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Best AI receptionists in 2026

No vendor wins outright, because the right answer changes with your call volume and how long your calls run. Rosie is the cheapest plan with real minutes. NextPhone wins on volume. Answrr is the only one you can test without a card. Abby Connect is the safest pick if you might want people. Every choice below is justified with a published number.

Which AI receptionist is best for a solo operator?

Rosie Professional, $49 a month. It holds 250 minutes, which works out at $0.196 a minute inside the plan. The obvious alternative is Dialzara Business Lite at $29, but that plan holds 60 minutes, or roughly one call a working day, at $0.483 a minute. Rosie gives you 4.2 times the minutes for 1.7 times the price, so the cheaper headline is the more expensive product per minute of work done.

Two things to know before you buy. Message taking is all the $49 tier does: appointment booking and warm transfer to a person start at the $149 Scale plan, so if you need booking, price that tier instead. And Rosie does not publish an overage rate, which means you cannot model a busy month. If that bothers you, Answrr Starter at $99 for 300 minutes (5 hours) publishes $0.25 a minute and includes every feature on every tier.

Which is best at high call volume?

NextPhone Pro, $199 a month for unlimited calls. No minutes, no overage, no surprises. The crossovers against per-minute vendors are calculable: Dialzara reaches $199 at 500 minutes and is capped there, Answrr at 750 minutes, Rosie at 1,000. Past those points you are paying overage for volume NextPhone gives away. The full working is in per minute against flat rate.

The catch is integrations. CRM connections to Clio, ServiceTitan and HubSpot only appear on the $299 Growth plan, so a firm that needs its receptionist writing into a CRM should price that tier, not the entry one. NextPhone also quotes prices as "starts at", so confirm your number before signing. For what it is worth, NextPhone runs no affiliate arrangement with us and still wins this category on the numbers.

Which can you test without a credit card?

Answrr. Fourteen days with 60 minutes included and no card required, which is the only genuinely no-commitment trial among the finished products here. Their tier structure helps too: every plan includes every feature, so the trial shows you the real product rather than a stripped version, and the tiers differ only by minutes and number of agents.

Two alternatives if Answrr does not fit. Smith.ai runs a permanently free AI tier covering 25 calls, then $3.00 a call, which is enough to hear how it handles your callers. For anyone technical, Bland's Start plan needs no card either and charges $0.14 a minute all in, though you are building the agent yourself. Abby Connect gives 14 days on every AI plan but asks for payment details first.

Which is best if you might need real people?

Abby Connect, AI from $99 a month. Their AI plans include human backup on demand, and more importantly they publish both price ladders, so the cost of changing your mind is known in advance. The AI tier is exactly 2.0 times cheaper than the matching human tier ($690 against $1,380), and Spanish is included on both tracks at every level.

Smith.ai is the alternative and suits a different buyer. It runs AI at $150 for 75 calls and live agents from $300 for 30 calls on one account, billed per call rather than per minute. That shape wins when a booked client is worth thousands and loses when you take many short calls. We compare the two tracks properly in AI receptionist against answering service.

Which is best when calls run long?

Goodcall Starter, $79 a month. It bills 100 unique customers with unlimited minutes, so call length stops being a cost at all. Put 10-minute calls through it and 100 callers is 1,000 minutes for $79, which is $0.079 a minute, well under anything a per-minute vendor can offer. Annual billing drops it further to $66 a month.

The exposure is the other direction. A month full of new callers costs $0.50 each above your limit, and the price is quoted per agent, so two agents doubles it. The Starter tier also keeps call records for seven days only, and allows one logic flow, so anything with branching intake needs the tier above. Goodcall pays us nothing and is still the right answer for consultative businesses that spend real time on the phone.

Which handles phone, text and chat together?

My AI Front Desk Business-in-a-Box, $99 a month. It covers 200 voice minutes plus 20 outbound calls a day, 400 SMS, 100 chats, in one product with 20 or more languages, which no other vendor in this data set matches at the price. Setup is advertised at five minutes and there is a 7-day trial.

Ignore the $20 Basic tier completely. It is the lowest published price on our whole site and it answers no phone calls: it covers email, SMS and chat only, no phone answering. Also convert the billing before you compare it with anyone: My AI Front Desk uses a credit pool where voice costs 25 credits a minute and $10 buys 1,000 credits, so a minute is about $0.25. More on that in the hidden costs of AI receptionists.

Which is best for a restaurant?

Slang.ai Core, $399 a month per location. It is not a general receptionist and does not pretend to be. It handles reservations and connects to OpenTable, SevenRooms and Yelp, with call recordings included. The Premium tier at $599 adds custom branding, cross-selling, real-time alerts and Spanish, which is otherwise a $99 a month add-on.

Price it per site before you get attached. Four locations on Core is $1,596 a month, and prices are quoted as "starting at" with no free trial, only a demo. A single-site restaurant that mostly needs calls answered rather than tables booked will do better with a general AI receptionist at a third of the price. A group that lives on OpenTable will not.

Which ones can we not recommend?

Three vendors are impossible to compare because they publish no usable price. Nexa lists plan sizes with no numbers attached. Podium publishes nothing for its base plans or its AI Employee add-on. Simple Phones puts its price table on the page as an image, so all we can verify is a single threshold. We keep all three visible on the pricing index, because refusing to publish a price is itself information.

Two more come with warnings rather than exclusions. Synthflow no longer sells to small businesses at all: its plans now start at $30,000 a year, so any article quoting it at $29 a month is out of date. Jobber's $29 receptionist is real, but it requires a Jobber subscription, making the true entry price $78 a month, and Jobber publishes no call or minute limit for the add-on.

How do you check this against your own numbers?

Work out what you are losing before you decide what to spend. Put your weekly call count, the share you miss and what a customer is worth into the calculator. If the monthly figure comes back under $49, none of these products earn their price yet and the honest advice is to wait.

Where to go next

• Every vendor price in one sortable table
• What an AI receptionist costs at 100, 300 and 600 minutes
• Where each billing model stops being the cheap one
• The costs hiding behind the headline rates
• AI against a human answering service, priced at the same vendor
• Best answering services if you would rather have people