ElevenLabs vs Competitors in 2025 + Real Samples!

In this ElevenLabs review, I’ll share its best features, pros and cons, plus actual AI voice samples from my own projects to help you decide if it’s right for you.

In fact, I’ve relied on ElevenLabs extensively for my own fantasy/lore YouTube channel, which has grown to 6K+ subscribers and achieved monetization — largely thanks to ElevenLabs.

ElevenLabs is an AI text-to-speech and voice cloning tool that transforms text into human-like voices across 32 languages.

It’s great for content creators, developers, and businesses seeking AI voicovers, dubbing, or transcription services. Think audiobooks, podcast production, or YouTube voiceovers.

Below I will share my personal experience with ElevenLabs. Let’s start with some voice samples.

ElevenLabs Voiceover Samples

ElevenLabs has great default voices and you can try them here with your own text. But my favorite voices are from their voice library where you can filter voices by usecase/gender/age.

David - British Storyteller voice is great for audiobooks. You can search these voices by name in voice library to use them.

(If on mobile, click “Listen in browser”)

NerdyNav (Nav) · ElevenLabs-David - British Storyteller-sample

Natasha - Valley girl is amazing for social media content. Sounds very relatable.

NerdyNav (Nav) · ElevenLabs-Natasha-ValleyGirl-Sample

Josh is a good premade voice, suited for YouTube. (Tip: Add text like “dramatic tone”, “sad” before your script to get more emotions. CAPITALIZATION helps for emphasis and ellipsis are also useful for pauses).

NerdyNav (Nav) · ElevenLabs - Josh

You can create your own custom AI voices or clone voices.

NerdyNav (Nav) · ElevenLabs - Joanne - Community - Voice

NerdyNav (Nav) · ElevenLabs - Knightely - Community - Voice

I’m attaching some more samples of community-submitted AI voices from Elevenlab’s Voice Lab that I liked. You can find and use the originals by searching the speaker’s name (like “Erin - Meditation Guide”).

If you want to compare ElevenLabs to alternatives like LOVO, Play.ht, and Murf, check out my comprehensive review of the 15 best AI voice generators with AI voiceover samples.

Key Features

1. AI Voiceover & Voice Generation

ElevenLabs’ core technology transforms written text into natural speech that closely resembles human voices.

With this feature, you can convert any text—scripts, articles, or stories—into spoken words with human-like qualities. The platform offers multiple AI models with varying capabilities to match specific needs.

• Four AI voice models to choose from:
  • Eleven Turbo V2: Fast processing (400ms generation) for English content
  • Eleven English V1: The original model with various styles in English
  • Eleven Multilingual V1: Covers 9 languages with lifelike voices
  • Eleven Multilingual V2: Expanded to 29 languages for global reach

The library includes over 40 pre-made voices in different accents (American, British, Indian, Australian, African) plus access to 10,000+ community-created voices.

These can be filtered by category, gender, age, accent, or specific use cases like conversational, social media, advertisements, or storytelling. Each voice comes with descriptive tags like calm, pleasant, childish, gentle, deep, or intense.

You can test the system for free on their homepage with up to 330 words before committing, making it practical for businesses evaluating voice options for customer service, marketing, or product development.

2. Voice Cloning & Customization

Voice cloning solves a fundamental problem for content creators and businesses: how to scale voice content without endless recording sessions.

This technology creates digital replicas from audio samples, enabling consistent voice production across all channels and touchpoints. For businesses, this means maintaining brand consistency while reducing production costs and timeframes.

Creating a custom voice follows a straightforward process:

• Upload voice samples (which remain private in your account)
• Name your voice and confirm you have usage rights
• Choose between instant cloning (quick but less precise) or professional cloning (takes up to a month but higher quality)

The free plan offers 3 custom voices, while the Creator plan expands this to 30 custom voices.

This technology has practical applications beyond marketing. For people with degenerative voice conditions, it provides a way to preserve their voice for future use. For businesses, it ensures continuity when spokespeople change or become unavailable.

3. AI Dubbing & Translation

Major content creators maintain channels in multiple languages because limiting content to one language significantly reduces potential reach and revenue. ElevenLabs addresses this market reality.

The AI dubbing feature translates and dubs content while preserving the original voice characteristics, opening global markets without the prohibitive costs of traditional dubbing.

The system supports 29 languages including French, German, Hindi, Arabic, Korean, and Italian, maintaining the original voice tone, style, and pacing in the translated content.

The process is straightforward:

• Upload your video/audio or provide a link from YouTube, TikTok, X, or Vimeo
• Select your source and target languages
• The system handles voice translation, speaker detection, and audio dubbing

Quality varies by language pair—English-to-Hindi generally works better than Hindi-to-English—but the technology continues to improve.

For businesses, this means faster market entry, reduced localization costs, and consistent brand voice across all regions. Educational institutions can make content accessible to international students without recreating materials from scratch.

4. Sound Effects

Sound design traditionally requires extensive libraries or custom recording sessions, creating bottlenecks in production workflows. ElevenLabs has streamlined this process.

The sound effects generator creates audio elements directly from text descriptions. You describe what you need—“rain on a tin roof,” “spaceship door opening,” or “children playing”—and the system generates four options to choose from.

This tool now includes:

• Short instrumental tracks (up to 22 seconds)
• Immersive soundscapes for setting scenes
• Character voices and custom dialogues

The partnership with Shutterstock has improved the variety and quality of sounds available, though the technology is still evolving in terms of accuracy and prompt adherence.

5. Voice Isolator & Voice Changing

The Voice Isolator extracts clear speech from noisy recordings. Upload your audio file, and it removes background sounds, leaving clean dialogue—essential for salvaging interviews, field recordings, or any audio captured in suboptimal conditions.

The Voice Changer (Speech-to-Speech tool) transforms voices while preserving natural qualities:

• Upload your voice recording
• Select a target voice from the library
• The system transforms your voice while maintaining tone, pitch, style, and emotional variations

This works best when input and output languages match, as cross-language transformations can affect pronunciation quality.

For production companies, these tools reduce reshoots and ADR sessions.

For podcasters and content creators, they enable consistent quality despite varying recording environments. Voice actors can expand their range without straining their vocal cords.

6. Studio: Long-Form Speech Editor

Long-form audio production traditionally requires significant studio time and post-production work. Studio addresses these inefficiencies.

This environment streamlines the production of extended audio content with multiple voices and chapters, functioning as a specialized workshop for long-form audio creation.

With Studio, you can:

• Import scripts via URL, document, or text paste
• Assign different voices to different characters or sections
• Add up to 200 chapters per project
• Customize voice quality and pronunciation for specific words
• Use auto-assignment of voices to speed up production

Free users can create up to three projects before upgrading, sufficient for evaluating the system’s capabilities.

The finished product can be downloaded as an MP3 file, ready for distribution.

For publishers, this means faster audiobook production at lower costs. For educational institutions, it enables the creation of accessible learning materials. For businesses, it facilitates the production of training materials and internal communications.

7. Custom Voice Design

Standard voice libraries often lack the specific characteristics needed for specialized projects. Custom voice design addresses this limitation.

Unlike voice cloning, which replicates an existing voice, this feature allows you to create entirely new synthetic voices from scratch in VoiceLab.

The process is efficient:

• Go to VoiceLab in your account
• Confirm usage rights
• Add the new voice with your desired characteristics

Your new voice becomes immediately available for use in any project. This has practical applications in branding, where a distinctive voice can become part of brand identity. For game developers and animation studios, it enables the creation of character voices that match specific creative requirements.

8. Speech-to-Speech Transformation

Voice transformation technology addresses the need to modify existing audio while preserving its expressive qualities.

Speech-to-Speech preserves the tone, rhythm, and expression of the original voice while transforming its fundamental characteristics. It maintains the human elements of speech that convey meaning and emotion.

The system requires only one minute of recorded speech to generate a synthetic version—significantly less than previous solutions that demanded extensive high-quality recordings.

This has practical applications for:

• Voice actors creating multiple character voices from a single recording
• Content creators maintaining consistent narration across projects
• Media companies adapting content for different audiences
• Localization teams preserving emotional content across languages

For businesses, this means more efficient voice production and consistent quality across all audio content, reducing costs and improving audience engagement.

9. Voice Settings & AI Models

The difference between artificial-sounding speech and natural voices often depends on fine adjustments. ElevenLabs provides control over these elements.

The platform offers adjustable parameters for fine-tuning generated speech:

Voice stability works on a 0-100% scale:

• Lower values (around 1%) create expressive speech with natural emotions and intonations
• Higher values (around 97%) produce more consistent, monotonous speech for formal content

Additional adjustments include:

• Clarity+Similarity Enhancement to improve voice clarity
• Style Exaggeration to create more dramatic speech (starting at 0.0 for faster generation)
• Speaker Boost to improve similarity to the original voice

For advanced users, the system supports special commands:

• Add pauses with <break time ="1.0s" /> or simple dashes
• Insert specific emotional cues
• Provide alternate pronunciations for unusual words

The AI Speech Classifier tool can identify whether audio was generated by ElevenLabs—useful for verification and compliance purposes.

10. Audio Export & Sharing

The basic export option in ElevenLabs is MP3 download, but the platform also offers:

• Public links that don’t require listeners to register
• Embedded audio players for websites or blogs with Audio Native

The Audio Native feature serves content publishers:

• Provide your website URL
• Customize the audio player appearance and voice
• Get an iFrame script to embed on your site
• Give visitors audio versions of your content

While the platform doesn’t yet offer advanced sharing options like password protection or targeted distribution, the existing tools integrate AI-generated audio into content ecosystems.

Pricing

ElevenLabs offers tiered pricing starting with a free plan. Paid plans start from just USD 5 and scale up to enterprise solutions costing $1k+ and supporting huge volumes.

Always refer to the official ElevenLabs website for latest pricing as their pricing and offers can change.

User Reviews/Reputation

I asked my readers as well as spent some time reading through ElevenLabs reviews on Reddit, Trustpilot and G2 to compare with my own experience.

Likes

• Voice Quality: Users consistently praise how natural the voices sound. I agree - the voices have a human quality that works well for narratives and video content.
• Simple Interface: Many people mentioned learning the platform quickly without technical knowledge. The controls and options are straightforward.
• Voice Cloning: Both myself and other reviewers were impressed by how the system can reproduce a voice from minimal audio samples.
• Multilingual: With over 32 languages and diverse accents, it handles international projects well and can be used in business settings reliably.
• AI Dubbing in 29 languages: Users working with multilingual content found this feature especially useful for reaching international audiences.
• Time Savings: YouTubers, content creators, and media professionals save a lot of time with ElevenLabs.
• Support Team: Customer service experiences were mostly positive. When I had questions, I received responses within 24 hours.

Dislikes

• Cost Concerns: Credits get used quickly with longer projects, and unused credits don’t roll over.
• Technical Issues: Some users reported occasional glitches - failed exports, audio volume inconsistencies, or unwanted background noise. I did not encounter these issues.
• Pronunciation: Getting certain words pronounced correctly can be difficult.

On the whole, ElevenLabs delivers what it promises - realistic voices that save creators enormous amounts of time despite some occasional glitches. Professional content creators can trust ElevenLabs over alternatives for its superior AI voice models and diverse collection of voices.

Making Money with ElevenLabs

You can make money with ElevenLabs by using its text-to-speech and voice cloning tools in a few simple ways:

• Monetize your Cloned Voice: Record 30 minutes of your voice, upload it to the Voice Library, and share it. You earn cash or credits whenever someone uses it—passive income while you sleep.
• Create Content: Use the AI voice generator to produce voiceovers for audiobooks, podcasts, or YouTube videos, then sell or monetize them.
• Faceless YouTube Channels: Many YouTubers are using ElevenLabs to create YouTube videos in niches like history, documentaries, true crime, fantasy lore, etc and making a significant monthly income.
• Translate Videos: Dub your existing videos into multiple languages with AI dubbing and reach a global audience to boost views and ad revenue.
• Offer Freelance Services: Make custom AI voices or transcriptions (with Scribe) for clients, like businesses needing narration or subtitles.

Start with the free plan, experiment, and scale up as you go!

Can I Monetize ElevenLabs on YouTube?

Yes, YouTube channels using ElevenLabs for voiceovers can be monetized if the content is original, valuable, and follows YouTube’s guidelines, including being transparent about AI use.

I was able to monetize a faceless fantasy/lore YouTube channel using ElevenLabs and have reached 6k subscribers so far.

Make sure to follow these guidelines:

• Content Value and Originality: The content needs to be valuable and engaging for viewers, not just basic AI-generated reading. It should offer something unique or interesting.
• Adherence to YouTube’s Guidelines: The content must strictly follow YouTube’s guidelines on originality, creativity, and transparency. This means it can’t be clickbait, spam, or plagiarized.
• Transparency: You need to be transparent about using AI-generated voices in your content. Read YouTube blog on AI
• Copyright: The content should not be based on recognizably copyrighted material generated by AI.

Here is complete list of YouTube monetization rules.