Agentis vs Smith.ai: Which AI Receptionist Is Right for Your Dental Practice?

If you've spent more than ten minutes researching AI receptionists, you've run into Smith.ai. They've been around since 2015, they have 500+ live agents, and they're the default recommendation on half the threads in r/smallbusiness. They're also the most common alternative practices evaluate against Agentis.

So let's do this honestly. This isn't a hit piece on Smith.ai — they're a legitimately good company with a lot of happy customers. But they're not the right fit for every dental practice, and neither are we. Here's how to tell which one is yours.

Quick verdict up top

Choose Smith.ai if: you need human receptionists in the loop, you handle complex legal or financial intake, or your call volume is low and unpredictable and you want to pay per-call.

Choose Agentis if: you're a dental practice, med spa, or small service business that wants flat-rate unlimited AI answering, bilingual English/Spanish support out of the box, and no per-call billing surprises at month-end.

If you skimmed that and already know which bucket you're in, you can stop reading. If not, keep going.

What Smith.ai actually is

Smith.ai is a hybrid AI + human receptionist service. Their AI handles the front half of calls — greeting, qualification, simple FAQs — and then hands off to one of their 500+ human agents for anything that needs judgment. The human agents are US-based, trained on your scripts, and can do things like intake forms, appointment booking, and lead qualification.

This hybrid model is Smith.ai's core differentiator. You're not betting entirely on AI; there's a human backstop for anything tricky.

Pricing (as of April 2026):

• Starter: $97.50/month for 30 calls
• Growth: ~$350/month for 100 calls
• Overage: $7–$10 per call beyond your plan
• Setup: Free, but onboarding takes 1–2 weeks

The trap people fall into: if you're getting 4+ calls per day (most practices are), you're not on the $97 plan anymore. You're on the $350–$700 plan, or you're paying overages that stack up fast.

What Agentis is

Agentis is a pure AI receptionist — no human handoff by default. We built it specifically for dental practices, med spas, and small service businesses. Marcus (our voice agent) handles calls end-to-end: answering, qualifying, booking into your calendar, capturing lead info, handling common FAQs in English or Spanish.

Pricing:

• Essentials: $199/month — unlimited calls, one location
• Professional: $399/month — multi-location, custom integrations
• Enterprise: $799/month — multiple agents, priority support

Flat rate. No per-call billing. No overages. If you get 10 calls a day or 100, the bill is the same.

Head-to-head comparison

| Feature | Smith.ai | Agentis | |---|---|---| | Pricing model | Per-call after base plan | Flat monthly, unlimited calls | | Entry price | $97.50/mo (30 calls) | $199/mo (unlimited) | | Bilingual (EN/ES) | Spanish available, surcharge | Included by default | | 24/7 coverage | Yes | Yes | | Human backup | Yes (core offering) | No (AI only) | | Appointment booking | Yes, via integrations | Yes, via integrations | | Industry focus | Generalist (legal, medical, services) | Dental, med spa, contractors | | PMS integrations | Limited | Limited, improving | | Setup time | 1–2 weeks | 24–48 hours | | HIPAA posture | BAA available | BAA available | | Per-minute charges | No, per-call | No | | Commitment | Monthly | Monthly |

Where Smith.ai genuinely wins

I'm going to resist the urge to spin this. Smith.ai is better than Agentis at the following things:

1. Complex intake with judgment calls. A personal injury law firm needs a human to probe a caller's story, figure out if there's a case, and not mess up the intake. No AI — not Agentis, not anyone else as of April 2026 — does this as well as a trained human agent does. Smith.ai has 500+ of those.

2. Track record. They've been doing this since 2015. If "we've been around a decade" is a tiebreaker for you, they win it.

3. Outbound calling with human touch. Smith.ai's human agents can do outbound follow-ups that feel personal in a way AI still can't match for relationship-heavy businesses.

4. Variable-volume pricing. If you get 5 calls a month, paying $97.50 is cheaper than paying us $199. That math flips the moment you're above ~20 calls/month, but it's real.

Where Agentis wins for dental practices specifically

1. Flat pricing means you can predict your bill. Dental practices get call spikes — a toothache Monday after a long weekend can easily 3x your normal volume. With Smith.ai, that's a $300+ overage month. With us, it's $199.

2. Bilingual is the default, not an add-on. If your practice sits in Miami, Los Angeles, Houston, Phoenix — anywhere with a meaningful Spanish-speaking patient population — this matters every single day. Marcus speaks Spanish natively, not as a translated-on-the-fly feature.

3. 24/7 actually means 24/7. 62% of calls that go to voicemail after hours never get called back. Humans sleep. Marcus doesn't.

4. Faster setup. Smith.ai onboarding is 1–2 weeks because humans need to be trained. We're live in 24–48 hours because configuration is all AI-side.

5. Built for dental/medspa workflows specifically. Appointment booking, insurance questions, new patient intake, emergency triage routing — the scripts are pre-built for these verticals, not generic.

Where Smith.ai has the edge we'll close later

I want to be honest: Smith.ai has deeper integrations with some legal and medical software than we do today. If you need tight Clio, MyCase, or certain EHR integrations that aren't dental-specific, their integration library is broader.

We're closing this gap on the dental side — Open Dental and Dentrix integration depth is our 2026 roadmap focus — but for non-dental verticals, Smith.ai's integration library is more mature right now.

The honest recommendation

If you're running a 1–3 dentist practice doing $1M–$5M in annual production, getting 20–80 calls/day, with any meaningful Spanish-speaking patient population, Agentis at $199/mo is a better fit than Smith.ai at whatever-tier-you'd-land-on.

If you're running a personal injury law firm, a multi-practice group with complex intake requirements, or a business where the call itself needs relationship-building judgment, Smith.ai's hybrid model is probably worth the premium.

Try both if you're genuinely undecided. Call our demo line at (786) 474-9984 to hear Marcus handle a live call. Smith.ai offers a free trial. Twenty minutes with each will tell you more than any comparison article.

Ready to see Agentis in action?

Call Marcus directly: (786) 474-9984 — ask about pricing, booking, Spanish support, anything. You'll hear exactly what your patients would hear.

Or book a 15-minute setup call: getagentis.ai/demo