AI Tool Comparison
ElevenLabs vs Fish Audio
A side-by-side breakdown to help you pick the right tool for your workflow.
ElevenLabs
Clone a voice or narrate anything with Eleven v3, the most natural-sounding TTS available. API pricing just dropped to pay-as-you-go with no subscription required.
Fish Audio
Clone a voice from a 10-second clip and generate lifelike speech via API or playground, now on the S2.1 Pro model with emotion tags, fresh off a $52M seed round.
Bottom Line
Last reviewed: August 2026
ElevenLabs and Fish Audio both sit in Audio, but they're built around different use cases within it. ElevenLabs carries the higher rating (4.9 vs 4.6), but a gap that size rarely overrides a real workflow fit on its own.
Choose ElevenLabs if…
Best for voice cloning and narration that needs to sound genuinely human, and its edge is text-to-Dialogue generates full multi-speaker conversations in one API call. The most natural-sounding TTS available, and the one to beat.
Choose Fish Audio if…
Fish Audio's actual story is that it's the TTS infrastructure already running inside HeyGen and Retell in production, available directly as a standalone API and playground. That makes it the logical pick for developers who want voice cloning or speech synthesis without building on top of a consumer-facing product that abstracts away the underlying model.
| Attribute | ElevenLabs | Fish Audio |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Audio | Audio |
| Pricing | freemium | freemium |
| Pricing Detail | Free (10K credits/mo) / $6/mo Starter / $22/mo Creator / $99/mo Pro / $990/mo Business / API pay-as-you-go from $0.05 per 1K chars | Free tier / Plus from $11/mo (annual) / higher plans to $749/mo / API pay-as-you-go from $15 per million characters |
| Rating |
Key Features
ElevenLabs
- Lifelike text-to-speech
- Voice cloning
- Voice library
- Multiple languages
- Speech to speech
Fish Audio
- Zero-shot voice cloning from 10-30 seconds of reference audio
- S1 flagship model with open-domain emotion and tone markers
- Pay-as-you-go API with WebSocket streaming and Python/TypeScript SDKs
- Open-weight self-hosting option under a commercial license
- Multilingual, cross-lingual speech with no phoneme dependency
Pros
ElevenLabs
- •Best-in-class voice realism
- •Incredible emotion and intonation
- •Easy to use API
- •Fast generation
Fish Audio
- •Same model quality already trusted in production by HeyGen and Retell
- •Genuinely usable free tier plus API pricing with no minimum commitment
- •Voice cloning quality holds up well even from short reference samples
Cons
ElevenLabs
- Can get expensive for long-form audio
- Requires careful prompting for specific inflections
- Ethical concerns around cloning
Fish Audio
- Credit-to-minute math on the consumer plans takes a minute to understand
- Best commercial voice cloning rights require a paid plan, not the free tier
- Self-hosting the open-weight models is an enterprise-level engagement, not a quick setup