ElevenLabs
ElevenLabs turns text, audio and images into speech, music, dubbing and conversational agents, all billed from one shared credit pool.
Buy ElevenLabs when the voice itself is the deliverable: an audiobook, a branded ad, a phone agent that has to sound human on the first ring. Eleven v4 and Eleven Flash v2.5 cover both the expressive and the low-latency ends, and ElevenAPI means you are not locked into the browser editor. Be deliberate about the shared credit pool, because Scribe v2 transcription at 330 credits per minute, Music at 900 per minute and Dubbing at 2,000-10,000 per minute drain it hundreds of times faster per minute than plain text to speech. For notification prompts or throwaway scratch audio, a cheaper single-purpose engine does the job at a fraction of the credit cost.
Verified 15h ago · liveness 87/100 · cite: rightaichoice.com/tools/elevenlabs
- Creators producing audiobooks, podcasts, ads or voiceovers who need expressive narration
- Developers embedding TTS, speech to text or music through documented APIs and SDKs
- Support teams deploying multilingual voice and chat agents with resolution analytics
- Localization teams dubbing video into 70+ languages
- Bulk transcription or localization on a tight budget, where 330 credits per minute for STT drains the pool
- Offline or on-device synthesis, since the platform is cloud-based with no local model
- Simple notification or IVR prompts where naturalness does not justify the per-character credit cost
We scan live Reddit threads, YouTube comments, X posts, G2 reviews and other communities — and hand you an honest verdict in under a minute.
- Honest verdict, not marketing
- Real pros & cons from real users
- Attributed quotes with receipts
3 free scans · no card needed
Skip ElevenLabs if your main job is high-volume transcription or localization, where Scribe v2 at 330 credits per minute and dubbing at 2,000-10,000 credits per minute will exhaust a shared pool that was sized for narration.
Speech to Text bills at 330 credits per minute, so an hour of audio costs 19,800 credits — roughly half of a Starter plan's entire 30,000 monthly allowance.
ElevenLabs prices as a premium voice vendor that also does cheap-adjacent API work: $6/mo Starter and $22/mo Creator sit alongside single-purpose TTS engines that undercut it on pure narration, while $99/mo Pro, $299/mo Scale and $990/mo Business undercut assembling separate TTS, ASR, music and dubbing vendors. Annual billing is two months free. Solo creators should stay on Creator; teams needing seats and 660+ voice slots are pushed to Scale at $299/mo monthly, or $249.17/mo billed annually.
In short
ElevenLabs — ElevenLabs turns text, audio and images into speech, music, dubbing and conversational agents, all billed from one shared credit pool. Best for Creators producing audiobooks, podcasts, ads or voiceovers who need expressive narration, Developers embedding TTS, speech to text or music through documented APIs and SDKs, Support teams deploying multilingual voice and chat agents with resolution analytics. Free to start; paid plans from $6/mo.
What's new in ElevenLabs
Checked todayAcross the latest 5 updates: 3 feature updates, 1 launch and 1 changelog entry.
Image & Video: Sora 2 and Sora 2 Pro retired, Seedance 1.5 Pro deprecated
OpenAI discontinues the Sora API on September 24, 2026, removing both models from the Image & Video picker, and ByteDance retires Seedance 1.5 Pro on November 11, 2026. Flows using a Sora node must be switched to another video model.
ElevenAgents: parallel tool calls, gpt-6-astra agent model, Slack alerting, phone number search
Agent prompt configuration adds enable_parallel_tool_calls, gpt-6-astra joins the agent LLM options, agent alerting now supports Slack alongside PagerDuty and webhooks, and a cursor-paginated phone number endpoint ships with provider and agent filters.
Image and video: GPT Image 2.5 models added
Image generation supports gpt-image-2.5-flare and gpt-image-2.5-sunburst, both accepting up to 10 reference images, quality levels through max, 14 fixed aspect ratios plus auto, and 1K, 2K or 4K output.
ElevenAgents call queueing, Music v2.5 API, JS/Python SDK v2.68.0
Call queueing was added for agents at their concurrency limit, so queued callers hear hold audio with queue_status events. Music endpoints now accept music_v2_5, and the JavaScript and Python SDKs moved to v2.68.0.
Scribe v2 Medical released
ElevenLabs shipped Scribe v2 Medical, a speech recognition model variant fine-tuned for clinical audio that claims 35% fewer transcription errors on clinical audio while matching Scribe v2 on everyday speech.
What people actually say about ElevenLabs — is it worth it?
We ran a structured research pass across product reviews, community discussions, and post-purchase forum threads to surface the patterns vendors won't publish themselves. Below: the recurring strengths, the hidden costs people mention most, and the cohort that consistently regrets adopting this tool.
108 mentions across 7 sources (Hacker News, YouTube, Product Hunt, App Store, Stack Overflow, GitHub, Lemmy) · researched Aug 18, 2026.
Average across the 7 sources that answered — each source counts once, not each post.
- +Most realistic and expressive AI voice quality in the industry.
- +70+ language support with natural-sounding accents and emotions.
- +Low-latency API: Eleven Flash at ~75ms, great for real-time apps.
- +Scribe v2 transcription earns top marks for accuracy and diarization.
- +Generous free tier (10k credits/month) good for trying out features.
- −Credit system is confusing and goes fast with long content.
- −Pricing is expensive compared to alternatives like Play.ht.
- −Support is nearly nonexistent for non-enterprise users.
- −SDK missing features like stitching and streaming input in JS.
- −Managing multiple environments (staging/prod) is a nightmare.
- • Credits reset monthly—unused credits are lost
- • Heavy users find credit burn fast, requiring frequent plan upgrades
- • Some advanced features like video generation may consume extra credits
Viability Score
How well maintained and how widely used is ElevenLabs? Built from what the vendor actually publishes (docs, changelog, tutorials, integrations, pricing), whether the site is live, and how much real users discuss it. How we calculate this
Last calculated: September 2026
How we score →Key Features
- Text to Speech in 70+ languages (90+ on Eleven v4) with controllable, expressive delivery
- Eleven v4 synthesis model with a 10,000-character limit and multi-speaker dialogue
- Eleven v4 Turbo with median inference latency around 100ms for real-time use
- Eleven Flash v2.5 at roughly 75ms latency, cited for conversational agents
- Eleven Multilingual v2 for stable, lifelike long-form narration across 29 languages
- Instant Voice Cloning from audio samples (Starter and above)
- Professional Voice Cloning (Creator and above)
- Voice Design: generate a voice from a text prompt
- Library of 10,000+ ready-made voices
- Speech to Text via Scribe v2 in 90+ languages with keyterm prompting up to 1,000 terms
- Scribe v2 speaker diarization up to 32 speakers and word-level timestamps
- Scribe v2 Realtime transcription at roughly 150ms latency
- Scribe v2 Medical variant for clinical audio, claiming 35% fewer clinical errors
- Music generation from natural-language prompts, with Music v2.5 API support
- Custom sound effects, soundscapes and a searchable SFX library
About ElevenLabs
ElevenLabs is an AI audio platform split into three products that draw on a single monthly credit balance. ElevenCreative is the browser studio for text to speech across 70+ languages, music generation, sound effects, voice cloning and design, dubbing, and image/video generation; ElevenAgents builds voice and chat agents that handle phone, chat, email and WhatsApp conversations with resolution-rate analytics; ElevenAPI exposes the same models as REST endpoints with Python and TypeScript SDKs, an MCP server and a CLI. The model lineup runs from Eleven v4, described by the vendor as its most emotive synthesis model with 90+ language support and a 10,000-character limit, down to Eleven Flash v2.5 at roughly 75ms latency for conversational use. Speech recognition uses Scribe v2 in standard, Realtime (~150ms) and Medical variants, the last promising 35% fewer transcription errors on clinical audio. Image and video generation runs on third-party models such as Veo, Wan, Kling and Seedance inside the same editor. Who it's for: creators shipping audiobooks, podcasts, ads and localized video; developers who want TTS, ASR or music behind documented APIs with JS and Python SDKs; and CX teams replacing scripted IVR with agents measured on resolution rate. The cost model is the real differentiator and the real trap — one pool covers everything, but the burn rates diverge sharply. Text to speech runs about 1 credit per character, while Speech to Text costs 330 credits per minute, Music 900 per minute, Voice Changer and Voice Isolator 1,000 per minute, and Dubbing between 2,000 and 10,000 credits per minute depending on watermark and Studio settings.
Behind the Verdict
ElevenLabs started as a text-to-speech company and now sells three distinct products. ElevenCreative is the creation surface: an editor where you generate speech, music, sound effects, dubbing and even images and video, the latter through third-party models such as Veo, Wan, Kling and Seedance. ElevenAgents is the operational surface, aimed at CX teams — agents listen and reply on phone, chat, email and WhatsApp, with testing simulations, guardrails, workflows and a resolution-rate dashboard. ElevenAPI is the developer surface, and it is unusually complete: REST endpoints, official Python and TypeScript SDKs, an MCP server added in August 2026, and a CLI that reached v1 the same month. Strengths. Breadth of model choice inside one account. Eleven v4 for expressiveness with a 10,000-character limit and multi-speaker dialogue; Eleven v4 Turbo for real-time work at a median inference latency around 100ms; Eleven Flash v2.5 at roughly 75ms for conversational agents; Eleven Multilingual v2 for stable long-form. On the recognition side, Scribe v2 does 90+ languages with keyterm prompting up to 1,000 terms, entity detection across 65 types, speaker diarization up to 32 speakers and word-level timestamps, and a Medical variant that each of these inherits. Voice tooling is deep: instant cloning, professional cloning, voice design from a text prompt, and a library of 10,000+ voices. And the pricing is finally legible — per-minute credit costs are published, annual billing is two months free, and unused credits roll over for up to two months. Weaknesses. The single credit pool is a budgeting problem disguised as simplicity. A Creator plan at $22/mo monthly billing gives 121,000 credits, which is roughly 121,000 characters of TTS — but only about 366 minutes of Speech to Text, or 134 minutes of Music, or 60 minutes of dubbing at the cheapest non-watermarked Studio rate. Teams that buy ElevenLabs for one capability and discover a second one will find the pool empties faster than the marketing implies. Tier gates matter too: Instant Voice Cloning starts at Starter, Professional Voice Cloning and additional credits at Creator, 44.1kHz PCM output and 192kbps audio at Pro, and 3 Workspace seats at Scale. Where it fits. Creator and localization workflows where output quality is the product. Developer builds that need TTS, ASR and music behind one API key rather than three vendor contracts. Support organizations that want phone agents measured on resolution rate rather than call duration. Where it doesn't. Bulk transcription or localization on a budget — 330 and 2,000-10,000 credits per minute respectively make ElevenLabs an expensive place to do volume ASR. Anywhere you need offline or on-device synthesis, since the platform is cloud-only. And simple notification prompts, where naturalness does not justify per-character credit spend.
Researching ElevenLabs? Get your full AI stack in 60 seconds.
Free, no signup — tell us your goal and get tools matched to your budget & existing stack.
Real-world workflow fit
Concrete scenarios for the personas ElevenLabs actually fits — and what changes day-one when you adopt it.
Subscribe to Creator at $22/mo ($11 for the first month), run Professional Voice Cloning on a narrator sample, then draft each chapter in the ElevenCreative editor using Eleven v4's multi-speaker dialogue for character lines and a stable Multilingual v2 pass for the body text.
Outcome: A finished, consistent-sounding chapter track without hiring a narrator per book, with credits tracked against the 121,000 monthly allowance as the manuscript grows.
Generate an API key, install the Python SDK, and wire Eleven Flash v2.5 for real-time conversational replies and Scribe v2 Realtime for incoming transcriptions, testing both from the ElevenLabs CLI before shipping.
Outcome: Working voice input and output in the app with documented endpoints, word-level timestamps and entity detection, without operating separate speech vendors.
Build a phone agent in ElevenAgents with guardrails and workflow steps, run simulated conversations to validate behavior, then enable call queueing so callers who hit the concurrency limit hear hold audio and queue_status events rather than a dropped line.
Outcome: Agents that resolve requests across phone and WhatsApp, tracked in the resolution-rate dashboard and tuned by comparing conversation versions.
Use Cases
- Narrating audiobooks and podcasts with expressive, multi-speaker voice control
- Producing YouTube voiceovers and ads with brand-consistent cloned voices
- Localizing film and video into 70+ languages with Dubbing Studio
- Generating background scores, jingles and sound effects in the same editor
- Running multilingual phone and WhatsApp support agents with resolution-rate analytics
- Cloning a host or guest voice to keep podcast output consistent across episodes
- Embedding TTS, Scribe v2 transcription or Music into an app via the API and SDKs
- Transcribing clinical audio with Scribe v2 Medical's 35% clinical error reduction
Models Under the Hood
as of 2026-09-30
Limitations
- Credits are shared across every product and the burn rate diverges sharply between capabilities, so using a second feature can exhaust the monthly allowance faster than the credit headline suggests.
- Several capabilities are tier-gated: Instant Voice Cloning requires Starter, Professional Voice Cloning and additional credits require Creator, 44.1kHz PCM output and 192kbps audio require Pro, and Workspace seats plus 3 Professional Voice Clones require Scale.
- Prices exclude all taxes, levies and duties.
- Certain newer model promotions (e.g. bonus credits on Eleven v4) are time-limited and available in the web and mobile apps only.
as of 2026-09-29
Verification history
We have re-verified ElevenLabs 88 times since . Each pass re-reads the vendor's own pages and re-checks every listed field against that evidence; passes where nothing had changed are marked as such.
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it, GitHub stars
- — re-verified GitHub stars
- — re-verified GitHub stars
- — re-verified GitHub stars
- — re-verified GitHub stars
- — re-verified GitHub stars
Showing the 6 most recent of 88 verification passes.
Free to cite with attribution — this page re-verifies continuously.
12-month cost
Project the real annual outlay, including the implied monthly cost when only an annual tier is published.
Vendor list price only. Add-on usage, seat overages, and contract minimums are surfaced under Hidden costs & gotchas.
Plans compared
For each published ElevenLabs tier: who it actually fits, and what it adds vs. the previous tier. Cross-reference the cost calculator above for projected annual outlay.
Free
$0/mo
Ideal for
Anyone evaluating ElevenLabs or producing occasional short clips, capped at 10,000 credits per month with no rollover.
What this tier adds
Starting tier: text to speech, speech to text, sound effects, voice design, music and image generation, with 3 Studio projects and no commercial license.
Starter
$6/mo
Ideal for
Solo creators publishing monetized YouTube or podcast audio who need a commercial license and their own cloned voice.
What this tier adds
Adds the commercial license, Instant Voice Cloning, 20 Studio projects, music commercial use, Dubbing Studio and image and video generation, on 30,000 credits.
Creator
$22/mo (monthly billing); $18.33/mo billed annually; $11 for
Ideal for
Working narrators and producers running professional voice clones across multiple client projects.
What this tier adds
Adds Professional Voice Cloning, extra credit purchases and 30 custom voice slots on 121,000 credits; $11 for the first month, and up to 2x monthly TTS credits spent on Eleven v4 do not count against your balance for two weeks.
Pro
$99/mo (monthly billing); $82.50/mo billed annually
Ideal for
Studios and developers who need broadcast-grade output and higher API concurrency.
What this tier adds
Adds 44.1kHz PCM audio output via API and 192kbps quality audio, plus 160 custom voice slots and around 10 concurrent requests on 600,000 credits.
Scale
$299/mo (monthly billing); $249.17/mo billed annually
Ideal for
Small teams that need shared workspace seats and multiple professional voice clones.
What this tier adds
Adds 3 Workspace seats, team collaboration, 3 Professional Voice Clones and 660 custom voice slots on 1.8M credits.
Business
$990/mo (monthly billing); $825/mo billed annually
Ideal for
Customer-experience and localization operations running agents at scale with low-latency audio requirements.
What this tier adds
Adds low-latency TTS from 5c per minute, 10 Professional Voice Clones, 10 Workspace seats and 2,200 custom voice slots on 6M credits.
Enterprise
Custom
Ideal for
Regulated or high-volume organizations needing custom contract terms, data agreements and elevated concurrency.
What this tier adds
Adds custom terms and assurance around DPA and SLAs, BAAs for HIPAA customers, custom SSO, elevated concurrency limits, fully managed dubbing with Productions and priority support.
Where the pricing makes sense
The company stage and team size where ElevenLabs's pricing actually pencils out — and where peers do it cheaper.
ElevenLabs prices as a premium voice vendor that also does cheap-adjacent API work: $6/mo Starter and $22/mo Creator sit alongside single-purpose TTS engines that undercut it on pure narration, while $99/mo Pro, $299/mo Scale and $990/mo Business undercut assembling separate TTS, ASR, music and dubbing vendors. Annual billing is two months free. Solo creators should stay on Creator; teams needing seats and 660+ voice slots are pushed to Scale at $299/mo monthly, or $249.17/mo billed annually.
Setup time & first value
How long it actually takes to get something useful out of ElevenLabs — broken out by persona, not the marketing-page minute.
Creator: hours, not days — subscribe to Starter at $6/mo or Creator at $22/mo, upload a voice sample, and the first text-to-speech render is minutes away. Developer: about a day to a working integration, since the Python and TypeScript SDKs and the CLI are documented and the API is REST. ElevenAgents: a few days, because value comes from writing workflows and guardrails and validating them in
Switching to or from ElevenLabs
How to bring data in from common predecessors and how to get it back out — written for the switcher, not the buyer.
- →From plain cloud TTS APIs: point existing text calls at the ElevenLabs Text to Speech endpoint and use Eleven Flash v2.5 for latency-sensitive paths.
- →From a separate ASR vendor: route audio to Scribe v2 and reuse its word-level timestamps and speaker diarization instead of post-processing another transcript format.
- →From manual dubbing vendors: run source video through Automatic Dubbing first to validate timing before paying for Dubbing Studio without a watermark.
- →From a scripted IVR provider: rebuild prompts as ElevenAgents workflows and enable call queueing so concurrency limits queue callers instead of dropping them.
- ↗To single-purpose TTS engines: for high-volume narration at low cost, export finished audio and re-render new scripts on a cheaper per-character engine.
- ↗To a dedicated ASR provider: for bulk transcription, move audio workloads off Scribe v2 and stop spending 330 credits per minute from the shared pool.
- ↗To a seat-based agent platform: if flat per-agent pricing matters more than voice quality, rebuild agent flows on a platform that bills per seat rather than per credit.
- ↗To an in-house self-hosted stack: if data residency forbids cloud inference, neither ElevenCreative nor ElevenAgents can run on-premises, so plan a local model deployment instead.
Resources & Guides
- Documentationelevenlabs.io
Documentation
Explore our docs and guides to integrate ElevenLabs
- Resourceelevenlabs.io
Documentation
Explore our docs and guides to integrate ElevenLabs
- Resourceelevenlabs.io
Changelog
ElevenLabs provides APIs and SDKs for text to speech, voice cloning, speech to text, sound effects, voice isolator, voice changer, and conversational AI agents. Build voice-enabled applications with lifelike audio generation.
- Resourceelevenlabs.io
Blog
Helpful link from elevenlabs.io
- Resourceelevenlabs.io
Support
Helpful link from elevenlabs.io
- Resourceelevenlabs.io
Pricing
Helpful link from elevenlabs.io
- Resourceelevenlabs.io
Enterprise
Helpful link from elevenlabs.io
Tutorials & Learning
How To Use Elevenlabs - Master This AI Voice Generator in 23 minutes!
Dan Kieft
ElevenLabsの使い方 - 最高のテキスト読み上げAI音声（完全ガイド）
Alec Wilcock
話題のAI音声を手に入れる方法 | Elevenlabs
Clark Gary
YouTube returned 6 videos for “ElevenLabs”, and we withheld 3: 3 could not be judged, because “ElevenLabs” is a single word that other videos use for other things. Showing the 3 we can prove are about ElevenLabs.
Tools that pair well with ElevenLabs
Common stack mates teams adopt alongside ElevenLabs, with the specific reason each pairing earns its keep.
Fish Audio
Fish Audio turns text into expressive, emotionally controllable speech with voice cloning from 15 seconds of audio and a free developer TTS API.
Krisp Voice AI
Real-time noise cancellation, accent conversion and AI meeting notes in one app
Podcastle
Async (formerly Podcastle) is a chat-based AI video editor that cuts, dubs, and generates video from plain-language prompts
Featured Head-to-Head Comparisons
Descript vs Elevenlabs
If you're a podcaster or video creator who wants to edit by fixing the transcript and relies on AI to clean audio, Descript is your pick. If you need ultra-realistic voiceovers, dubbing, or conversational agents at scale, ElevenLabs dominates. Both are freemium, but they solve different problems—choose based on whether you're editing content or generating audio.
Elevenlabs vs Speechify
These are only loosely competitors: Speechify is a consumer reading-and-dictation assistant you open next to a PDF or email, while ElevenLabs is an audio production platform you embed in a product or a studio workflow. Pick Speechify if the job is "help me get through and write text faster, across every device I own" and the $29/month Premium is easy to justify. Pick ElevenLabs if the output is the product — narrated audiobooks, dubbed video, cloned voices, transcribed medical audio, or voice agents on phone and WhatsApp — and you need cloning, an API, and a credit model that deliberately punishes heavy STT/music use. Most buyers should not be choosing between them at all; they should be choosing which of the two problems they actually have.
Elevenlabs vs Heygen
If your end product is a video — ads, training, social clips — HeyGen is the clear pick, with Avatar V leading the pack. If your end product is audio or an interactive voice agent — audiobooks, dubbing, customer support bots — ElevenLabs dominates. They actually complement each other (HeyGen even integrates ElevenLabs), so a power user might use both: ElevenLabs for the voice, HeyGen for the face.
Assemblyai vs Elevenlabs
If you need lifelike voice generation for content or voice agents, ElevenLabs is the pick — it excels at TTS, dubbing, and audio creation. If your core need is accurate speech-to-text and building voice AI products, AssemblyAI's APIs are what you want — especially with Universal-3.5 Pro's human-parity accuracy. Choose based on your primary input (text-to-speech vs. speech-to-text) and whether you prefer a broad creative suite or a focused developer platform.
Bland Ai vs Elevenlabs
Choose Bland AI if your calls live in a regulated environment (healthcare, finance) and you need ironclad compliance and sub-400ms real-time interaction. Pick ElevenLabs if your priority is hyper-realistic voiceovers and multilingual agents for customer engagement, with a more API-first and creative toolset. There's barely any overlap: Bland is for high-stakes phone calls, ElevenLabs for content and agent versatility.
Alternatives to ElevenLabs
View all
Fish Audio
Fish Audio turns text into expressive, emotionally controllable speech with voice cloning from 15 seconds of audio and a free developer TTS API.
Krisp Voice AI
Real-time noise cancellation, accent conversion and AI meeting notes in one app
Frequently Asked Questions
Categories
Best-of guides
Used ElevenLabs? Help shape our editorial sentiment research.