10 Best ElevenLabs Alternatives in 2026 (Free & Paid)

ElevenLabs makes some of the most realistic AI voices you can buy. But it tries to do everything (voiceovers, voice agents, dubbing, music, audiobooks), and its credits run out fast on anything long.

The best ElevenLabs alternatives in 2026 are Audiobook Generator for audiobooks, Fish Audio for voice cloning, Speechify for listening, Cartesia for real-time apps and Murf for business voiceovers. NaturalReader is the best free option for listening, and Chatterbox is the best open-source one.

We checked every tool’s own pricing pages and help docs in October 2026, and labelled each one by what it does best. AI voice prices change often, so check the current price before you sign up.

Quick picks

• Best for audiobooks: Audiobook Generator
• Best for voice cloning: Fish Audio
• Best free option: NaturalReader for listening, Chatterbox for making audio files
• Best open source: Chatterbox

Prices are monthly billing in US dollars, from each company’s own pages in October 2026.

Why people look for ElevenLabs alternatives

ElevenLabs is good at a lot of things. People usually leave for one of these reasons:

• The price of long audio. Credits are counted per character. A 90,000-word novel is about 550,000 characters, most of a $99 Pro month in one pass.
• Audio quality is tied to the plan. Its Studio, where audiobooks are made, exports 128 kbps MP3 on Free, Starter and Creator. You need Pro ($99 a month) for the 192 kbps most audiobook stores ask for.
• The free plan is limited. 10,000 credits a month (about 10 minutes), for personal use only, with “elevenlabs.io” in the title of anything you publish.
• It’s built for everything. Voice agents, dubbing and music sit beside audiobooks, and the book workflow is one corner of a big product.
• Running it yourself. Some people want an open model on their own computer, with no monthly bill.

Here are ElevenLabs’ plans, for comparison:

1. Audiobook Generator — best for audiobooks

Audiobook Generator is the best ElevenLabs alternative for audiobooks because it turns a whole manuscript into a finished, chaptered audiobook ready for the stores, instead of a pile of audio clips you put together yourself.

Where ElevenLabs is a general voice studio with a book workflow added, Audiobook Generator is built for one job, making books. And you can pay by the book instead of by the month.

Key features:

• Upload your book as it is. Word, EPUB, PDF, plain text or Markdown. Chapters are found for you, and the copyright page, contents and footnote marks are left out.
• A voice for every character. Each line of dialogue is matched to who says it, so a character keeps their voice from the first chapter to the last. Or keep it to one narrator.
• Pronunciation lists. Add a name once and every chapter says it your way. Read one sentence again without redoing the chapter. (Our guide to fixing AI mispronunciations shows how.)
• Files ready for the stores. MP3 per chapter mastered to 192 kbps, an M4B with chapter marks, a square cover and opening and closing credits.
• 252 voices in 42 languages, and on Pro your own voice, made from about two minutes of reading.

Pricing: Free gives you 30 credits, enough to hear your first chapter in the app. Paid plans start at $19 a month (Starter, about 2.5 hours of audio), or buy credits once: the One book pack is $79 for about 11 hours in Standard quality, enough for most 90,000-word novels, with downloads included and no subscription. See pricing.

Limitations: It only makes audiobooks. There’s no API, no voiceovers for video and no music or sound effects. Downloads need a paid plan or a pack.

Best for: authors and small publishers who want a finished audiobook, not a set of clips.

2. Fish Audio — best for voice cloning and expressive voices

Fish Audio is the best ElevenLabs alternative for voice cloning: it clones a voice from as little as 10 seconds of audio on every plan, including the free one, and costs less than ElevenLabs at most levels.

Fish Audio is the most searched-for ElevenLabs rival, and it competes head-on on voice quality. Its newest model, Drama 3 (October 2026), takes emotion directions in brackets, like [whispers] or [laughing nervously], and its library has over 2 million community voices.

Key features:

• Voice cloning on every plan, from 10 seconds of audio (it recommends a few clips of 15 to 20 seconds).
• 83 languages on its latest models.
• Over 2 million voices made by its community.
• Story Studio, a long-form editor for audiobooks and stories.
• An API from $15 per million bytes of text (about a million characters in English).

Pricing: Free gives 8,000 credits a month, up to 500 characters at a time. Plus is $15 a month at list price for 250,000 credits (about 200 minutes), and Pro is $100. Both were cheaper during its Drama 3 launch offer, which ends 12 November 2026.

Limitations: The free plan is for personal use only (the FAQ says so, even though the plan card says otherwise), and its own pages disagree in places, so read the current terms before you publish anything.

Best for: creators who want to clone a voice, or need emotional, characterful delivery on a budget.

3. Speechify — best for listening to documents and articles

Speechify is the best ElevenLabs alternative if you want to listen to text rather than produce audio: it reads documents, web pages, PDFs and scanned pages aloud on your phone, computer and browser.

Speechify is three separate products, each with its own price. The reader app is the famous one. Speechify Studio makes voiceovers you can download, and the Speechify API is for developers.

Key features:

• 1,000+ voices in 60+ languages in the reader app, read at up to 5x speed.
• Scan & Listen reads photos of printed pages, and it works across phone, desktop and a Chrome extension.
• The API starts free, with 500,000 characters a month and commercial use, then $10 a month.
• Studio adds voiceovers and dubbing for video.

Pricing: The reader app is free with 10 basic voices. Premium is $29 a month, or $139 a year. Studio is billed yearly, from $100 a year with commercial rights.

Limitations: The reader app doesn’t make audio files. Studio has no voice cloning, and its free plan has no commercial rights. Neither has tools for long books.

Best for: students, busy professionals and anyone who reads more than they have time for.

4. Cartesia — best for developers who need low latency

Cartesia is the best ElevenLabs alternative for real-time apps: its Sonic 3.6 model starts speaking in under 90 milliseconds, fast enough for live conversation.

Cartesia is built for developers making voice agents, phone bots and games, where any delay is noticeable. It doesn’t try to be a studio.

Key features:

• First audio in under 90 milliseconds.
• 44 languages.
• Instant voice cloning from about 10 seconds of audio, from $5 a month.
• Emotion read from the text, with tags like [laughter].

Pricing: Free gives 20,000 credits (about 27 minutes), without a commercial licence. Pro is $5 a month for 100,000 credits with commercial use, and Startup is $49 for 1.25 million.

Limitations: It’s an API. There’s no editor for long-form audio, and the free plan has no commercial use or cloning.

Best for: developers building voice agents and real-time apps.

5. Murf — best for business voiceovers and presentations

Murf is the best ElevenLabs alternative for business voiceovers, with a studio built for training videos, presentations and ads, and plugins for PowerPoint, Google Slides and Canva.

Murf’s editor works block by block, so you can change the pitch, speed, pauses and emphasis of each line. That suits a 3-minute explainer more than a 10-hour book.

Key features:

• 200+ voices in 30+ languages.
• Per-line control of pitch, speed, pauses and emphasis.
• Plugins for PowerPoint and Google Slides (Business plan), plus Canva.
• A fast API, Falcon, at $10 per million characters.
• AI dubbing into other languages.

Pricing: Free gives 10 minutes in total, with no downloads or commercial use. Creator is $29 a month (2 hours of audio a month), and Business is $99 (8 hours).

Limitations: Voice cloning is Enterprise only. At 2 hours a month, Creator would take about 5 months to narrate a 10-hour book.

Best for: teams making training videos, product demos and presentations.

6. OpenAI — best for directing a voice with plain-English prompts

OpenAI’s text-to-speech is the best ElevenLabs alternative for developers who want to direct a voice in plain English, such as “calm, slow, like a bedtime story”, through a simple, inexpensive API.

OpenAI has 13 built-in voices. Its gpt-4o-mini-tts model takes written instructions for accent, tone, speed and emotion, which you can try on its demo site, OpenAI.fm.

Key features:

• Delivery directed by written instructions.
• 13 voices (it recommends Marin and Cedar for the best quality).
• Output as MP3, WAV, FLAC and other formats, streamed as it’s made.

Pricing: No free API tier. tts-1 costs $15 per million characters, tts-1-hd $30, and gpt-4o-mini-tts is charged per token.

Limitations: OpenAI has deprecated all three text-to-speech models: they stop working on 6 January 2027. The replacement runs on a different API (Realtime), so code written today will need changing. The voices are tuned for English, and custom voices are for approved customers only. Our guide to whether ChatGPT can make audiobooks covers OpenAI for books.

Best for: developers prototyping voice features who are happy to switch APIs next year.

7. Google Cloud or Amazon Polly — best for large-scale projects

Google Cloud Text-to-Speech and Amazon Polly are the best ElevenLabs alternatives for large volumes: both charge from $4 per million characters, with no monthly plan, and run at any scale.

These are developer services from the two biggest cloud companies. You pay only for the characters you convert.

Which to choose:

• Google Cloud for quality and languages: 380+ voices in 75+ languages. Its Chirp 3 HD voices cost $30 per million characters, with 1 million free each month, and its Gemini voices can be directed with prompts.
• Amazon Polly for the lowest price and long narration: Standard voices cost $4 per million characters, and its long-form voices ($100 per million) are made for reading at length, though there are only six of them (US English and Spain Spanish).

Pricing: Pay as you go. Google gives new customers up to $300 in credits, and AWS gives new accounts up to $200.

Limitations: Both need a cloud account and some code. There’s no editor, books have to be split into small pieces, and custom voices are only for approved customers.

Best for: apps, websites and businesses converting a lot of text.

8. Descript — best for editing audio like a doc

Descript is the best ElevenLabs alternative for editing recordings: you edit audio and video by editing the transcript, and its AI voices can fix or add a line in your own cloned voice.

Descript is a video and podcast editor first. Deleting a word in the transcript deletes it from the recording, and its AI Speech (once called Overdub) generates new lines in a stock voice or a clone of yours.

Key features:

• Edit audio and video by editing text.
• A clone of your own voice, from the Hobbyist plan.
• Studio Sound cleans up background noise and echo.
• Dubbing into 30 languages.

Pricing: Free includes 60 media minutes a month and up to 5 minutes of AI speech. Hobbyist is $24 a month, and Creator is $35.

Limitations: It isn’t built for long text to speech. AI speech uses AI credits, and Descript doesn’t say how many a minute takes. Cloned voices are based on US English, so accents may not carry over.

Best for: podcasters and video creators fixing and polishing recordings.

9. NaturalReader — best free option

NaturalReader is the best free ElevenLabs alternative for listening: its free plan reads documents aloud with unlimited free voices and 20,000 characters a day of its better voices, with no card needed.

NaturalReader has been around for years and is a favourite for reading documents, PDFs and web pages aloud. Like Speechify, it’s two products: a personal reader, and a separate commercial voice generator.

Key features:

• Reads documents, PDFs, web pages and photos of text.
• Works on the web, phone and as a Chrome extension.
• A pronunciation editor.
• The commercial plans include voices from ElevenLabs, OpenAI, Google and Microsoft in one place.

Pricing: The personal plan is free to listen. Paid personal plans start at $13.90 a month. Commercial plans, which let you publish the audio, start at $29 a month.

Limitations: The free plan can’t save MP3s, and audio from the personal plans is for personal use only. To publish anything you need a commercial plan, where ElevenLabs voices use your credits 10 to 20 times faster.

Best for: anyone who wants to listen to text for free.

10. Chatterbox — best open-source option

Chatterbox, from Resemble AI, is the best open-source ElevenLabs alternative: it’s free, released under the MIT licence so you can use it commercially, and clones a voice from a short clip.

Open models run on your own computer, so there’s no monthly bill and no character limit. The catch is setup: you need some Python and, for the larger models, a decent graphics card.

Key features:

• Free for commercial use (MIT licence).
• Voice cloning from a clip of about 10 seconds.
• An “exaggeration” setting for more dramatic delivery.
• 23 languages in its multilingual version, and a small Nano version that runs on a normal computer’s processor.

Pricing: Free. Try it in your browser on Hugging Face, or install it from GitHub.

Limitations: You set it up and run it yourself, there are no tools for long books, and every file carries Resemble’s inaudible watermark.

Other open models: Kokoro is tiny, fast and Apache-licensed (also fine for commercial use) but can’t clone voices. Fish Audio’s open models are free only for research, or for businesses under $500,000 a year in revenue.

Best for: developers and tinkerers who want no monthly bill.

Also worth a look

• MiniMax Audio: expressive voices and cloning, from $5 a month with commercial rights. Its free plan is for personal use, with credit to MiniMax.
• WellSaid: polished English voices for corporate training, from $19 a month.
• Play.ht: Meta bought PlayAI in July 2025, and Play.ht has since shut down.
• Hume Octave: Hume is ending its text-to-speech service on 13 November 2026.

How to choose the right alternative

Start with what you’re making:

Then check three things before you pay:

1. Can you use the audio commercially? Most free plans say no.
2. Can you download it, and at what quality? Audiobook stores ask for 192 kbps MP3 or better.
3. What does a whole project cost? Work out your character count (about six characters a word) and compare it with each plan’s allowance. Our guide to how much it costs to make an audiobook has the numbers for books.

FAQ

Is ElevenLabs free?

Yes, ElevenLabs has a free plan with 10,000 credits a month, about 10 minutes of speech. It’s for personal use only: you can’t use the audio commercially, and anything you publish must credit “elevenlabs.io” in its title. Commercial use starts with Starter at $6 a month.

Is there a free version of ElevenLabs?

The Free plan is the free version. It includes text to speech, sound effects and speech to text, and its newest model, Eleven v4. It doesn’t include voice cloning (from $6 a month) or 192 kbps Studio exports (from $99 a month).

What is the best free ElevenLabs alternative?

For listening, NaturalReader: its free plan reads documents aloud with unlimited free voices. For making audio you can use commercially, Chatterbox, which is open source under the MIT licence. Developers also get 1 million free Chirp 3 HD characters a month from Google Cloud.

What is the best open-source ElevenLabs alternative?

Chatterbox, from Resemble AI. It’s MIT-licensed, so you can use it commercially, clones voices from a short clip and runs on your own computer. Kokoro is a smaller Apache-licensed option without cloning.

What is the best ElevenLabs alternative for audiobooks?

Audiobook Generator. It’s built for books: it finds the chapters, gives every character a voice, keeps a pronunciation list for the whole book and exports MP3s and an M4B ready for the stores, from $79 a book.

Is ElevenLabs worth the price?

For voice quality and range, yes: it’s among the best. It costs most on long projects, because the 192 kbps exports audiobooks need start at $99 a month. If you only need one part of it, a tool built for that job is often cheaper.

What happened to Play.ht?

Meta bought PlayAI, the company behind Play.ht, in July 2025, and the service has since shut down. If you used it, any of the paid tools above will replace it. Fish Audio and Cartesia are the closest for voice cloning and API use.

Ready to make your audiobook?

If you’re here because you want an audiobook, you don’t need a voice studio. Upload your manuscript, hear your first chapter free, and get files ready for the stores. We also have pages for turning an EPUB, PDF or Word document into an audiobook.