Best ElevenLabs Alternatives 2026: 7 Voice Tools, Prices Checked

Speechify Studio prices voiceover by the second: 1 credit buys 1 second of new speech. Starter’s 86,400 credits a year come to 24 hours of voiceover, about $4.17 per hour. Creator’s 345,600 credits come to 96 hours, about $3.13 per hour. That is roughly a third of what the same hour costs on ElevenLabs Creator.

Re-exporting audio you already generated costs nothing, and only new generations use credits. Volume changes are free too; pitch, speed and emotion changes are regenerated and do cost credits.

Dubbing costs 3 credits per second and avatars cost 30 per second, so the “24 hours” shrinks fast if you go beyond plain voiceover. Paid Studio plans are annual-only on the pricing page. And Studio is a separate subscription from the $29/month Speechify reader app, so do not buy the wrong one.

• Free: 600 credits (10 minutes), no commercial rights
• Studio Starter: $100/year, 86,400 credits, commercial rights, stock media, voiceover, dubbing and voice changer
• Studio Creator: $300/year, 345,600 credits, everything in Starter

You produce a steady stream of voiceovers, such as YouTube narration, explainer videos or course modules, and cost per hour matters more than having the most expressive voice on the market.

Murf is built around projects rather than a raw text box, which suits people narrating course modules or slide decks. Creator is $19/month billed annually ($228/year) with 100 projects. Business is $66/month billed annually ($792/year) with 500 projects and 96 hours of voice generation a year, about $8.25 per hour.

Murf now sells its API separately on pure pay-as-you-go: $0.01 per 1,000 characters for its low-latency Falcon model and $0.03 per 1,000 for the studio-quality Gen2 model. That is $0.60 and $1.80 per hour of speech. New API accounts get $10 of free credit, and purchased credit never expires.

The low sticker prices are annual-billing rates. Check the toggle before you pay. The pay-as-you-go API allows only 5 concurrent requests, which is fine for batch narration but tight for a busy voice app.

• Free: available to try
• Creator: $19/month billed annually ($228/year), 100 projects
• Business: $66/month billed annually ($792/year), 500 projects, 96 hours/year
• API: Falcon $0.01, Gen2 $0.03 per 1,000 characters; voice changer $0.10/minute; translation $0.02 per 1,000 characters

You narrate training, e-learning or presentation content on a regular schedule and want a project-based editor rather than a credit meter.

WellSaid meters what you download, not what you generate. Generation is unlimited on paid plans, so you can redo a line ten times without paying for nine wasted takes. On ElevenLabs, every regeneration that is not flagged as free spends credits.

Its plans include full commercial rights, caption files and controls for tone, pitch and emotion. The $33 tier adds Adobe Express integration and up to 48 kHz audio; the Business tier adds a team workspace and Adobe Premiere Pro integration.

WellSaid is the most expensive tool here per finished hour on its smaller plans. The $10 tier gives 240 minutes a year, about $30 per hour, and the $19 monthly plan gives 20 minutes a month, about $57 per hour. Individual plans include English voices only; other languages and translation are Enterprise features.

• Free: 3 download minutes/month, no commercial rights
• $10/month billed annually ($120/year): 240 minutes/year, 10 projects
• $33/month billed annually ($396/year): 2,160 minutes/year, unlimited projects
• Monthly: $19 for 20 minutes/month or $49 for 180 minutes/month
• Business: $160/user/month billed annually, 2,880 minutes/year per user, up to 5 seats

You produce English-language corporate, training or brand narration, you iterate heavily on delivery, and predictable download-based billing matters more than the lowest price.

Descript is not a standalone voice generator. It is a text-based audio and video editor with AI Speech built in. Hobbyist includes custom voice clones, stock AI speakers and Regenerate, which repairs a fumbled word in your own recording by matching the surrounding tone. If you already pay for an editor, folding voice work into Descript can replace a separate ElevenLabs subscription.

Our Descript review covers the editor itself in depth.

AI features draw from a monthly pool of AI credits: 400 on Hobbyist, 800 on Creator. Voice work competes with Studio Sound, filler-word removal and Underlord for that pool. Descript also warns that once you hit the Regenerate limit, the output turns into “jibber jabber”. It is not built for long-form narration at volume.

• Free: 60 media minutes/month, 720p export
• Hobbyist: $16/month annual or $24 monthly; 10 media hours, 400 AI credits, AI Speech with voice clones
• Creator: $24/month annual or $35 monthly; 30 media hours, 800 AI credits, 4K export
• Business: $50/month annual or $65 monthly; 40 media hours, 1,500 AI credits, dubbing in 30+ languages

Most of your voice work is fixing or extending your own recordings inside videos and podcasts, not generating hours of narration from scratch.

Cartesia’s Pro plan costs $5 a month for 100,000 credits, including a commercial use license and instant voice cloning. Cartesia’s own table puts that at about 133 minutes of its Sonic text-to-speech, roughly $2.26 per hour. For comparison, ElevenLabs Starter is $6 for about 30 minutes.

The company is built for real-time voice agents, so the plans also include prepaid dollars for its managed agents and a speech-to-text allowance. Unused credits roll over up to twice your monthly amount.

Cartesia is a developer-first product. If you want a timeline editor with projects, music and slides, Murf or Speechify Studio fit better. Professional voice cloning starts on the $49 Startup plan (2 slots), and overage on Pro costs $65 per million credits.

• Free: 20K credits/month, no commercial license
• Pro: $5/month, 100K credits, commercial license, instant voice cloning
• Startup: $49/month, 1.25M credits, professional voice cloning
• Scale: $299/month, 8M credits, priority support

You need cloned or commercial speech on a small budget, or you are building a voice agent and care about latency and per-call cost.

If you already use the OpenAI API, adding speech is one more endpoint on the same bill. tts-1 costs $15 per million characters, about $0.90 per hour of speech, and tts-1-hd costs $30, about $1.80 per hour. The newer gpt-4o-mini-tts model is billed by tokens instead: $0.60 per million text tokens in and $12 per million audio tokens out.

There is no studio app, project editor or subscription plan here. You need to write code or use a tool that calls the API for you. If your clients need a specific cloned voice, a creator platform such as ElevenLabs, Cartesia or Descript is the more direct route.

You are a developer or technical freelancer who needs clean, cheap narration inside an app, script or automation, with no monthly commitment.

Google’s free tier is the most generous here. Chirp 3 HD voices, its current flagship, are free for the first million characters each month, about 16 hours of speech, then $30 per million. The older WaveNet and Standard voices are free up to 4 million characters a month and then cost $4 per million, about $0.24 per hour. Instant custom voices cost $60 per million characters.

You must enable billing on a Google Cloud account even to use the free tier, and you are charged automatically above it. Studio voices are the expensive exception at $160 per million characters. Like OpenAI, this is an API, not a studio.

You generate a lot of speech, such as audio versions of articles, product catalogs or app prompts, and want the lowest cost per hour with a large free allowance.