Hudson vs Vapi
Vapi is developer infrastructure for voice. Hudson is the onboarding product your SaaS team can deploy today — no engineering required, no pipeline to maintain.
The onboarding product, not the building block
Hudson ships with everything an onboarding use case needs: video avatar, knowledge base, structured persona, session analytics, and churn detection. Your CS team configures it. Your engineering team doesn't have to touch it.
Best-in-class voice infrastructure
Vapi is a well-regarded developer platform for building voice agents. Its primitives are solid — turn-taking, hotwords, interruption handling. But an onboarding product built on Vapi is something you'd have to assemble yourself, complete with knowledge, analytics, and frontend.
Where Hudson wins
The onboarding-specific capabilities Vapi doesn't cover
- Video avatar — Vapi is voice-only. No visual presence to guide users through your product UI.
- Full knowledge pipeline — RAG, auto-chunking, transcript ingestion, study notes. All out-of-box. None of this ships with Vapi.
- Screen-share & in-app awareness — Hudson can see what the user is doing on screen. Vapi has no perception layer.
- Churn & drop-off analytics — Hudson reports where users got stuck. Vapi provides raw transcripts, nothing more.
- No code, no ops — Vapi requires ongoing engineering to maintain. Hudson is self-serve for product and CS teams.
Head-to-head feature breakdown
Every capability, side by side
| Feature | Hudson | Vapi |
|---|---|---|
| Persona & Training | ||
| Structured persona schema | Yes | No |
| Version history & rollback | Yes | Partial |
| Knowledge & RAG | ||
| RAG over your own docs | Yes | Partial |
| Transcripts become knowledge | Yes | No |
| Conversation Engine | ||
| Video avatar | Yes | No |
| Turn-taking & interruptibility | Yes | Yes |
| Perception | ||
| Screen-share awareness | Yes | No |
| In-app overlay widget | Yes | No |
| Analytics & Closed Loop | ||
| Churn / drop-off signals | Yes | No |
| Weekly digest email | Yes | No |
| Commercial | ||
| Pricing model | Per-session | Per-minute |
| Time to first agent | Minutes | Hours |
| Target buyer | SaaS teams | Developers |
Don't build what you can deploy
Hudson is the finished product. Live in minutes.