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Tavus
Tavus is a San Francisco AI research lab whose platform lets developers and companies build real-time AI humans that see, hear, and talk face to face, with its own models for rendering, turn-taking, and perception and a Conversational Video Interface API.
Product and revenue teams building face-to-face AI agents for sales coaching, learning and development, recruiting, or customer service, from a first prototype to production.
Teams that want an editing tool for finished marketing video, and buyers who need long conversations or heavy volume at the lowest per-minute cost.
Verdict
Tavus is worth a look when the product is a conversation, not a rendered clip. It builds its own models for face rendering, turn-taking, and perception, posts plan prices from free to $975 a month with per-minute overage, and reports results from Salesforce and Orum. Conversation length and monthly minutes are capped by plan, so costs rise quickly at volume.
Score Breakdown
These scores cover how realistic and quick Tavus conversations are, how well developers can build on it, how much agents can be customized, and how it handles safety, and then how it does as a company on innovation, communication, pricing, and contract terms.
Who Uses Tavus, Where It Fits on Price, and Its Competitors
Tavus builds AI humans, which it calls PALs, that hold live conversations by video, voice, or text. Behind them are Tavus's own models: Phoenix for face rendering, Sparrow for turn-taking, and Raven for perception of context and emotion. Developers reach these through the Conversational Video Interface, which supports more than 42 languages, a knowledge base, memories, and guardrails. Tavus's homepage shows Salesforce using it for a sales development agent and Orum using it for sales role-play, and the company says more than 100,000 developers and enterprises use it.
Tavus posts a free plan with 20 minutes a month and paid plans from $22 to $975 a month, with a custom Enterprise plan. Its closest competitors are Descript, HeyGen, and Runway, which score a little lower, and Luma AI, which scores lower, though most of them focus on producing video rather than live conversation.
Pricing
We checked Tavus's pricing page and recorded each plan with its included minutes and overage rate.
| Plan | Price | What stands out |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 20 minutes of Conversational Video a month, stock faces, and conversations capped at 5 minutes. |
| Starter | $22 a month | 60 minutes a month, one custom face, and conversations capped at 10 minutes, with no overage. |
| Builder | $59 a month | 175 minutes a month, three custom faces, three concurrent sessions, and overage at $0.35 per minute. |
| Growth | $397 a month | 1,300 minutes, seven custom faces, 10 concurrent sessions, and overage at $0.31 per minute. |
| Business | $975 a month | 4,000 minutes, 15 custom faces, priority support with an onboarding call, and overage at $0.26 per minute. |
| Enterprise | Custom | Volume discounts, white-labeled experiences, service level agreements, and SOC 2 and HIPAA compliance, which the plan table lists only here. |
The Field at a Glance
How Tavus compares with other creative production tooling vendors we reviewed, by Overall Score and relative typical engagement cost.
Tavus scores 7.6 in creative production tooling, under Descript (7.8), and ahead of HeyGen (7.3), Runway (7.2), and Luma AI (6.5).
Compared with …
- Tavus vs HeyGen 7.6/7.3
How Well Tavus Fits Each Conversational Video Use Case
We rated Tavus against the situations teams bring to a live AI video platform, drawing on its homepage and pricing page and the November 2025 Series B announcement.
| Use case | Fit | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| AI sales agent on a website | Strong | Tavus reports that Salesforce's Piper agent produced 6 times as many meetings scheduled and 2 times the conversation engagement. |
| Sales role-play and coaching | Strong | Orum built Aurora on Tavus, and Tavus reports a 50% decrease in rep ramp time. |
| Building a custom agent through an API | Strong | The Conversational Video Interface offers a knowledge base, memories, objectives and guardrails, and function calling. |
| Long or high-volume conversations | Mixed | Conversations are capped at 5 to 60 minutes by plan, and overage costs $0.26 to $0.35 per minute. |
| Regulated industries | Mixed | The plan table lists SOC 2 and HIPAA compliance only for Enterprise. |
| Finished marketing videos and editing | Weak | Tavus centers on live conversation, and HeyGen and Descript are built for producing videos. |
Review Excerpts
These excerpts come from Tavus's homepage, one of them a customer quote and one the company's own description of a customer deployment, and from the buyer concern we found on its pricing page. Paid reviews and pay-for-play sites were excluded.
“Salesforce built Piper, a real-time AI sales development rep, on Tavus. She works Salesforce's main touchpoints and talks with tens of thousands of visitors a day, answering questions, keeping them engaged, and turning more of them into pipeline.”
“By having that visual and having that emotional connection, it actually creates a more high stakes conversation… and it makes the practice more effective.”
“The monthly price looks low, but conversations stop at 5 to 60 minutes, and every minute past the plan costs 26 to 35 cents.”
Where customer reviews couldn't be found, our analysts attempted to give a voice to buyer sentiment, drawing on real information from review sites, forums, and product documentation.
Based on: Tavus pricing
Company Facts
- Founder
- Hassaan Raza, co-founder and CEO (Tavus announcement on VentureBeat)
- Headquarters
- San Francisco (VentureBeat)
- Funding
- A $40 million Series B led by CRV in November 2025, with Scale Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, Y Combinator, HubSpot Ventures, and Flex Capital (VentureBeat)
- Products
- PALs, the Conversational Video Interface, and the Phoenix, Sparrow, and Raven models (Tavus)
- Website
- tavus.io
Key Leadership
Hassaan Raza
Co-founder and CEO
He is quoted as CEO in Tavus's November 2025 Series B announcement (VentureBeat).
Methodology
We scored Tavus on eight criteria, from conversational realism to contract fairness, and the Overall Score is their simple average on a 0 to 10 scale. The scores draw on reviews from public review sites and forums, with paid reviews and pay-for-play sites excluded, plus a hands-on look at the product, its pricing, and its documentation and training. Scores can change as we add reviews and product checks.