ElevenLabs Alternatives 2026: 5 Free Options
ElevenLabs alternatives: Kokoro, Piper, Chatterbox, Fish Audio and 1 more. Prices and licenses checked October 25, 2026.
•3 min read•Voice AI & Transcription
Verdict:ElevenLabs is the default for expressive, realistic voice output, including cloning and dubbing, so leave it only when a specific feature no longer justifies the bill. Usage is the first thing to check, because a few long scripts can use up a monthly plan quickly. If you only need voice for narration, an open-source model is the clearest free alternative. Kokoro runs on your own machine and costs nothing per character, but you handle the setup and quality varies by language. Piper is lighter and works offline on modest hardware, which suits batch narration, though its voices sound less natural than ElevenLabs. Chatterbox is the choice if you want to experiment with cloning on your own GPU and accept the tuning work. For a hosted service without the ElevenLabs price, Fish Audio offers a free tier and paid plans, but its voice library is smaller, so test your voices first. Google Cloud Text-to-Speech suits a product team calling a speech API in production across many languages. The trade-off is that you give up creator-friendly voice libraries and cloning. Pick by the job: self-hosted for free output, hosted for convenience, API for scale.
Quick comparison
| Tool | Price | Platforms | Best for | Tested |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kokoro | Free (Free open-weight 82M-parameter model you run yourself) | Self-hosted (Python library) | Self-hosted voice generation | Docs only |
| Piper | Free (Free local neural text-to-speech engine) | Self-hosted (Python package) | Offline narration on a laptop | Docs only |
| Chatterbox | Free (Free open-source models (Nano 110M runs on CPU) with voice cloning from a short reference clip) | Self-hosted (Python library) | Open-source voice cloning experiments | Docs only |
| Fish Audio | Free (Free: 8,000 credits per month, up to 500 characters per generation, 3 public voice slots); paid from $11 per month (Plus: 250,000 credits, commercial use) | Web browser | Hosted voices on a budget | Docs only |
| Google Cloud Text-to-Speech | Free (Free monthly allowance: first 1M characters of Neural2 voices and first 4M characters of Standard voices (billing account required)); paid from $16 per 1M characters (Neural2 voices after the free allowance) | Web API | Multilingual API speech at scale | Docs only |
| Cartesia | Free (Free: 20K TTS/STT credits and $1 prepaid voice agent dollars per month); paid from $5 per month (Pro: 100K model credits and $5 prepaid agent dollars; Startup $49; Scale $299) | Web browser | AI voice and text to speech | Docs only |
Independent comparison. Paid placements are labelled separately; editorial links earn no affiliate commissions. Learn more.
Good fit if
- You want fully free, self-hosted speech (Kokoro is the pick)
- You need offline narration on a laptop (Piper is the pick)
- You want a hosted voice service at lower cost (Fish Audio is the pick)
- You are building an app that calls a speech API (Google Cloud Text-to-Speech is the pick)
Not ideal if
- You rely on ElevenLabs features or integrations that these tools do not replicate
ElevenLabs today: Free (Free: 10,000 credits per month; commercial licence appears to start on the paid Starter plan); paid from $6 per month, billed monthly (Starter; $5 equivalent on annual billing; Creator $22) (ElevenLabs pricing, checked 2026-10-22).
Why people look for ElevenLabs alternatives
ElevenLabs' free plan gives 10,000 credits a month, and the pricing page lists a commercial licence only from the Starter plan up. Instant voice cloning starts at Starter and Professional Voice Cloning at Creator. Higher volume gets expensive: Pro is $99 a month for 600,000 credits, Scale $299 for 1.8 million credits with 3 seats, and Business $990 for 6 million with 10 seats. Extra text-to-speech minutes are priced at about $0.36 on Free and $0.17 on Pro and above.
Kokoro
Compared with ElevenLabs: Open-source text-to-speech model you run on your own machine. You give up ElevenLabs' voice cloning and hosted API, and in return the model costs nothing per character once it is running locally.
Price: Free (Free open-weight 82M-parameter model you run yourself) (Kokoro pricing, checked 2026-10-22).
Platforms and license: Self-hosted (Python library). Apache-2.0 (open source).
Project activity: 9.7k GitHub stars · No commits since Aug 6, 2025
Best for: Self-hosted voice generation.
Worth knowing: Inference library with several languages via the misaki grapheme-to-phoneme library; no hosted service from the project.
Piper
Compared with ElevenLabs: Open-source local text-to-speech with a free licence. Voices are simpler than ElevenLabs output, but it runs offline on modest hardware, so it fits batch narration more than expressive dubbing.
Price: Free (Free local neural text-to-speech engine) (Piper pricing, checked 2026-10-22).
Platforms and license: Self-hosted (Python package). GPL-3.0 (open source).
Project activity: 6.1k GitHub stars · latest release v1.8.0 (Sep 4, 2026) · last commit Oct 25, 2026
Best for: Offline narration on a laptop.
Chatterbox
Compared with ElevenLabs: Open-source speech model with a free licence that you can run yourself. Compared with ElevenLabs it needs your own GPU and tuning, and you lose the managed voice library and support.
Price: Free (Free open-source models (Nano 110M runs on CPU) with voice cloning from a short reference clip) (Chatterbox pricing, checked 2026-10-22).
Platforms and license: Self-hosted (Python library). MIT (open source).
Project activity: 27.3k GitHub stars · latest release v0.1.2 (Jun 13, 2025) · last commit Jul 21, 2026
Best for: Open-source voice cloning experiments.
Worth knowing: Every generated file carries a Perth watermark per the README. Multilingual V3 covers 23+ languages.
Fish Audio
Compared with ElevenLabs: Text-to-speech service with a free tier and paid plans for more generation. It is hosted like ElevenLabs but has a smaller voice catalogue, so check the voices you need before switching.
Price: Free (Free: 8,000 credits per month, up to 500 characters per generation, 3 public voice slots); paid from $11 per month (Plus: 250,000 credits, commercial use) (Fish Audio pricing, checked 2026-10-22).
Platforms and license: Web browser. Proprietary SaaS.
Best for: Hosted voices on a budget.
Google Cloud Text-to-Speech
Compared with ElevenLabs: Google's hosted text-to-speech API with a free tier and many languages. It is built for developers calling an API in production, where ElevenLabs is more focused on expressive, creator-style voices.
Price: Free (Free monthly allowance: first 1M characters of Neural2 voices and first 4M characters of Standard voices (billing account required)); paid from $16 per 1M characters (Neural2 voices after the free allowance) (Google Cloud Text-to-Speech pricing, checked 2026-10-22).
Platforms and license: Web API. Proprietary.
Best for: Multilingual API speech at scale.
Other popular options (paid)
Cartesia
Compared with ElevenLabs: Free plan includes 20K credits a month, and Pro is $5 a month for 100K credits, one dollar below ElevenLabs Starter at $6 monthly. Paid tiers also bundle prepaid voice agent dollars alongside text-to-speech and speech-to-text credits.
Price: Free (Free: 20K TTS/STT credits and $1 prepaid voice agent dollars per month); paid from $5 per month (Pro: 100K model credits and $5 prepaid agent dollars; Startup $49; Scale $299) (Cartesia pricing, checked 2026-10-25).
Which one to pick
- You want fully free, self-hosted speech: Kokoro
- You need offline narration on a laptop: Piper
- You want a hosted voice service at lower cost: Fish Audio
- You are building an app that calls a speech API: Google Cloud Text-to-Speech
Limits of this review
Docs-only for Kokoro, Piper, Chatterbox, Fish Audio, Google Cloud Text-to-Speech: we did not install or run them, so feature claims come from vendor pages and we did not test import from ElevenLabs. Vendor prices and free limits change; confirm on the linked pricing page before you buy or migrate.
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Kevin Fan
Kevin Fan is a SaaS founder. He runs Free Instead Of, which tracks free and open-source alternatives to paid software and checks each price and free-plan limit against the vendor's own pages.
Methodology
Based on official pricing and product pages checked between 2026-10-22 and 2026-10-25: ElevenLabs, Kokoro, Piper, Chatterbox, Fish Audio, Google Cloud Text-to-Speech, Cartesia. Prices, free limits and licenses are the figures shown on those pages on those dates. No tool on this page was installed or run. No accounts were created.