⏱ 8 Reading Time
- 01What Is Fish Audio?
- 02What Is ElevenLabs?
- 03How Do Fish Audio and ElevenLabs Compare on Pricing?
- 04How Do Fish Audio and ElevenLabs Compare on Voice Cloning?
- 05How Do Fish Audio and ElevenLabs Compare on Features and Languages?
- 06Which Tool Should You Choose?
- 07Who Should Use Fish Audio vs ElevenLabs?
- 08What Are the Best Alternatives to Fish Audio and ElevenLabs?
- 09Frequently Asked Questions
- 10Verdict
Fish Audio and ElevenLabs both generate AI voice clones and text-to-speech audio, but they target different budgets. Fish Audio undercuts ElevenLabs on price by 3x to 11x depending on the tier, while ElevenLabs leads on language coverage, voice marketplace size, and enterprise features.
What Is Fish Audio?
Fish Audio is an AI voice cloning and text-to-speech platform built by Hanabi AI Inc. that generates a working voice clone from 10 seconds of reference audio. It runs on the open-source Fish Speech and OpenAudio S1/S2 model families and exposes both a web app and a pay-as-you-go API.
Hanabi AI Inc. released Fish Audio in 2024, building on founder Shijia Liao’s earlier open-source work on GPT-SoVITS, Bert-VITS2, and So-VITS-SVC (Hanabi AI, company announcement). The platform streams audio at roughly 100ms latency, which supports real-time conversational agents and live narration. Fish Audio’s community voice library holds more than 2,000,000 shared voices across 30-plus languages, including English, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, French, German, Arabic, and Spanish (Fish Audio official site).
| Attribute | Value |
|---|---|
| Company | Hanabi AI Inc. |
| Release Year | 2024 |
| Pricing | $0 to $999/month across 4 consumer tiers, plus custom Enterprise |
| Platforms | Web app, REST/streaming API, Discord community |
| Key Feature | Voice cloning from 10 seconds of reference audio |
What Is ElevenLabs?
ElevenLabs is an AI audio platform, founded in 2022 by Mateusz Staniszewski and Piotr Dąbkowski, that produces text-to-speech, voice cloning, dubbing, and conversational voice agents across 90-plus languages. It reached an approximately $11 billion valuation after a $500 million Series C led by Sequoia Capital in February 2026 (Taskade, ElevenLabs company history).
ElevenLabs organizes its stack into three product lines: ElevenCreative for content generation, ElevenAgents for voice agents, and ElevenAPI for developer access. Its Eleven v3 model generates speech in 70-plus languages with inline emotion tags such as [whispers] and [excited], while the Flash v2.5 model renders speech in under 75 milliseconds across 32 languages for real-time use cases (Coval, ElevenLabs review 2026). The Voice Library marketplace hosts close to 10,000 community-shared voices, and ElevenLabs has paid creators more than $10 million in royalties (Taskade).
| Attribute | Value |
|---|---|
| Company | ElevenLabs (Eleven Labs Inc.) |
| Release Year | 2022 |
| Pricing | $0 to $990/month across 6 tiers, plus custom Enterprise |
| Platforms | Web app, REST API, mobile SDKs, ElevenAgents platform |
| Key Feature | Professional Voice Cloning with studio-grade fidelity |
How Do Fish Audio and ElevenLabs Compare on Pricing?
Fish Audio’s paid tiers start at $15/month and top out at $999/month; ElevenLabs starts at $6/month and tops out at $990/month for its Business tier, with both companies offering custom Enterprise contracts.
Fish Audio prices its plans on both monthly and annual billing, with a 50% annual discount active as of this writing (Fish Audio official pricing page):
| Plan | Monthly Price | Annual Price (per month) | Credits/Month | Generation Minutes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | 8,000 | ~7 minutes |
| Plus | $15 | $5.50 | 250,000 | ~200 minutes |
| Pro | $100 | $37.50 | 2,000,000 | ~1,620 minutes |
| Max | $999 | $749 | 25,000,000 | ~6,250 minutes |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Custom volume | Custom |
ElevenLabs prices six tiers with no bundled annual discount as steep as Fish Audio’s, based on figures verified against ElevenLabs’ own pricing page (ComparEdge, ElevenLabs pricing tracker, July 2026):
| Plan | Monthly Price | Credits/Month | Approx. Audio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 10,000 | ~10 minutes |
| Starter | $6 | Limited (entry API access) | Entry-level |
| Creator | $22 | 100,000+ | ~1.6 hours |
| Pro | $99 | 500,000 characters | Agency-scale |
| Scale | $299 | 1,800,000 | High-volume |
| Business | $990 | 6,000,000 | Enterprise-scale |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Custom |
On API access specifically, Fish Audio charges $15 per million UTF-8 bytes for its S1 and S2 models (Fish Audio developer docs). ElevenLabs charges $0.05 per 1,000 characters for its Flash and Turbo models and $0.10 per 1,000 characters for Multilingual v2 and v3 (ElevenLabs API pricing, cited via CognitiveFuture, July 2026). That converts to $50 and $100 per million characters, respectively. Fish Audio’s API undercuts ElevenLabs by a factor of 3.3x against the cheaper ElevenLabs models and 6.7x against Multilingual v2/v3.
How Do Fish Audio and ElevenLabs Compare on Voice Cloning?
Fish Audio clones a voice from 10 seconds of audio at every paid tier; ElevenLabs splits cloning into two products, Instant Voice Cloning from about 1 minute of audio and Professional Voice Cloning that requires 30-plus minutes of studio-quality recording.
Fish Audio’s cloning pipeline builds a usable voice model from 10 to 30 seconds of reference audio, according to the company’s own homepage copy. The Free plan restricts generated audio to personal, non-commercial use; commercial rights unlock starting on the Plus plan at $15/month (Fish Audio FAQ).
ElevenLabs’ Instant Voice Cloning (IVC) creates a clone from roughly 1 minute of sample audio and is available starting on the $6/month Starter plan. Professional Voice Cloning (PVC) demands 30 minutes or more of professionally recorded source audio and produces a clone that independent testers describe as indistinguishable from the original speaker in casual listening tests; PVC requires the $22/month Creator plan or higher (ElevenLabs Magazine, 2026 guide).
Third-party blind A/B testing from TextToLab found Fish Audio’s S2 Pro model ranked first by Bradley-Terry score, 1.7x higher than the next-best model tested, while ElevenLabs scored higher on Arena ELO ranking in the same comparison at 4x to 8x the API cost (TextToLab, Fish Audio pricing analysis, May 2026).
How Do Fish Audio and ElevenLabs Compare on Features and Languages?
ElevenLabs supports more total languages (90-plus across its speech-to-text stack) and a larger voice marketplace (10,000 voices); Fish Audio supports 30-plus languages but wins on emotion-tag granularity and open-source model access.
| Feature | Fish Audio | ElevenLabs |
|---|---|---|
| TTS languages | 30+ | 70+ (Eleven v3) |
| STT languages | Included in TTS models | 90+ (Scribe v2) |
| Real-time latency | ~100ms | ~75ms (Flash v2.5) |
| Voice marketplace size | 2,000,000+ community voices | ~10,000 curated voices |
| Emotion control | Inline tags: [angry], [sad], [whispering] | Inline tags: [whispers], [excited] (Eleven v3) |
| Open-source models | Yes — Fish Speech, OpenAudio S1/S2 on GitHub | No |
| Dubbing/translation | Audio Translation tool | Dubbing Studio, 30+ languages, lip-sync |
| Enterprise compliance | SOC2, Zero Data Retention, on-premise (Enterprise tier) | On-premise, government vertical, AIUC-1 insurance certification |
Fish Audio publishes its core models — Fish Speech, OpenAudio S1, and OpenAudio S2 — as open-source repositories on GitHub, which lets developers self-host inference instead of routing every request through the hosted API (Hanabi AI, OpenAudio S1 launch announcement). ElevenLabs keeps its models closed and instead differentiates through Scribe v2, a transcription model with sub-150ms real-time latency across 90-plus languages, and ElevenAgents, a platform that converts existing chat agents into voice agents from a single prompt (Coval, ElevenLabs review 2026).
Which Tool Should You Choose?
Choose Fish Audio for per-character API cost, open-source flexibility, and fast low-cost voice cloning; choose ElevenLabs for language breadth, enterprise compliance, and studio-grade Professional Voice Cloning.
Choose Fish Audio if:
- Run a high-volume API workload where per-character cost determines margin
- Need to self-host or fine-tune an open-source TTS model
- Clone a voice from a short 10-second sample without a 30-minute studio session
- Build for 30 core languages rather than 90
- Operate on a startup or indie-developer budget under $50/month
Choose ElevenLabs if:
- Require 70-plus TTS languages or 90-plus STT languages for a global product
- Need Professional Voice Cloning that passes casual-listener blind tests
- Deploy voice agents at Fortune 500 scale with government or on-premise compliance requirements
- Depend on Dubbing Studio for lip-synced video localization
- Prioritize the largest curated voice marketplace over raw price
Who Should Use Fish Audio vs ElevenLabs?
Solo developers, indie podcasters, and cost-sensitive API builders fit Fish Audio; agencies, enterprise localization teams, and voice-agent platforms fit ElevenLabs.
Fish Audio serves solo indie developers building voice agents on a metered budget, podcasters and YouTubers who need commercial-use clones under $15/month, and researchers who want to fine-tune an open-source TTS model instead of calling a closed API. ElevenLabs serves marketing agencies producing multilingual video campaigns through Dubbing Studio, enterprise teams that require SOC2 and on-premise deployment, and companies building customer-facing voice agents on ElevenAgents where 90-plus language coverage and sub-100ms Flash v2.5 latency matter more than the per-character rate.
What Are the Best Alternatives to Fish Audio and ElevenLabs?
Cartesia, PlayHT, and Murf AI serve as the three most-cited alternatives when Fish Audio’s price or ElevenLabs’ feature set does not fit a specific workflow.
- Cartesia prioritizes ultra-low-latency streaming speech for real-time voice agents, positioned as a speed-first alternative to ElevenLabs.
- PlayHT offers a credit-based pricing model comparable to ElevenLabs with a stronger focus on long-form audiobook narration.
- Murf AI targets corporate training and e-learning voiceover production with a script-editing interface rather than an API-first design.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Fish Audio cheaper than ElevenLabs?
Yes. Fish Audio’s Plus plan starts at $15/month ($5.50/month billed annually) versus ElevenLabs’ Creator plan at $22/month, and Fish Audio’s API rate of $15 per million characters undercuts ElevenLabs’ $50-$100 per million character rate.
Does Fish Audio support commercial use on the free plan?
No. Fish Audio’s free plan restricts generated audio to personal, non-commercial projects; commercial rights require the $15/month Plus plan or higher (Fish Audio FAQ).
How much reference audio does each platform need to clone a voice?
Fish Audio clones a voice from 10 to 30 seconds of audio at every tier. ElevenLabs needs about 1 minute for Instant Voice Cloning or 30-plus minutes of studio audio for Professional Voice Cloning.
Which platform supports more languages?
ElevenLabs supports more languages overall — 70-plus for Eleven v3 TTS and 90-plus for Scribe v2 transcription — compared with Fish Audio’s 30-plus supported languages.
Verdict
Fish Audio delivers the lower price at every comparable tier and matches ElevenLabs’ cloning quality in third-party blind testing, while ElevenLabs delivers broader language coverage, a larger voice marketplace, and enterprise compliance features that Fish Audio’s smaller team has not yet built.