# ElevenLabs Alternatives 2027: 14 Paid, Free & Open-Source

Source: https://zekaiwork.com/alternatives/elevenlabs/
Prices checked: 2026-11-11 (Zekai Price Ledger)

The best ElevenLabs alternatives in 2027 are Fish Audio (best overall, $11/mo), Cartesia (best free plan: 20K credits a month) and Kokoro (best open source, Apache-2.0). ElevenLabs itself starts at $6/mo. Zekai checked these prices on vendor pages on 11 Nov 2026; 11 more are compared below, including 3 with a free plan and 7 open source.

| Tool | Type | Starting price | Free plan limit | Licence | Best for | Price checked | Links |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ElevenLabs (the tool being replaced) | — | $6/mo | 10k credits a month, 3 Studio projects | — | — | 2026-11-11 | [pricing](https://elevenlabs.io/pricing) |
| Fish Audio | Free plan + paid | $11/mo | 8,000 credits a month, 500 characters per generation | — | Voice cloning with a cheaper plan ladder | 2026-11-11 | [site](https://fish.audio) [pricing](https://fish.audio/plan/) [Zekai page](https://zekaiwork.com/ai-tools/fish-audio/) |
| Murf.ai | Paid | Not checked | No free plan | — | Studio voiceovers for presentations and video | 2026-11-11 | [site](https://murf.ai) [pricing](https://murf.ai/pricing) [Zekai page](https://zekaiwork.com/ai-tools/murf-ai/) |
| Speechify | Free plan + paid | $11.58/mo billed yearly | 10 robotic-sounding voices, text to speech only | — | Listening to documents and web pages | 2026-11-11 | [site](https://speechify.com) [pricing](https://speechify.com/pricing/) [Zekai page](https://zekaiwork.com/ai-tools/speechify/) |
| WellSaid Labs | Free plan + paid | $10/mo billed yearly | 3 download minutes a month, no commercial rights | — | Studio-grade voiceover for teams | 2026-11-11 | [site](https://wellsaidlabs.com) [pricing](https://www.wellsaid.io/ai-voice-pricing) [Zekai page](https://zekaiwork.com/ai-tools/wellsaid-labs/) |
| Voicemaker | Free plan + paid | $5/mo | 250 characters per conversion, limited generations | — | Low-cost text to speech with character credits | 2026-11-11 | [site](https://voicemaker.in) [pricing](https://voicemaker.in/pricing) [Zekai page](https://zekaiwork.com/ai-tools/voicemaker/) |
| Cartesia | Free plan + paid | $5/mo | 20K credits a month (about 27 minutes of text to speech) | — | Low-latency speech for voice agents | 2026-11-11 | [site](https://cartesia.ai) [pricing](https://cartesia.ai/pricing) [Zekai page](https://zekaiwork.com/ai-tools/cartesia/) |
| Kokoro | Open source | Free (self-hosted) | No limit (self-hosted) | Apache-2.0 | Small open voice model with Apache weights |  | [site](https://github.com/hexgrad/kokoro) [code](https://github.com/hexgrad/kokoro) [Zekai page](https://zekaiwork.com/free-open-source/kokoro/) |
| Piper | Open source | Free (self-hosted) | No limit (self-hosted) | GPL-3.0-or-later | Offline voices used by Home Assistant and NVDA |  | [site](https://github.com/OHF-Voice/piper1-gpl) [code](https://github.com/OHF-Voice/piper1-gpl) [Zekai page](https://zekaiwork.com/free-open-source/piper/) |
| Chatterbox | Open source | Free (self-hosted) | No limit (self-hosted) | MIT | MIT-licensed voice agents with laugh tags |  | [site](https://github.com/resemble-ai/chatterbox) [code](https://github.com/resemble-ai/chatterbox) [Zekai page](https://zekaiwork.com/free-open-source/chatterbox/) |
| F5-TTS | Open source | Free (self-hosted) | No limit (self-hosted) | MIT | Flow-matching TTS driven by reference audio |  | [site](https://github.com/SWivid/F5-TTS) [code](https://github.com/SWivid/F5-TTS) [Zekai page](https://zekaiwork.com/free-open-source/f5-tts/) |
| Coqui TTS (Idiap fork) | Open source | Free (self-hosted) | No limit (self-hosted) | MPL-2.0 | Maintained fork of the original Coqui toolkit |  | [site](https://coqui-tts.readthedocs.io) [code](https://github.com/idiap/coqui-tts) [Zekai page](https://zekaiwork.com/free-open-source/coqui-tts/) |
| Dia | Open source | Free (self-hosted) | No limit (self-hosted) | Apache-2.0 | English multi-speaker dialogue from a script |  | [site](https://github.com/nari-labs/dia) [code](https://github.com/nari-labs/dia) [Zekai page](https://zekaiwork.com/free-open-source/dia/) |
| VoxCPM | Open source | Free (self-hosted) | No limit (self-hosted) | Apache-2.0 | Multilingual voice cloning and voice design |  | [site](https://voxcpm.readthedocs.io) [code](https://github.com/OpenBMB/VoxCPM) [Zekai page](https://zekaiwork.com/free-open-source/voxcpm/) |
| WhisperSpeech | Open source | Free (self-hosted) | No limit (self-hosted) | MIT | Commercially safe TTS trained on licensed data |  | [site](https://github.com/WhisperSpeech/WhisperSpeech) [code](https://github.com/WhisperSpeech/WhisperSpeech) [Zekai page](https://zekaiwork.com/free-open-source/whisperspeech/) |

## How each alternative compares with ElevenLabs

- **Fish Audio** (Free plan + paid, $11/mo, checked 2026-11-11): Free plan gives 8,000 credits a month (up to 7 minutes) with 500 characters per generation; Plus adds Voice Design and one professional voice slot, at roughly 600 credits a minute. Switch if you want voice cloning and a 250,000-credit plan priced well under ElevenLabs Creator. Stay with ElevenLabs if you need a bigger library of models and studio tools than Fish Audio's credit plans offer.
- **Murf.ai** (Paid, Not checked): Lists 120+ text to speech voices in 20 languages on its site; its pricing page needs JavaScript and could not be read, so plan limits are not shown here. Switch if you produce narrated presentations or explainer videos and want a studio editor around the voices. Stay with ElevenLabs if you mainly need an API, expressive models or voice cloning rather than a voiceover studio.
- **Speechify** (Free plan + paid, $11.58/mo billed yearly, checked 2026-11-11): Consumer reading app: Premium offers 1,000+ voices in 60+ languages with Scan & Listen, AI Summaries and cloud-drive integrations, and playback up to 5x; the free plan has 10 robotic-sounding voices. Switch if you want to listen to PDFs, articles and scanned pages rather than produce voiceover files. Stay with ElevenLabs if you generate voiceover for videos or apps and want credits, an API and voice cloning.
- **WellSaid Labs** (Free plan + paid, $10/mo billed yearly, checked 2026-11-11): Meters downloads in minutes, not credits: Starter includes 20 download minutes a month with unlimited generation, and Business is $160 a month per user, billed yearly, for 1 to 5 seats. Switch if you want unlimited generation and predictable download-minute billing for commercial voiceover. Stay with ElevenLabs if you need a bigger free allowance or credit-based plans that start at a lower price.
- **Voicemaker** (Free plan + paid, $5/mo, checked 2026-11-11): Credits map to characters: default voices cost 1 credit per character, premium voices 2 to 4, and an Audiobook & Podcast plan is $25 a year for 1,000,000 credits. Switch if you convert large amounts of text on a tight budget and accept character-based billing. Stay with ElevenLabs if you want expressive models, studio editing and cloning without multiplying credits per character.
- **Cartesia** (Free plan + paid, $5/mo, checked 2026-11-11): Free plan gives 20K credits a month (about 27 minutes of text to speech, 2 concurrent requests) plus a $1 voice-agent balance and one phone number; there are no overages on Free. Switch if you build real-time voice agents and want API-first text to speech with a larger free allowance. Stay with ElevenLabs if you work in a studio editor with Projects, music and sound effects around the voices.
- **Kokoro** (Open source, Free (self-hosted)): Kokoro is an 82-million-parameter model whose weights are Apache-licensed, so you can ship it in a product without a licence fee; voices are picked by name, such as af_heart. Switch if you want a small Apache-licensed voice model you can embed in your own product. Stay with ElevenLabs if you want a hosted voice editor with a studio interface rather than a Python library.
- **Piper** (Open source, Free (self-hosted)): Piper is a GPL-3.0 engine with a command line, HTTP server and C/C++ library, and its README says the Open Home Foundation is looking for new maintainers. Switch if you want an offline engine that Home Assistant and screen-reader users already run. Stay with ElevenLabs if you want a hosted voice library and editor instead of running a command-line engine.
- **Chatterbox** (Open source, Free (self-hosted)): Chatterbox embeds Resemble AI's PerTh watermark in every file it generates, and its README says the code now stays public as an archive with no support or updates. Switch if you want an MIT-licensed model with paralinguistic tags like [laugh] and a CPU-capable Nano variant. Stay with ElevenLabs if you need a vendor that supports and updates its voices rather than an archived repository.
- **F5-TTS** (Open source, Free (self-hosted)): F5-TTS code is MIT, but its README says the pre-trained models are CC-BY-NC because of the Emilia training data, which rules out commercial output. Switch if you want to experiment with a flow-matching model and only need non-commercial audio. Stay with ElevenLabs if you publish voice work commercially and need a licence that covers the voices you generate.
- **Coqui TTS (Idiap fork)** (Open source, Free (self-hosted)): This Idiap fork continues the original Coqui repository, which its README calls unmaintained, and offers training tools, dataset utilities and pre-trained models in over 1,100 languages. Switch if you want a trainable TTS toolkit with many languages and a maintained package on PyPI. Stay with ElevenLabs if you want finished voices and a web editor instead of a library you assemble yourself.
- **Dia** (Open source, Free (self-hosted)): Dia is a 1.6B-parameter model that generates dialogue from a transcript, can add laughs and coughs, supports English only, and its README says CPU support is still to come. Switch if you need two-person dialogue with nonverbal sounds and have a CUDA GPU to run it. Stay with ElevenLabs if you need languages other than English or have no CUDA-capable GPU available.
- **VoxCPM** (Open source, Free (self-hosted)): VoxCPM2 is a 2B-parameter model with 30 languages, voice design from a text description and cloning from a short clip, with Apache-2.0 weights and code. Switch if you want multilingual cloning or text-described voices with commercial-friendly Apache-2.0 weights. Stay with ElevenLabs if you have no CUDA-capable GPU and want voices without setting up PyTorch.
- **WhisperSpeech** (Open source, Free (self-hosted)): WhisperSpeech inverts OpenAI Whisper to make speech, says its models are trained only on properly licensed data, and currently ships English only. Switch if you want TTS trained only on licensed data and can work with English voices. Stay with ElevenLabs if you need many languages today and a maintained product rather than a research codebase.

## Open-source options in detail

- **Kokoro** (https://github.com/hexgrad/kokoro): Licence: Apache-2.0; Commercial use: Yes; the code and the model weights are Apache-2.0.; Runs on: 82M-parameter model installed with pip plus espeak-ng; Apple MPS acceleration is supported.; Setup: moderate: pip install kokoro, install espeak-ng, then a few lines of Python.; Last commit: 2025-08-06; GitHub stars: 10,100 (2026-11-13)
- **Piper** (https://github.com/OHF-Voice/piper1-gpl): Licence: GPL-3.0-or-later; Commercial use: Yes; GPL-3.0 copyleft applies if you distribute it; each voice has its own licence.; Runs on: Local engine installed with pip; the README lists no GPU or RAM figure.; Setup: moderate: pip install piper-tts, then download a voice model.; Last commit: 2026-11-13; Last release: 2026-09-04; GitHub stars: 6,300 (2026-11-13)
- **Chatterbox** (https://github.com/resemble-ai/chatterbox): Licence: MIT; Commercial use: Yes (MIT); the README adds a watermark to every output file.; Runs on: Nano (110M) runs on CPU, 3x real-time on 8 cores; others want CUDA.; Setup: moderate: pip install chatterbox-tts; the README develops on Python 3.11.; Last commit: 2026-11-04; Last release: 2025-06-13; GitHub stars: 27,800 (2026-11-13)
- **F5-TTS** (https://github.com/SWivid/F5-TTS): Licence: MIT; Commercial use: No for the pre-trained models (CC-BY-NC); the code itself is MIT.; Runs on: Nvidia, AMD or Intel GPU through PyTorch; a Docker image with --gpus=all is provided.; Setup: hard: Install the right PyTorch build for your GPU first, then pip install f5-tts.; Last commit: 2026-11-03; Last release: 2026-07-23; GitHub stars: 15,600 (2026-11-13)
- **Coqui TTS (Idiap fork)** (https://github.com/idiap/coqui-tts): Licence: MPL-2.0; Commercial use: Yes for the code (MPL-2.0); check each model's own licence, including XTTS.; Runs on: Python 3.10 to 3.14 with PyTorch; the README gives no VRAM figure.; Setup: moderate: uv pip install coqui-tts after installing PyTorch; models download on use.; Last commit: 2026-11-13; Last release: 2026-10-19; GitHub stars: 2,400 (2026-11-13)
- **Dia** (https://github.com/nari-labs/dia): Licence: Apache-2.0; Commercial use: Yes (Apache-2.0); the README forbids identity misuse and illegal use.; Runs on: GPU only: CUDA 12.6; about 4.4 GB VRAM in bfloat16, 7.9 GB in float32.; Setup: hard: CUDA GPU required; install with pip, weights come from Hugging Face.; Last commit: 2025-11-19; GitHub stars: 19,400 (2026-11-13)
- **VoxCPM** (https://github.com/OpenBMB/VoxCPM): Licence: Apache-2.0; Commercial use: Yes; the README says weights and code are Apache-2.0, free for commercial use.; Runs on: Python 3.10-3.12, PyTorch 2.5+, CUDA 12+; CPU and Apple MPS are selectable.; Setup: hard: Needs a CUDA-ready PyTorch environment, then pip install voxcpm.; Last commit: 2026-11-09; Last release: 2026-05-11; GitHub stars: 42,400 (2026-11-13)
- **WhisperSpeech** (https://github.com/WhisperSpeech/WhisperSpeech): Licence: MIT; Commercial use: Yes; the README says code is Apache-2.0 or MIT and training data is licensed.; Runs on: README reports 12x real-time on an RTX 4090; no minimum is stated.; Setup: moderate: Run the Colab notebook, or run the notebook locally.; Last commit: 2025-06-08; GitHub stars: 4,700 (2026-11-13)

## Questions

### What is the best alternative to ElevenLabs in 2027?
Fish Audio is the best overall ElevenLabs alternative on this page ($11/mo). For no cost, Cartesia has a free plan (20K credits a month (about 27 minutes of text to speech)). To self-host, Kokoro is open source (Apache-2.0).

### Is there a free version of ElevenLabs?
Yes. ElevenLabs has a free plan: 10k credits a month, 3 Studio projects. Paid plans start at $6/mo, checked on 11 Nov 2026.

### Is there a 100% free alternative to ElevenLabs?
Yes. Kokoro, Piper, Chatterbox, F5-TTS, Coqui TTS (Idiap fork), Dia, VoxCPM, WhisperSpeech are open source and free to self-host. Fish Audio, Speechify, WellSaid Labs, Voicemaker, Cartesia have a free plan with limits, shown in the table.

### What is cheaper than ElevenLabs?
Voicemaker starts at $5/mo, against $6/mo for ElevenLabs, as listed on each vendor's pricing page on 11 Nov 2026.

### How much do ElevenLabs alternatives cost for a team of 5?
If each of 5 people buys the entry paid plan, at the prices Zekai checked on 11 Nov 2026, the monthly cost is Voicemaker $25/mo, Cartesia $25/mo, WellSaid Labs $50/mo, against ElevenLabs $30/mo for ElevenLabs. Team and business plans can cost more per seat. The Zekai Cost Finder on this page recalculates for any team size.

### Which is better, Fish Audio or ElevenLabs?
Free plan gives 8,000 credits a month (up to 7 minutes) with 500 characters per generation; Plus adds Voice Design and one professional voice slot, at roughly 600 credits a minute. Choose Fish Audio if you want voice cloning and a 250,000-credit plan priced well under ElevenLabs Creator. Stay with ElevenLabs if you need a bigger library of models and studio tools than Fish Audio's credit plans offer.

### Why are people leaving ElevenLabs?
The documented reasons are: ElevenLabs' Free plan lists 10k credits a month (about 10 minutes) and 3 Studio projects; the commercial licence and Instant Voice Cloning start at Starter (11 Nov 2026); Professional Voice Cloning is listed from the Creator plan at $22/mo, and extra minutes beyond the allowance are priced at about $0.18 to $0.36 depending on plan (11 Nov 2026). Each is sourced in the section above.

### What is the best ElevenLabs alternative?
It depends on the job: Fish Audio for cloning at a lower plan price, Cartesia for real-time voice agents, WellSaid Labs for commercial voiceover, and Kokoro if you want free software you run yourself.

## Related on Zekai

- [Fish Audio alternatives](https://zekaiwork.com/alternatives/fish-audio/)
- [Murf.ai alternatives](https://zekaiwork.com/alternatives/murf-ai/)
- [Speechify alternatives](https://zekaiwork.com/alternatives/speechify/)
- [AI for E-commerce & Online Stores](https://zekaiwork.com/professions/ai-ecommerce-online-store-optimization/)

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Live table, team cost finder and price alerts: https://zekaiwork.com/alternatives/elevenlabs/