Both put a talking avatar in front of your visitors. They are priced differently, built for different buyers, and one of them is ours. Prices below came from their own pricing page on 2026-09-18.
The short answer. Smara costs about an eighth as much per minute at entry, $0.073 against $0.590, and $0.055 against $0.318 in the middle.
| Product | Plan | Per month | Minutes | Per minute |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Smara | Starter | $29 | 400 | $0.073 |
| Tavus | Starter | $59 | 100 | $0.590 |
| Smara | Growth | $99 | 1,800 | $0.055 |
| Tavus | Growth | $397 | 1,250 | $0.318 |
Their price covers the whole conversation, as ours does, so these are comparable numbers.
A developer platform with the whole conversational pipeline included: language model, speech both ways, and WebRTC streaming, with a focus on conversational quality and what they describe as the lowest market latency.
Genuinely good conversational feel and a serious platform with guaranteed SLAs at enterprise. Free tier gives 25 minutes with no card.
Price. Their entry plan is $59 for 100 minutes, ours is $29 for 400. An extra minute is $0.37 against our $0.04, which is roughly nine times. If your avatar gets used, that gap compounds every month.
Underneath, the thing that makes our price possible is that the engine runs without a GPU. That is also why the same software can run inside a clinic or a law firm's own building, why the stream fits a 100 kbps connection, and why we can charge four cents for an extra minute rather than thirty-seven.
She can also operate the page she is on: point at what she is describing, fill in a booking form from what you told her, and finish the job rather than describe it.
Where we are weaker: we are newer, we are one product rather than a platform, and if you need a hundred simultaneous conversations today, several of the names here have been doing this longer.
You are building a product where conversational quality is the entire proposition and budget is not the constraint.
You want an avatar on a normal business website that greets visitors, answers their questions and completes tasks, installed with one script tag, at the lowest running cost per minute of any complete product here.
No signup, no card.