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ElevenLabs vs Speechlab

Two fact sheets from our own research, side by side — pricing, platforms, API access and status re-checked by us rather than quoted from the vendors. ElevenLabs starts at $6, Speechlab at $0.60. Both have a free tier. Both ship a public API.

Side by side

FactElevenLabsSpeechlab
CategoryText-to-SpeechVideo Dubbing & Translation
Pricing modelFreemiumFreemium
Starts at$6 month$0.60 minute
Public APIYesYes
PlatformsWeb, API, iOS, AndroidWeb, API
CompanyElevenLabsSpeechlab, Inc.
Launched20222022
Last verifiedSep 6, 2026Sep 6, 2026

What our research says

ElevenLabs

The quality bar for synthetic speech and the easiest voice API to start on, but the credit meter is the actual product and it empties faster than the plan names imply.

Pros

  • Output quality and language coverage remain ahead of most rivals
  • One account spans speech, dubbing, recognition, effects and agents
  • The first paid tier is $6, so testing commercially costs almost nothing

Cons

  • Credits rather than minutes, so cost per finished second shifts with model and settings
  • Commercial licence and instant cloning are both withheld from the free tier
  • Professional voice cloning starts only at Creator ($22)
  • Team seats do not appear until the $299 Scale plan

Speechlab

A dubbing workbench rather than a one-click button: you get a diarised transcript, an editable translation and per-speaker voice assignment before anything renders. That review loop is the reason to pick it over cheaper tools, and the per-minute meter is the reason to price a project before uploading a back catalogue.

Pros

  • Segment-level re-dub: fixing one line does not force a full re-render
  • Speaker diarisation with a separate voice assigned per speaker
  • Voice cloning carries the original speaker into the target language
  • Transcript and translation editor tied to the waveform, so timing is fixable by hand

Cons

  • Per-minute billing scales badly on long libraries
  • Free tier of two projects is too small to judge quality on real work
  • Enterprise pricing is quote-only, so budgeting needs a sales call
  • API is gated behind Pro and above

Which one fits

Choose ElevenLabs if you need

  • Product teams adding narration or voice agents without training a model
  • Creators dubbing video into other languages with the speaker's timbre kept
  • Audiobook and podcast producers who need a licensable cloned voice

Choose Speechlab if you need

  • publishers localising an existing library
  • course and podcast teams shipping multi-language versions
  • workflows that need a human check between translation and render

All Speechlab alternatives →Browse all Text-to-Speech