Smith.ai sells receptionist service by the call: its plans are call buckets, and on its human plans booking, transcription and follow-up carry per-call fees. Beside sells the phone line itself: $199.99 a year, unlimited calls and texts, transcripts and a daily recap included. Smith.ai staffs live humans; Beside does not.
Both answer the phone when you can't. They are priced on different ideas about what you are buying, and that difference shows up the month the phone gets busy.
Two months on that Pro plan comes to $300, more than the $199.99 Beside charges for a full year. That is our arithmetic, using the prices both companies publish.
Smith.ai sells calls. Beside sells the line.
An answering service sits in front of your number. Calls forward to their team, someone picks up, and you get a message. The number your customers dial is still yours, but the answering happens somewhere else, and what you are buying is a quantity of it.
Beside works the other way round. It becomes the line. You port your existing business number into it or forward the one you have, and the AI answers your line, with voice cloning included (what Beside actually does on a call). Beside's pricing page lists unlimited calls and texts across the US and Canada, so there is no quantity to buy (Source: Beside pricing, 2026).
That one structural difference explains most of what follows. If you sell answering by the call, you have to count calls, cap them, and charge for the things that happen on them. If you sell the line, a busy month looks like a slow one on the invoice.
The two things owners ask before they switch
When a call needs a person
Smith.ai's answer here is the strongest thing they sell. Their receptionist plans are live-staffed with expert agents around the clock, they use no overseas agents, and spam calls are not billed (Source: Smith.ai pricing, 2026). If you want a person on the line every time, that is precisely what you are paying for, and in some businesses it is worth the money. Their AI plans are not human-free either: Smith.ai says a complex call can be transferred to a live North America-based receptionist, any time (Source: Smith.ai AI receptionist pricing, 2026).
Beside does not have that. It is AI, and when a call needs you it transfers the call. If you can't pick up, the call is transcribed and summarised and you get the details instead of a message slip. That is the right trade for a lot of owners. If it isn't the one you want, buy the humans.
Where a booked appointment lands
Beside takes the booking on the call and captures the details. There is no calendar product named on beside.com/integrations today: not Google Calendar, not Outlook, not Calendly. Zapier is where you would wire up anything further, and Beside's pricing page puts that at more than a thousand apps, but no calendar hand-off is published as a supported feature today (Source: Beside pricing, 2026).
Smith.ai's AI plans advertise scheduling with Calendly by name (Source: Smith.ai AI receptionist pricing, 2026). If booking straight into the calendar you already keep is what decides this for you, that is a point for them. There is more detail in our write-up of how the booking works.
| Beside | Smith.ai | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $199.99/user/year ($16.67/user/mo billed annually) | AI: $0 for 25 calls · $150/mo for 75 · $500/mo for 300. Human: from $300/mo for 30 calls |
| Calls | Unlimited calls and texts (US & Canada) | Every plan is a call bucket; $11.50 per call over 30 on the entry human plan |
| Who answers | AI, with voice cloning included | AI on the AI plans, which can transfer a complex call to a live North America-based receptionist; live agents 24/7 on the receptionist plans, no overseas agents |
| Your number | Becomes your line: port it or forward it | Also ports your business number at no charge, or gives you a dedicated one |
| Transcripts and summaries | Included, plus a daily recap | $0.25 per call on the human plans; included on every AI plan, free tier included |
| Appointment booking | Included, though no calendar product is named | $1.50 per call on the human plans; the AI plans advertise scheduling with Calendly |
| Trial or guarantee | 7-day free trial | Month-to-month, 30-day money-back guarantee |
What each one costs in a busy month
Take a one-person shop that takes 60 calls in a month, and price it three ways. Beside is priced per user, so a second person on the account doubles that side of it, and extra numbers are $4.99 a month each. This is our arithmetic, built from the numbers each company publishes on its own pricing pages.
On Smith.ai's Pro AI plan, 60 calls sits inside the 75-call bucket, so the month costs $150 (Source: Smith.ai AI receptionist pricing, 2026).
Smith.ai's entry human plan publishes 30 included calls at $300, overage at $11.50 a call, appointment booking at $1.50 and recording and transcription at $0.25 (Source: Smith.ai pricing, 2026). Applying those rates to our 60-call month is our own arithmetic: $300 plus 30 overage calls is $645, and adding both per-call extras on every call takes it to $750. That second figure assumes every caller books, which is the top of the range rather than a typical month.
On Beside, the same 60 calls sit inside a $199.99 annual plan, which works out at $16.67 per user per month. So does the month you take two hundred.
On one model, the better the month goes, the more you pay for it. On the other, the bill does not move.
Where Smith.ai is the better buy
Smith.ai is built for a business where one converted call is worth four figures and a human voice is part of what the customer is buying: a law firm, a specialist practice, a high-ticket consultancy. When the phone rings thirty times a month and the work on the other end is worth thousands, $300 is not a real cost, and the people answering are trained for intake work.
Their terms back it up: month-to-month, no long-term contract, a 30-day money-back guarantee, no setup fees, and a 10% discount if you pay for the year (Source: Smith.ai pricing, 2026). If that is your business, buy theirs.
There is also a free tier worth naming: Smith.ai's AI plan is $0 for 25 calls a month (Source: Smith.ai AI receptionist pricing, 2026). If you take fewer than 25 calls a month and you only want them screened, that is a real option and it costs nothing.
Two things are worth knowing. The 26th call is $3.00 and every one after it is too, so the month you get busy is the month it stops being free. And it does not become your line: your number stays where it is, and so does everything that happens after the call.
What you get after the call ends
An answering service hands you the message. That is the product.
Beside's output is the record. Every call is transcribed and summarised, it drafts the follow-up, it creates the contact, and at the end of the day it gives you a recap. When you can't remember what somebody said three weeks ago, you ask, and you get the detail back in seconds.
On Smith.ai's human plans, recording and transcription is a $0.25 per-call add-on (Source: Smith.ai pricing, 2026). Their AI plans list recording, transcription and summaries as included on every tier, including the free one (Source: Smith.ai AI receptionist pricing, 2026). So the transcript is only an extra if you are buying the human service.
| After the call | Beside | Smith.ai human plans |
|---|---|---|
| Recording and transcription | Included | $0.25 per call as an add-on (included on their AI plans) |
| Text and email follow-up | Included | $0.50 per call as an add-on |
| Appointment booking | Included | $1.50 per call as an add-on |
| Daily recap | Included | Not listed as a feature or an add-on |
| Where the record lives | In the app on your phone, with the line | In Smith.ai's service and dashboard |
125 calls a day
Avery Headley runs Hudson Loop, sixteen affordable-housing buildings and 294 units in the Bronx. His line takes around 125 inbound calls a day, and 500 to 600 texts at peak.
Every plan on this page except one would price that per call. What he talks about is the notes.
"It captures the phone call, you can hear the message, you can hear the notes. For me, this is really a game changer." — — Avery Headley, Hudson Loop, the Bronx
So which one should you pick?
Pick Smith.ai if you want a person on the line, your volume is low and predictable, and one converted call is worth thousands. That is a real business and this is a real product for it.
Pick Beside if the phone is the business, the volume moves with the season, and you want the same bill in August as in February. Both of them will port your number, so that is not the deciding factor. The difference is that with Beside the line, the texts and the record of every call sit in one app on your phone.
If the phone is only part of what is eating your week, we also went through what else is worth automating in a small service business.
PS — we're also building Beside Agentic, for owners who want more than the phone handled. You can join the waitlist.
Sources: Smith.ai receptionist pricing, Smith.ai AI receptionist pricing, HomeAdvisor, App Store. Beside pricing and features verified on beside.com/pricing and beside.com/integrations on 28 July 2026. Competitor pricing is taken from Smith.ai's own pricing pages on the same date. Photo: Pexels.