COMPARE:
ElevenLabs or OpenAI TTS for speech in a product
ElevenLabs and OpenAI TTS both do adding generated speech to a product you are building, and this page puts them on the same seven questions. Mamba Labs builds Apify actors. We have nothing of our own in this category, so this page is two products and no pitch.
The short answer
OpenAI is already in your stack and costs less per minute. ElevenLabs sounds better and can clone a voice. Whether the voice is part of the product decides which of those matters.
Side by side
| ElevenLabs | OpenAI TTS | |
|---|---|---|
| What it actually does | Turns text into speech, clones a voice from a sample, and dubs existing audio into other languages. | Turns text into speech from a small set of built in voices, with an instruction field for delivery. |
| Coverage and hit rate | Text to speech, voice cloning, dubbing, sound effects and a conversational agent, in one account. | A handful of voices, many languages, and a realtime speech to speech model on the same account. |
| What it costs | Per character in monthly plans, with cloning and the commercial license gated to the paid tiers. | Per minute of generated audio, on the same usage account as everything else you call there. |
| How it fits a workflow | An API with streaming, a studio for long form, and libraries for the common languages. | The same SDK and the same key as the rest of the API, which is most of the argument for it. |
| Where the data comes from | Its own models, with a voice library of speakers who are paid when their voice is used. | Its own models. There is no voice library and no cloning. |
| What it takes to set up | Paste text and press play. Cloning takes a minute of clean audio. | If you already call the API, it is one more function. Nothing new to sign up for. |
| Where it stops | Character pricing makes long form audio expensive, and the cheapest plans forbid commercial use. | No voice cloning, and a short voice list, so the audio sounds like everyone else's. |
The same seven questions are asked on every compare page here, in this order, so two of these pages can be read against each other.
Who wins what
- ElevenLabs wins on what it actually does, coverage and hit rate. The voice model most people mean when they say the audio sounded real.
- OpenAI TTS wins on what it costs, what it takes to set up. Text to speech as one more endpoint on an API you are probably already calling.
- Nobody wins on how it fits a workflow, where the data comes from, where it stops. ElevenLabs and OpenAI TTS give the same answer on those, and we are not going to invent a difference.
Try them yourself
The honest answer
If speech is a convenience feature, take the OpenAI endpoint. It is one more call on a key you already hold, the quality is fine, and there is no second vendor to manage. If the voice is the product or the brand, ElevenLabs is the only one of the two that can do it. The price is then the price. Test both on your own script rather than on a demo, because the gap is much wider on some text than others.