ElevenLabs is still the best at this, and most people leave over credits rather than quality. The open-source replacements are real now. The two everyone recommends are not licensed for commercial use.
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Stay on ElevenLabs if you need line-by-line performance direction, dubbing, or a voice you can hand a client with the rights cleared, because nothing open source gives you all three.
checked 2026-10-13 · ElevenLabs is Free tier without a commercial licence; Starter is $6/mo billed monthly ($5/mo annual) and adds the commercial licence. · by dan scutaru
better: Instant cloning and the commercial licence on the $5 plan, with more characters than ElevenLabs gives you for $6. Built for real-time voice agents, with its own transcription model and agent platform.
you give up: 44 languages instead of 70-plus. Emotion tags work in English only and are labelled beta.
better: More minutes for less: up to 200 a month for $15, against about 121 for $22 at ElevenLabs. Direction is free text in square brackets, not a fixed tag list. Even the free plan clones.
you give up: Commercial rights cover paid plans and voices you own and have verified, not the community voices you browse. The open weights are research-licensed.
better: A real production TTS API with instant cloning from a 10 to 30 second sample, billed per character. Different product from the reader app at speechify.com, which is what most comparison lists confuse it with.
you give up: English on its newest model and six other languages on the older one. The consumer brand makes the docs harder to find than they should be.
better: MIT licensed. Zero-shot cloning from a reference clip across 23 languages, and you can ship what it makes. With Qwen3-TTS, it is the open pick for commercial cloning.
you give up: The laugh and cough tags exist only in the English models, Turbo and Nano. It watermarks its own output by design, which matters if you care about detectability downstream.
better: Apache 2.0 and only 82 million parameters, so it is cheap to run, and its model card says it already sits behind commercial APIs. Good enough for narration and the cleanest licence in the field.
you give up: No voice cloning at all. Eight languages. And the repo has had no code activity since August 2025, so treat it as stable rather than maintained.
better: Fast and fully local, with voices in about forty languages, and the repo was still getting commits in October. It is what Home Assistant uses for local voice.
you give up: Intelligible, not expressive. No zero-shot cloning, only training a voice from scratch. The engine is GPL, the docs say personal use and research, and the foundation behind it is asking for new maintainers.
better: A documented consent and approval process with a recorded statement from the voice talent. That paper trail is the entire reason to choose it for a brand voice.
you give up: Still gated behind an access request. Microsoft's own guide puts a reasonable voice at about 300 studio-recorded utterances. This is voice-talent production, not a ten-second clone.
better: Every voice is built from licensed recordings of professional voice actors who are paid royalties on each use, and paid plans carry full commercial rights. That is the paper trail a brand team asks for, without recording anyone yourself.
you give up: Self-serve plans cover English voices only. Starter is $19 a month for 20 download minutes, and the pricing page lists no voice cloning on any self-serve plan.
better: Thirteen built-in voices on an API bill you probably already have, and gpt-4o-mini-tts takes plain-language instructions on how to say a line. Custom voices exist, via a consent script the actor must read verbatim.
you give up: Custom voices are for eligible customers through sales, capped at 20 per organisation. You are required to tell listeners the voice is AI-generated.
Competitor lists mix up four businesses. For voiceovers and cloning on a subscription, the fastest-growing is Fish Audio: US searches for it went from about ten thousand a month to a quarter of a million in a year. For real-time voice agents over an API, Cartesia. For a voice on an API bill you already pay, OpenAI. For listening to documents rather than making audio, Speechify's reader app, which ElevenLabs answers with ElevenReader.
One name to cross off: Hume, whose Octave voice was on this page last month, ends access to its text to speech API on 13 November and deletes account data after that.
Every hosted free tier has ElevenLabs' rule: personal use only. ElevenLabs gives you about 10 minutes a month with no cloning. Fish Audio gives up to about 7 minutes and does include cloning, but its terms limit free users to non-commercial use. Cartesia gives 20,000 characters, with the commercial licence starting on the $5 plan.
Free and sellable means running a model yourself. Kokoro is Apache 2.0, with no cloning. Qwen3-TTS is Apache 2.0 and clones from a 3-second clip in 10 languages. Chatterbox is MIT and clones in 23. "Free unlimited" only ever means your own hardware.
Fish Audio is cheaper per minute. Plus is $15 a month, or $11 billed yearly, for up to 200 minutes. ElevenLabs gives about 121 minutes on its $22 Creator plan. Fish Audio's newer models also take free-text direction in square brackets, such as [warm and happy], in all 13 of its languages.
What you give up is certainty about the voice. Fish Audio's FAQ says paid users can use "verified voices (that you own)" commercially, which leaves out the community voices you browse. Its open S2 weights carry a research licence, so selling what they make needs a separate written deal with Fish Audio.
Cartesia gives you more speech per dollar. Its $5 Pro plan has 100,000 characters a month with instant cloning and a commercial licence. ElevenLabs' $6 Starter has 30,000 credits, which is 30,000 characters on its main models. That is about four times as much per dollar at the entry tier.
ElevenLabs answers with range: 70-plus languages against Cartesia's 44, and professional cloning from the $22 Creator plan instead of Cartesia's $49 Startup plan. Cartesia's emotion tags are English only and still in beta.
Yes, with 10,000 credits a month, about 10 minutes of speech, for non-commercial use only and without voice cloning. The commercial licence and instant cloning start on the $6 Starter plan. The full answer →
Yes. The $0 plan has 8,000 credits a month, which Fish Audio puts at up to 7 minutes, and it includes voice cloning. The terms limit free users to personal, non-commercial use, so anything you publish for money needs a paid plan, from $15 a month.
They mostly do different jobs. Speechify's main product is a reader app, $29 a month for Premium, that reads your pages and PDFs aloud. The part that competes with ElevenLabs is the developer API at speechify.ai, which covers English plus six languages against ElevenLabs' 70-plus.
Yes, and three of them allow commercial use: Chatterbox (MIT), Qwen3-TTS (Apache 2.0) and Kokoro (Apache 2.0, no cloning). Do not build a product on F5-TTS, XTTS-v2 or Fish Audio's S2 weights: their licences cover non-commercial or research use only.