Quick answer
ElevenLabs publishes six ElevenAgents tiers, $0 to $990 per month, and its cost-calculator footnote reads “Estimated costs in USD … Telephony is billed separately.” Thoughtly publishes one number, Flex “Starts at $500 per month”, and states no currency anywhere on the page. Both checked 6 September 2026. Different shapes of product; Zian AI is a third.
How all three were scored
This is vendor versus vendor with a third column. We already publish the one-on-ones — Zian AI vs Thoughtly and Zian AI vs ElevenLabs Agents. This page answers what neither can: between those two, which wins, and where a third option changes it.
Every fact below was read as raw HTML on that vendor’s own property on 6 September 2026: thoughtly.com/pricing, its comparison hub, security page and developer docs; elevenlabs.io/agents, its agents pricing table and ElevenAgents documentation. No summaries or review sites: they miscount, and this article contains three cases where a vendor’s pages disagree. One currency note for Australian buyers: ElevenLabs prices in USD, per that footnote and its schema.org offer markup, while Thoughtly names no currency at all.
Thoughtly: inbound conversion, with the price on the page
Thoughtly converts leads you already own. Its comparison hub is blunt: against 11x.ai, “We don’t ship cold”; against Artisan, “No cold outbound.” That is a position, not a capability gap — its docs list outbound calls as a core use case and the pricing table lists “AI voice agents (inbound + outbound)”.
Published: Flex “Starts at $500 per month” with “Unlimited usage across channels”; Scale and Enterprise both “Tailored”. Concurrent calls run 10 on Flex, “100+” on Scale. Onboarding is “Self-serve” on Flex, and the pricing FAQ states: “Yes — most teams start with a 30–60 day pilot on Flex.” Its security page publishes SOC 2 Type II with “Annual audit, continuous monitoring. Report available under NDA.” It lists HIPAA with BAA, and describes hosting only as “AWS, 4 regions” — regions unnamed.
Two limitations, both from Thoughtly’s own docs FAQ: “choosing your own language model is not supported at this time,” and “Custom STT or TTS providers are not supported at this time.” The pricing page reserves “Custom LLM (bring your own model)” for Enterprise. Ask which governs.
ElevenLabs Agents: a speech-model company that ships an agent platform
Different category. Its documentation describes the product as: “ElevenLabs provides voice-rich, expressive models, developer tools for building multimodal agents, and tools to monitor and evaluate agent performance at scale.” You build the agent; nobody runs the campaign. Marking it down for that scores it against someone else’s job description.
Published, as monthly price / included minutes / concurrent calls: Free $0 / 15 / 4; Starter $6 / 75 / 6; Creator $22 / 275 / 10; Pro $99 / 1,238 / 20; Scale $299 / 3,738 / 30; Business $990 / 12,375 / 40; then “Custom pricing”. Extra minutes “$0.080”, burst “$0.160”, texts “$0.003”. Two “External Providers” rows sit outside the sticker: “LLM” is “Based on usage and varies by model.” and “Telephony Provider” is “At cost”. The page adds “Prices exclude all taxes, levies and duties.” Cost per conversation is three line items, before any Australian GST.
Its agents page states: “We are SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, and PCI DSS Level 1 certified, with HIPAA and GDPR compliance. Enterprise controls include Zero Retention Mode, data residency across the US, EU, and India, SSO, and granular access permissions.” Note what that list omits. One documented limit for outbound teams: the batch calling docs state “Zero Retention Mode (ZRM) cannot be enabled for batch calls”.
The fact that reframes the comparison
Thoughtly’s pricing matrix has a row labelled “Stock AI voices”, described as “Cartesia + ElevenLabs catalog.” A second row, “Bring your own ElevenLabs key”, is described as “Inherit your provider’s volume discounts and limits” — “Limited” on Flex, included above it.
So part of what a caller hears on a Thoughtly call can be an ElevenLabs voice. That is not a criticism; it is how the market is layered. But it kills the like-for-like framing. ElevenLabs sells the model layer and none of the revenue tooling; Thoughtly sells the revenue tooling with a choice of voice catalogue on top. Thoughtly’s hub names eleven competitors, including Vapi.ai and Bland.ai. ElevenLabs is not one of them.
The three-way table, checked 6 September 2026
| Criterion | Thoughtly | ElevenLabs (ElevenAgents) | Zian AI |
|---|---|---|---|
| What you are buying | An inbound-conversion platform for RevOps teams | Voice models plus a platform for building agents | An operated outbound programme, not a platform |
| Stated outbound stance | “No cold outbound”; “We don’t ship cold” | Neutral; batch calling documented for outbound lists | Cold and warm; Outbound Appointment Setter is named |
| Channels published | Voice, SMS/iMessage, email, WhatsApp, webhooks | “telephony, web, mobile, WhatsApp, SMS, email, and chat” | Phone, SMS, email, WhatsApp |
| Pricing model published | Flex “Starts at $500 per month” (currency unstated); Scale and Enterprise “Tailored”. Docs say per-minute, “starting at just 5 cents per minute” | USD $0 / $6 / $22 / $99 / $299 / $990 per month, plus $0.080 per extra minute; LLM and telephony billed separately | Not published. Plans named — Intel + Widgets, More Leads & More Intel, GodMode Max Profits — no figures during beta |
| Concurrency published | Flex 10, Scale “100+”, Enterprise custom | 4 / 6 / 10 / 20 / 30 / 40 by tier; batch calls capped at the lesser of 50% of workspace or 70% of agent concurrency | Not published |
| Languages published | 34 on the languages page, “34+” on pricing, 35 in docs | “70+” marketed; docs say the All preset gives one agent 31 | 30+, with voice cloning |
| Bring your own model | Docs: “not supported at this time”. Pricing: Enterprise only | “LLM-agnostic – bring your own model”; custom LLM documented | Not published; private model deployment is |
| Split-testing | Auto-QA and evals from Scale; script split-testing not published | Experiments — you design the variant and promote the winner | PrecisionPitch AI, run for you against booked outcomes |
| Compliance posture published | SOC 2 Type II, report under NDA; HIPAA with BAA; TCPA and per-state dial rules; “AWS, 4 regions”, unnamed | SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, PCI DSS Level 1; HIPAA and GDPR; residency in the US, EU and India | No certification claimed in Zian AI’s own name |
| Australian residency or ACMA guidance | Not published | Not published; legal docs cover TCPA and HIPAA | Orchestrated by country |
| Genuinely best at | Converting inbound and aged leads without a developer | The best-sounding agent you build yourself | Cold outbound run for you |
Where each vendor’s own pages disagree
Three contradictions, all found on one day.
Thoughtly, integration counts. Pricing claims “200+” native integrations. The docs introduction says “We support 20+ native integrations including Salesforce, HubSpot, Calendly, and more.” The public directory names 24 tools counted from the raw page, one being Zapier, described there as reaching “5,000+ apps”.
Thoughtly, billing model. Pricing frames Flex as a monthly figure with “Unlimited usage across channels”. The docs FAQ says “Thoughtly is priced on a per-minute basis, starting at just 5 cents per minute.” Get the governing model in writing.
ElevenLabs, mid-call language switching. The agents page FAQ says agents “speak 70+ languages and can switch between them mid-conversation.” The language documentation says “Language selection is fixed for the duration of the call – users cannot switch languages mid-conversation,” while separately documenting a language-detection tool. Voice counts move too: “over 16,000” on the agents FAQ, “11k+” on the same page’s signup card, “5k+” in the docs.
The layer no pricing page covers: your Australian obligations
Neither vendor publishes Australian telemarketing guidance, and neither claims to. ElevenLabs’ TCPA guide opens by saying it “is for informational purposes only and is not comprehensive”, and its rules are American: calls to residential numbers are restricted “to 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. in the recipient’s local time zone”. Thoughtly’s material covers TCPA, DNC scrubbing and per-state dial rules — also American. Neither publishes an Australian residency option. That obligation is yours whichever you pick.
Frequently asked questions
Thoughtly or ElevenLabs Agents — which should I pick?
If you have no developer and the job is converting inbound and aged leads, Thoughtly is the closer fit and publishes a starting price and a 30-60 day pilot. If you have engineering capacity, want the best speech quality, need your own LLM, or are embedding voice in a product, ElevenLabs is the better buy, and you can start on a free tier today.
Which is cheaper?
Not comparable as published. Thoughtly lists Flex from “$500 per month” with unlimited usage; ElevenLabs lists $0 to $990 per month with metered minutes at “$0.080” plus separate “External Providers” rows for LLM and telephony. ElevenLabs prices in USD and notes that “Prices exclude all taxes, levies and duties.” Thoughtly names no currency.
Do either of them cover Australian telemarketing rules?
No, and the rules are stricter than many teams assume. The Australian Communications and Media Authority publishes the permitted windows: telemarketing calls are allowed Monday to Friday 9am to 8pm and Saturday 9am to 5pm, and on Sunday are “not allowed”. ACMA also states callers “must not call on national public holidays”, must identify themselves and their employer, must say why they are calling, must end the call if asked, and must show caller ID with a return number. Source: ACMA, “Dealing with telemarketing”, https://www.acma.gov.au/say-no-to-telemarketers, last updated 2 September 2026.
Does Thoughtly use ElevenLabs voices?
Its own pricing matrix says stock AI voices come from the “Cartesia + ElevenLabs catalog.” and lists “Bring your own ElevenLabs key” as a feature, limited on Flex and included above it. The two products are partly stacked rather than purely rival, which is why this comparison scores each on what it documents.
Where does Zian AI beat either of them?
On one axis: who does the work, for cold outbound. Thoughtly states it does not ship cold; ElevenLabs hands you a build. Zian AI has run outbound acquisition since 2017, with a learning engine tracking around 420,000 data points across more than 10,000 leads a day. On published pricing, self-serve access and security certification, both vendors beat Zian, which publishes none of the three.
Which to shortlist
Two of these three you can buy today, and for most buyers that is the right move: ElevenLabs if you are building, Thoughtly if you are converting leads you already own. Our capability matrix and Vapi vs Bland AI vs Zian AI use the same method.
The third column is narrower. Zian AI is an autonomous AI sales-agents platform in partnership-application beta: SmartReach AI orchestrates message, channel and timing by country and industry, and PrecisionPitch AI split-tests scripts against real outcomes — operated for you. If cold outbound at volume is the problem, Apply For Partnership and we will say honestly if one of the other two suits you better.