-time voice and multimodal conversational agents. | Tone is an open-source voice AI platform for building, deploying, and self-hosting voice agents. |
Plans
Pipecat
- Pipecat Cloud agent-1x reservedFree
- Pipecat frameworkFree
- Pipecat Cloud$0.01 a month
- Pipecat Cloud agent-1x active$0.01 a month
- Pipecat Cloud agent-2x active$0.02 a month
- Pipecat Cloud agent-3x active$0.03 a month
- Pipecat Cloud EnterprisePriced on request
In their own words
Pipecat
Pipecat is an open-source ecosystem for building voice and multimodal AI agents. Its pipelines can handle voice, video, text, and images, with control over individual frames in a conversation. Because frames move through the pipeline as they are produced, an agent can begin responding before a person has finished speaking. The framework includes interruption handling, turn detection, context management, subagent handoffs, and Pipecat Flows, and its homepage lists more than 200 providers and services for speech, language, and vision. Transports include WebRTC, SIP, and PSTN, alongside client SDKs, a UI kit, metrics, traces, and OpenTelemetry. Teams can run it on infrastructure that supports Python or deploy it to Pipecat Cloud, which adds scaling and observability. Cloud capabilities include telephony, noise cancellation, monitoring, recordings, and persistent transcription storage. Pipecat Cloud is listed at $0.001 per participant minute for Daily WebRTC voice and $0.004 per participant minute for voice and video; connected third-party services using customer keys are billed by their providers.
Tone
Tone is an open-source voice AI platform for building, deploying, and self-hosting voice agents. Agents can handle inbound or outbound calls, web widgets, or chat, combining prompts, tools, workflows, configurable models, voices, and speech-to-text providers. Its knowledge base accepts PDFs, scraped documents, Notion, and Confluence content, with chunking, embeddings, retrieval, re-ranking, citations, and custom vocabulary. A visual workflow builder supports branching, loops, human handoff, TypeScript hooks, and triggers from Zapier, REST API, or HighLevel. The test center runs simulated calls with personas, accents, and edge cases, supports parallel regression runs, and replays production calls. Observability includes interruption rate, latency, sentiment, gibberish detection, recordings, dashboards, and real-time alerts. Tone offers a TypeScript-first SDK, CLI, hosted API, and self-hosting through Docker Compose or a Kubernetes Helm chart. The Self-host plan is free. Cloud costs $0.09 per minute and includes $10 free credit with no card required; Enterprise pricing is custom.