ElevenLabs

Rating reflects ElevenLabs' documented plans and capabilities as of September 2026 plus our own sessions. Some vendor links on this site are affiliate links; they never affect a rating. See our disclosure and method.

What it does

ElevenLabs turns text into speech that most listeners cannot tell from a human reading. That is the core, and it is still the reason to pay. Around it the company has built a full audio and video studio it calls ElevenCreative: voice design from a text description, instant and professional voice cloning, a Voice Library of licensed voices, Dubbing v2 for translating video while keeping the original performance, Eleven Music for generating songs with vocals, sound effects, Scribe v2 transcription, and since May 2026 a Studio Agent that drafts a video timeline from a chat brief. Image and video generation arrived in August 2026 through third-party models, including Black Forest Labs' FLUX 3 and ByteDance's Seedance 2.5.

The model lineup matters. Eleven v3 is the expressive flagship, covering 70 or more languages with inline audio tags for emotion, and it caps at 5,000 characters per request. Eleven v3 Conversational is the real-time version at about 280 milliseconds of latency, built for voice agents. Multilingual v2 is the safe choice for consistent long-form narration across 29 languages, and Flash v2.5 is the fast, half-price model for interactive apps at about 75 milliseconds. Turbo v2.5 is deprecated in favor of Flash.

The company sells the same six price points across three product families: ElevenCreative for content, ElevenAgents for conversational voice agents, and ElevenAPI for developers. In May 2026 it cut API and agent prices and introduced pay as you go, with agent minutes at $0.08 on the Starter plan. If you are a creator, only the ElevenCreative rate card applies to you.

Where it wins

• Voice quality. Nothing in the suit sounds as natural over a long read. Eleven v3's audio tags let you mark a line as whispered or excited instead of fighting a slider, and the general-availability release in February 2026 sharply cut the structured-text errors (numbers, formulas, phone numbers) that plagued the alpha.
• Dubbing. Dubbing v2, launched May 28, 2026, conditions on the original audio rather than the transcript, so tone, pacing and emphasis carry across languages. It reached the API in August. For a YouTube channel going multilingual it is the strongest one-click option we have heard.
• Voice agents. ElevenAgents runs on phone, web, WhatsApp, Slack, SMS, Telegram and support desks, and the August 2026 Spotlight feature scores live calls against criteria you write in plain sentences.
• Cloning rules that protect you. A Professional Voice Clone can only be of your own voice, verified by reading lines aloud. That limits abuse and means the voice in your Voice Library is genuinely yours to license.
• Provenance. AI audio is watermarked with SynthID, built with Google DeepMind, and a free detector launched in June 2026.

Where it loses

• Credit math. Text to speech is one credit per character, so the numbers on the plan cards are honest for narration. Everything else burns faster: transcription is about 330 credits a minute, music about 900, voice changing about 1,000, and clean Dubbing Studio output about 10,000 a minute. A $22 Creator plan is roughly 121 minutes of narration or about 12 minutes of studio-grade dubbing.
• Two rate cards for one plan. The pricing page gives Creator 121,000 credits; the API pricing page prints 220,000 characters for the same $22. The subscription pool is what your account meters. Read the page that matches the product you are buying.
• Training on by default. Self-serve accounts contribute data to model improvement unless you flip the Improve the models for everyone toggle under Terms and privacy. Enterprise is off by default.
• No commercial use on Free. The free plan is a demo. The commercial license starts at Starter.
• Sprawl. The product now spans images, video, music, agents and a node-based Flows canvas. If you wanted a voice tool, the interface has grown around you.

Plans and pricing, September 2026

Annual billing is priced as ten months. Enterprise adds custom data terms, HIPAA agreements, SSO and higher concurrency on request. Prices were cut during 2026, so older guides that show Scale at $330 are out of date; the figures above match the live pricing page in September 2026.

Score breakdown

Alternatives

• Descript if you want voices inside an editor: it clones your voice for corrections and does 30-language dubbing on its Business plan.
• Canva if your voiceover is one small part of a social video and you would rather stay in one design tool.
• ChatGPT if what you actually want is a voice to talk to rather than a voice to publish.

Quick answers

Is ElevenLabs free?

There is a free plan with 10,000 credits a month, which is roughly ten minutes of speech, but it carries no commercial license. The first paid plan, Starter, is $6 a month and adds the commercial license and instant voice cloning.

Can I clone someone else's voice with ElevenLabs?

Not with a professional clone. ElevenLabs' documentation says you can only create a Professional Voice Clone of your own voice, even with the other person's consent, and it verifies you by having you read lines out loud. Instant cloning needs one to two minutes of audio and is meant for your own voice too.

How much speech does the $22 Creator plan buy?

About 121 minutes of narration a month, since standard text to speech costs one credit per character and Creator includes 121,000 credits. Dubbing, music and voice changing burn credits far faster, so a Creator plan used mostly for dubbing runs out in minutes, not hours.

More cards

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