ElevenLabs Alternatives 2026: 7 Picks for Voiceovers, Cloning and APIs
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ElevenLabs’ Starter plan costs $6 a month for about 30 minutes of speech, and unused credits expire when you cancel or downgrade. Here are seven alternatives sorted by job, with prices checked on 7 October 2026.
Verdict: For business voiceovers, Murf Creator costs $19 a month billed yearly for 24 hours of audio a year, with commercial rights; clones are Enterprise-only. Cartesia Pro suits developers: $5 a month for about 133 minutes. Fish Audio Plus adds a professional clone slot for $11 a month billed yearly. Stay with ElevenLabs for 74 languages and $6 instant cloning.
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Why people look for an ElevenLabs alternative
The platform sells one pool of credits for speech, dubbing, music and sound effects. In its web app, 1 character of text costs 1 credit, and a minute of speech takes about 1,000 characters.
Prices checked on 7 October 2026, in US dollars before tax. Yearly prices come from the pricing page’s FAQ: you pay for 10 months and get 12.
| Plan | Monthly | Billed yearly, per month | Credits a month | About minutes of speech |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | – | 10,000 | 10 |
| Starter | $6 ($1 first-month offer ended 18 October) | $5 | 30,000 | 30 |
| Creator | $22 ($11 first month; no end date shown) | $18.33 | 121,000 | 121 |
| Pro | $99 | $82.50 | 600,000 | 600 |
| Scale | $299 | $249.17 | 1,800,000 | 1,800 |
| Business | $990 | $825 | 6,000,000 | 6,000 |
The points below come from the vendor’s own pages and its Trustpilot profile, read on 7 October 2026.
- Rollover limits. Unused credits roll over for up to two months while a paid plan stays active, so the balance can reach three times the monthly quota. After a cancellation or downgrade, the help center says “any unused paid credits will expire” at the end of the cycle.
- Steps between plans. After Creator at $22 comes Pro at $99. An extra minute costs about $0.20 on Starter and $0.17 from Pro up.
- April 2026 price change. Between 8 and 15 April, Starter rose from $5 to $6 and Business fell from $1,320 to $990 with 6 million credits instead of 11 million, while Creator went from 100,000 to 121,000 credits and Pro from 500,000 to 600,000 at the same prices. Both October offers have ended: the $1 first month on Starter ran until 18 October and the 3x-credits launch bonus on Creator and above until 12 October; on 21 October 2026 the pricing page showed Starter at $6 and only Creator’s 50% first-month discount.
- Refund conditions. The help center allows a refund within 14 days of payment if no credits were used. Outside the EEA, Switzerland and the UK, the terms (dated 31 March 2026) say fees already paid aren’t refunded when you cancel early; consumers inside them can withdraw within 14 days. Plans renew automatically.
- Divided reviews. Trustpilot showed 3.1 out of 5 from 1,175 reviews on 7 October 2026 (48% five-star, 38% one-star). One-star reviews from September 2026 describe credits lost after cancelling, an annual charge after an attempted downgrade and a renewal date that couldn’t be moved.
- Cloning rules. A professional clone needs at least 30 minutes of audio and a voice check, and “Even with their consent, you cannot clone someone else’s voice.” For a client’s voice, only an instant clone is allowed.
- Data use. By default, some customer data trains the company’s models; a toggle called “Improve the models for everyone” stops this for new data. Enterprise data is excluded by default.
Prices, minutes and rights side by side
No single best AI voice generator fits every job. Our seven picks are six apps (Murf, WellSaid, Speechify Studio, Fish Audio, Typecast and Cartesia), compared below with ElevenLabs Starter, plus the cloud APIs in the developer section. All figures were read on 7 October 2026.
| Tool and plan | Monthly | Billed yearly, per month | Audio a month | Trustpilot, 7 Oct 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ElevenLabs Starter | $6 | $5 | About 30 min | 3.1 (1,175) |
| Murf Creator | $29 (page data) | $19 | 2 hours; 24 a year on yearly | 4.6 (186) |
| WellSaid Starter | $19 | $10 | 20 downloaded min | 3.0 (23) |
| Speechify Studio Starter | No monthly price listed | $8.33 ($100 a year) | 7,200 credits (86,400 a year) | 4.7 (7,126) |
| Fish Audio Plus | $15 | $11 | Up to 200 min | 2.2 (31) |
| Typecast Basic | $5 | $4.50 ($54 a year) | About 35 min | 3.2 (1 review) |
| Cartesia Pro | $5 | Not listed | About 133 min | No reviews |
| Tool | Voice cloning | Languages | Free plan: commercial use | Refunds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ElevenLabs | Instant from Starter; professional (own voice) from Creator | 74 on v3; 90+ on v4 | No; attribution required | 14 days, no credits used |
| Murf | Enterprise only, written consent | 35+ (home page); 33 (help center) | No; no downloads | 24 hours, under 10 min used |
| WellSaid | Not on the pricing page | English on self-serve plans | No (trial) | Not on pricing page |
| Speechify Studio | From Starter | About 20 | No | Not on pricing page |
| Fish Audio | 15-second sample; 1 professional slot on Plus | 30+ | Conflicting: card lists “Commercial use”, FAQ says personal only | 7 days, from Pro up |
| Typecast | Instant from Basic; professional from Plus | 35+ | No; attribution required | Not on pricing page |
| Cartesia | Instant from Pro; professional from Startup ($49) | 44 | No; license from Pro | Not on pricing page |
Murf’s monthly prices come from the plan data its pricing page loads; the page showed yearly prices when we checked. Speechify and Typecast per-month figures are yearly prices divided by 12. Speechify’s Trustpilot score covers the whole company, whose main product is a reading app.
Per minute, the order changes. On monthly billing, Cartesia Pro works out to about $0.04, Fish Audio Plus $0.075 if you use all 200 minutes, and Typecast Basic $0.14. ElevenLabs Starter costs $0.20 a minute, Murf Creator $0.24 and WellSaid Starter $0.95 per downloaded minute. Billed yearly, Fish Audio falls to about $0.055, Typecast to $0.13, Murf to $0.16, ElevenLabs Starter to $0.17 and WellSaid to $0.50. Our calculations from plan prices and stated minutes.
Two former alternatives have shut down. Meta bought Play AI, the company behind Play.ht, in July 2025; the Internet Archive shows play.ht working on 24 December 2025 and reading “We have shut down the service” on 6 January 2026. Lovo, Inc. filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy on 27 May 2026, and lovo.ai returned an HTTP 402 error on 7 October 2026. Murf’s 2026 alternatives page still recommends both; see what happened to Lovo AI.
Alternatives for business voiceovers: Murf and WellSaid
For training videos, slides and explainers, two things set the price: finished minutes a month and the right to use them commercially. For a voice inside a presenter video, see our guide to AI avatar generators.
Murf: studio plans counted in hours
Murf, founded in October 2020 and based in San Francisco, sells a voiceover studio and a separate speech API.
- Plans: Creator costs $19 a month billed yearly ($228) for 24 hours of voice generation a year, with 100 projects, 1 editor, unlimited downloads and commercial rights. Business costs $66 a month billed yearly ($792) for 96 hours and 500 projects. The page’s plan data lists monthly billing at $29 and $99.
- Time counting: regenerating the same text with another voice, style or speed uses no generation time, and yearly plans have no monthly cap.
- Catch: refunds only within 24 hours of purchase and under 10 minutes of use. Unused hours carry over one period only while the plan renews or is paused, and are lost on cancellation or downgrade. Low-rated Trustpilot reviews from 10 March and 16 September 2026 describe unwanted renewals and lost minutes.
- Not for: cloning on a small budget, or month-to-month buyers who stop often.
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WellSaid: English narration priced by downloads
WellSaid, now at wellsaid.io, targets corporate training, marketing and HR. Starter costs $19 a month for 20 downloaded minutes, or $10 a month billed yearly ($120 for 240 minutes). Generation is unlimited on paid plans; only downloads count.
- Voices and rights: 280+ voices from licensed recordings of real actors, commercial rights from Starter, and English voices only below Enterprise.
- Data: the pricing page says “Customer data and content are never used to train our AI models.”
- Catch: Trustpilot showed 3.0 from 23 reviews on 7 October 2026, 70% one-star. A one-star review from 22 December 2025 says popular voices moved to dearer plans; a five-star one from 21 May 2026 praises its training videos.
Synthesys and Listnr
Synthesys now leads with a video agent. Its pricing page lists AI voiceover and music as “Never costs credits” on every plan, from $29 a month or $20 billed yearly, and refunds apply within 3 days if no more than 25% of credits were used. Its voice page claims 400+ voices in 140+ languages.
Listnr charges $19 a month or $190 a year for about 2 hours of audio a month, with commercial rights on paid plans only. Its FAQ says “We generally do not refund partial months or used quota”.
Alternatives for voice cloning: plans and consent
The best AI voice cloning tool depends on whose voice you need. The vendors below differ in plan, sample length and consent paperwork.
| Tool | Clone type and plan | Consent rule |
|---|---|---|
| ElevenLabs | Instant from Starter ($6); professional from Creator ($22) | Instant: confirm right and consent. Professional: own voice only, verified |
| Murf | Enterprise add-on; 1–2 hours of studio audio | Explicit written consent of the speaker |
| Fish Audio | 15-second sample; professional slot from Plus | Commercial use only for verified voices you own |
| Typecast | Instant from Basic ($5); professional from Plus ($19) | Not stated on the pricing page |
| Cartesia | Instant from Pro ($5); professional from Startup ($49) | Only voices you have the right to clone |
| Google Cloud | Instant custom voice, allow-listed customers | Recorded consent statement by the voice owner |
| Microsoft Azure | Personal voice, approved customers | Recorded consent from each speaker |
Typecast Basic and Cartesia Pro both include a commercial license and instant cloning for $5 a month. Typecast’s plan costs $54 paid yearly, covers about 35 minutes a month and spends credits only on downloads. Its pricing page adds that companies, institutions and agencies “should use the Business plan”, at $69 a month for about 250 minutes.
Fish Audio vs ElevenLabs: price, cloning and reviews
Fish Audio Plus costs $15 a month, or $11 billed yearly ($132), for up to 200 minutes and one professional voice slot. These are US-dollar list prices; from the EU on 7 October the page showed euro prices and a limited-time 50% off yearly billing. The cheapest ElevenLabs plan with a professional clone, Creator, costs $22 for about 121 minutes. Fish clones from a 15-second sample and supports 30+ languages; SiliconANGLE reported a $52 million seed round in July 2026.
- Catch: credits don’t roll over; the free plan’s card lists “Commercial use”, while the FAQ limits free users to “personal, non-commercial projects”; and a 7-day money-back guarantee is listed from Pro ($75 a month billed yearly, or $100 monthly) up, not on Plus.
- Reviews: Trustpilot showed 2.2 from 31 reviews on 7 October 2026, 71% one-star. One-star reviews from 26 August and 29 September 2026 describe a yearly charge on a monthly plan and poor clone quality.
Resemble AI now sells deepfake detection instead: its pricing page sold voice clones on 8 July 2026 and by 5 August 2026 was titled “Deepfake Detection & AI Security Pricing” (Internet Archive), so we don’t list it.
Alternatives for developers (API): Cartesia, Murf and cloud TTS
At about 1,000 characters a minute, a million characters is roughly 1,000 minutes of speech; Cartesia counts 750–800 characters a minute.
API prices per 1 million characters in US dollars, checked on 7 October 2026. Cartesia’s figure is our calculation from its Pro plan: 100,000 credits for $5. Azure: East US list price.
| API and model | Per 1M characters | Free allowance | Custom voices |
|---|---|---|---|
| ElevenLabs v3 / Flash | $80 / $40 | 10,000 (v3) or 20,000 (Flash) characters a month | Instant from Starter |
| Murf Falcon | $10 | $10 credit a month | Enterprise only |
| Murf Gen 2 (studio quality) | $30 | Same credit | Enterprise only |
| Cartesia Sonic, Pro plan | About $50; overage $65 | 20,000 credits a month | Instant from Pro |
| OpenAI tts-1 / tts-1-hd | $15 / $30 | None listed | No cloning; built-in voices |
| Google Chirp 3: HD | $30 | 1M a month | $60 per 1M, allow-list only |
| Amazon Polly Neural | $16 | 1M a month for 12 months | Brand Voice project |
| Azure Neural | $15 | 0.5M a month | Personal voice for approved customers; custom voice $24 per 1M plus training |
Cartesia: $5 entry and on-premise options
Cartesia Pro costs $5 a month for about 133 minutes, with a commercial license and instant cloning from 10 seconds of audio; Startup ($49) adds two professional clone slots. Sonic covers 44 languages and can run on-premise or in your own cloud account. After a cancellation or downgrade, its FAQ says “You will keep the credits in your account until you use them”.
Is Cartesia better than ElevenLabs?
In a Cartesia vs ElevenLabs choice, the entry plans differ by $1 and about 100 minutes: $5 for roughly 133 minutes against $6 for 30. On languages, Sonic’s 44 compare with 74 on v3 and 90+ on v4.
On quality, each side claims the win. Cartesia’s comparison page, read on 7 October 2026, says Sonic 3.6 “outscores every ElevenLabs model on quality benchmarks”. ElevenLabs’ v4 launch post says about 75% of listeners preferred v4 in blind tests against four rival models, Sonic 3.6 among them, measured in September 2026. We haven’t run listening tests, so we don’t pick a winner on sound.
Murf API: Falcon at $0.01 per 1,000 characters
Murf’s API is billed per use: $0.01 per 1,000 characters on Falcon, its fast conversational model, and $0.03 on its studio-quality model, with a free allowance shown as “$10 FREE, every month”.
Murf’s Falcon page, read on 7 October 2026, says its Falcon 2 model returns first audio in under 100 ms and ranks above ElevenLabs Flash v2.5 and Turbo v2.5 for naturalness on the Artificial Analysis Speech Arena. That is the vendor’s claim. Its pricing card says purchased credit never expires, while its product terms say credits expire after a year.
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OpenAI, Google, Amazon and Microsoft
The four cloud providers sell speech through APIs, mostly per character; OpenAI’s newer gpt-4o-mini-tts is billed per token, has 11 built-in voices and no cloning, and OpenAI’s policies require telling listeners the voice is AI-generated.
Reading aloud: Speechify and NaturalReader
For reading documents aloud rather than voiceovers, ElevenLabs’ own app is ElevenReader, whose audio is for personal listening in the app only, with no export or commercial use.
- Speechify: the reader’s Premium plan costs $29 a month or $139 a year, with 1,000+ voices and 60+ languages. Voiceovers need Speechify Studio, a separate subscription: Starter costs $100 a year and includes voice cloning, commercial rights and about 20 languages. Trustpilot on 7 October 2026: 4.7 from 7,126 reviews, the highest score in this guide.
- NaturalReader: Lite costs $13.90 a month or $79 a year for 1 million MP3 characters a month in Lite voices. Its audio is “licensed for personal use only”; the commercial AI Voice Generator is a separate product whose prices didn’t load for us. Trustpilot on 7 October 2026: 1.5 from 58 reviews, 84% one-star.
For voiceovers, ElevenLabs vs Speechify comes down to billing. Speechify Studio lists yearly prices only, $100 for 86,400 credits; ElevenLabs Starter costs $60 a year or $6 a month.
Free ElevenLabs alternatives and open-source options
Is there a free version of ElevenLabs?
Yes. The Free plan gives 10,000 credits a month, about 10 minutes of speech, and 3 Studio projects. It “does not include a commercial license”, published content must credit “elevenlabs.io” or “11.ai” in its title, and unused credits don’t roll over. Other free plans compare as follows.
| Free plan | Audio | Commercial use | Other limits |
|---|---|---|---|
| ElevenLabs Free | About 10 min a month | No; attribution required | No rollover; dubs watermarked |
| Murf Free | 10 min in total | No | No downloads |
| WellSaid trial | 3 downloaded min a month | No | Only downloads count |
| Fish Audio Free | Up to 7 min a month | Conflicting: card lists “Commercial use”, FAQ says personal only | 500 characters per generation |
| Cartesia Free | About 27 min a month | No; license from Pro | 2 parallel requests |
| Typecast Free | About 5 min in total | No; attribution required | Trial voices only, 16 kHz; video watermarked |
| Speechify Studio Free | 600 credits | No | No MP3 download |
| Listnr Free | 1,000 credits to start | Paid plans only | Limited downloads |
Cloud APIs have larger free tiers; see the developer table above.
Open-source models and MiniMax: what we could verify
Two open models appear in our sources. Fish Audio’s Fish Speech has 33,000 GitHub stars, but its code and weights are “released under FISH AUDIO RESEARCH LICENSE”, a custom license rather than a standard open-source one; read it before commercial use. In October 2025, Resemble AI’s pricing page advertised “Chatterbox Open Source, Free Voice Cloning AI Model”; we didn’t check its current license.
We didn’t verify other self-hosted models. As for MiniMax or ElevenLabs, we have no sourced facts on MiniMax’s voice plans, prices or terms: not verified by us, so we don’t compare them.
When to stay with ElevenLabs
These facts from the vendor’s pages and Trustpilot favour staying.
- Languages: 74 on the v3 model and 90+ on v4, launched on 28 September 2026; automatic dubbing covers 90+ languages.
- Cloning from $6: instant clones on Starter with a commercial license, and a professional clone of your own voice from Creator. Content made during a paid plan stays commercially usable after you cancel.
- One balance for many jobs: speech, dubbing, music, sound effects and transcription draw on the same credits.
- Safety rules: clones of prominent public figures are blocked, professional clones need voice verification, and businesses running AI agents must tell users they are talking to AI.
- Lower API prices: on 7 May 2026, text-to-speech API prices dropped by up to 55% and pay-as-you-go top-ups started; the v4 launch price of $0.022 per 1,000 characters ran until 12 October; on 14 October 2026 the API page listed v4 at $0.08 again.
- Praise on record: five-star Trustpilot reviews from 21, 22 and 24 September 2026 cite natural voices, a reliable API and features that work as advertised. Murf’s own comparison page, dated 2025, scores the platform 7.5 for emotion against its own 6.5.
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How we picked and checked
We started from Google’s results for “ElevenLabs alternatives” on 7 October 2026. The top 10 were vendor blogs, including Ringly, Cekura, Resemble and WellSaid, plus Reddit and YouTube. We kept tools with public self-serve prices for a business job.
The cloud APIs of OpenAI, Google, Amazon and Microsoft count as one pick; Synthesys, Listnr and NaturalReader appear as context.
On 7 October 2026 we read each vendor’s pricing page and Trustpilot profile, plus, where we found them, the terms and help-center articles on refunds, cloning and data. We have no paid accounts with these tools, so there are no audio samples and no output-quality score; see our review method.
We may earn commissions through the Murf and ElevenLabs links; no other tool here pays us. Other sources: pricing pages of WellSaid, Speechify Studio, Fish Audio, Typecast, Cartesia, Synthesys and Listnr. Also NaturalReader’s plan article and the OpenAI, Google Cloud, Amazon Polly and Azure price lists.
FAQ
It depends on volume and rights. Murf Creator gives 24 hours of audio a year for $19 a month billed yearly, with commercial rights. WellSaid Starter suits short English clips at $10 a month billed yearly for 240 downloaded minutes a year. We haven’t scored output quality.
For commercial publishing, the free plans here don’t fit: each excludes commercial use or requires attribution, and Fish Audio’s card and FAQ disagree. Open models such as Fish Speech carry their own license and need your own hosting. Paid APIs cost $4 per million characters for Google’s or Amazon’s standard voices, $10 for Murf Falcon, and $15–16 for Azure Neural, OpenAI’s tts-1 and Polly Neural.
It depends on whose voice it is. To clone your own voice on a budget, Fish Audio Plus includes a professional slot for $11 a month billed yearly. For a client’s voice with written consent, Murf builds clones on Enterprise. Instant clones start at $5 a month on Cartesia Pro or Typecast Basic, though Typecast asks companies to use its $69 Business plan. We haven’t compared clone quality.
Few, and with conditions. Murf accepts refund requests within 24 hours of purchase if under 10 minutes were used, Synthesys within 3 days if no more than 25% of credits were used, and Fish Audio within 7 days from its Pro plan up. Listnr generally doesn’t refund partial months; WellSaid, Typecast, Cartesia and Speechify list no refund terms on their pricing pages.
Among the entry plans here, billed monthly, Cartesia Pro: about $0.04 a minute, or $5 for roughly 133 minutes. Fish Audio Plus follows at $0.075 and Typecast Basic at $0.14. Pay-per-use APIs cost less per minute: Murf Falcon is $0.01 per 1,000 characters, about a cent a minute, and Google’s and Amazon’s standard voices $4 per million characters.