Open-source alternatives / Vapi
Pipecat — free open-source Vapi alternative
16,146 GitHub stars
Open Source framework for voice agents, multimodal apps, and realtime AI. Maintained by Daily and the community.
Replaces: Vapi + Retell AI — the paid alternative. Pipecat does the same job and the licence is $0: you pay only for the server it runs on.
Why teams switch to Pipecat
- $0 licence. The paid tool charges per seat every month. Pipecat is free forever, including commercial use under its open-source licence.
- Your data stays yours. Pipecat is self-hosted — it runs on your own server, so no third party holds your records.
- Proven at scale. 16,146 GitHub stars and an active contributor base mean real companies run this in production, not just hobbyists.
Trade-off, honestly: open-source means you (or an IT person) install and maintain it. If nobody on your team can run a server, the paid alternative may still be the right call — that is what it is charging for.