Best FREE ElevenLabs Alternatives & Opensource Text to Speech Models (2025)

ElevenLabs is a great AI voice generator, but it comes with a hefty price tag.

This guide lists free and open-source text-to-speech alternatives to ElevenLabs that sound just as natural or better.

Quick Recommendation

Update Sep 2025: If you want the best AI voices that sound very real, I am now using Fish Audio/Open Audio S1 and strongly recommend it.

Listen to more voice samples

Fish Audio outperforms ElevenLabs in public blind tests (TTS-Arena2) and offers insane value:

• S1 Mini model free for personal use (open-sourced under CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0)
• S1 Full model for commercial use
  • $9.99/month - 200 minutes of voice gen, commercial use (80% cheaper than ElevenLabs)
  • Pay-as-you-go API: $15 per 1M characters (vs ElevenLabs’ $330/2M chars)

Note: If you specifically need a fully open-source solution for commercial projects, skip to Chatterbox below.

Best ElevenLabs Alternatives - At a Glance

To run these models you need some technical setup and a decent GPU. 👉 If you don’t have one, you can rent online for cheap (starting $0.20/hr) from RunPod.

Prefer an easy‑to‑use online UI instead? Check out my roundup of the Best AI Voice Generators.

Best Open-Source AI Voice Generators

1. Fish Audio (Open Audio S1)

Fish Audio, also known as Open Audio S1, is the closest you’ll get to ElevenLabs quality - and in many cases, it’s actually better.

Their 4B full-featured flagship model achieved the #1 ranking on TTS-Arena (leaderboard for best AI text to speech models).

Voice Samples

Just listen to these voice samples and you’ll get why I like it so much:

You can either use their default voices or 100s of voices cloned by the community.

Each voice can be made to act specific “emotions” using speech tags:

Why Fish Audio is My Top Pick:

• ✅ Sounds insanely real: Fish audio voices show emotion, pause, breathe, and much more.
• ✅ Incredible Pricing: $9.99/month for 200 minutes of speech or $15 per 1M characters (vs ElevenLabs’ $330 for 2M chars!)
• ✅ Free for Personal Projects: Download Open Audio S1-mini and run the open-source model locally
• ✅ Advanced Emotion Control: You can add tags like “(laugh)”, “(whisper)”, “(sob)” for expressive speech
• ✅ Multilingual support: Currently supports English, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, French, German, Arabic, and Spanish.
• ✅ Very High-fidelity Voice Cloning: I think it’s the best AI voice cloning in the industry. Check Elon Musk and Donald Trump voice clones on their website

Limitation: Fish Audio is pretty new, so it currently has fewer voices than ElevenLabs’ community voice library (10 000+ voices). If that’s important to you, go for ElevenLabs.

Pricing Comparison

How to Use Fish Audio: 2 Methods

1. Cloud Service (Full model + commercial use allowed): They offer their best 4B S1 model on Fish Audio website.

2. Self-Host (Free for Personal): Their 0.5B distilled model OpenAudio S1-mini can be downloaded and run locally. Try at HuggingFace

Commercial Users: The $9.99/month plan or the pay-as-you-go API ($15/1M chars) is a no-brainer compared to ElevenLabs’ pricing which can cost upwards of $100+/month. You get better quality at 80% less cost.

Get Started with Fish Audio

2. Chatterbox

If you absolutely need a 100% free solution for commercial use, Chatterbox is your best bet.

Github Link | License: MIT | GPU: 8-10GB recommended

Chatterbox is an MIT-licensed AI text to speech model from Resemble AI. It suprised the open-source AI community by outperforming ElevenLabs - in blind tests—63.8% of listeners preferred Chatterbox’s output (link to study).

Chatterbox also allows great quality voice cloning with just 5-10 seconds of reference audio. Works best for English but has multilingual support.

Voice Samples

Listen to more voice samples on their official demo page.

You can also try Chatterbox English TTS or multilingual TTS on Huggingspace.

Key Features

• 23-language support including English, Spanish, Mandarin, Hindi, and Arabic
• Emotion intensity control with “exaggeration/intensity” slider for dramatic effect
• Built-in watermarking (PerTh) for synthetic audio detection
• For production use, they also offer a paid API with ultra-low latency of sub 200ms

Pros

• ✅ Genuinely rivals ElevenLabs quality
• ✅ Extensive multilingual support for text to speech and voice cloning
• ✅ MIT license (commercial use allowed)
• ✅ Active development and community
• ✅ Paid API also available if you don’t want to self-host

Cons

• ❌ Requires 8GB+ VRAM for optimal performance
• ❌ No official Docker image yet
• ❌ Windows users need WSL

Best For

Chatterbox is best for multilingual content creation and voice applications where you need fine emotional control or voice cloning and don’t mind the GPU requirement.

3. Kokoro TTS

HuggingFace Demo - deploy on Runpod

Kokoro is an 82-million-parameter model that delivers good quality AI voiceovers comparable to larger models but significantly faster and more affordable.

Voice Samples

Key Features

• Only 82 million parameters, so Kokoro is extremely fast and cost-efficient to run
• Runs on CPU at real-time speed (on Apple M1 MacBook Air it averages 0.7× real-time)
• Fourteen built-in voices; switch speaker with a single line of code
• Supports English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Chinese and Hindi through the Misaki G2P module

Pros

— ✅ Starts instantly on a Raspberry Pi 4
— ✅ Apache-2.0 licence – commercial projects allowed
— ✅ No CUDA required, so zero GPU rental cost
— ✅ Installs with a plain pip install kokoro

Cons

— ❌ Cannot clone new voices; you are limited to the bundled speakers
— ❌ Requires espeak-ng (one extra package install on Windows)
— ❌ Voices have a neutral “news-anchor” style with little emotional variation

Best For

Kokoro is excellent for generating AI voiceovers quickly and at a low cost. It works well for mobile apps, smart kiosks, and any project requiring a compact, royalty-free AI narrator that operates offline.

4. Coqui TTS/XTTS v2

XTTS v2 needs only six seconds of audio to copy a voice across seventeen languages. It is free for personal use and runs on a single mid-range GPU.

The easiest way to use it is via Coqui TTS. You can start for free with its Python library which supports 100s of TTS models.

• Creates a new speaker with only six seconds of reference audio
• Seventeen languages including English, Spanish, Hindi, Japanese, Polish and Arabic
• Outputs 24 kHz, 16-bit PCM audio
• Part of the Coqui ecosystem, so it plugs into Coqui Studio, Coqui API and the open-source TTS library
• Coqui supports a large number of TTS models including:
  • xtts-v2
  • Tortoise
  • Bark
  • Tacotron
  • Fastspeech and more.

Note: The Coqui code is released under the MPL license.

What does this mean? The TTS code and models have explicit licenses. TTS as a code base is under MPL2.0 (allows commercial use) and each model has its own license (may not allow commercial use). The model creator chooses the license.

xtts is free for personal use only.

Key Features

• Creates a new speaker with only six seconds of reference audio
• Seventeen languages including English, Spanish, Hindi, Japanese, Polish and Arabic
• Outputs 24 kHz, 16-bit PCM audio
• Part of the Coqui ecosystem, so it plugs into Coqui Studio, Coqui API and the open-source TTS library

Pros

• ✅ Easy-to-use colab notebook.

• ✅ Multiple emotional tones and styles

• ✅ You can generate your own voices from text prompts plus fuse two voices using Voice fusion.

• ✅ Voice cloning is fast and high quality.

• ✅ Best voices for fantasy/storytelling use cases.

Cons

• ❌ Commercial license for XTTS model is paid.

Best For

Coqui TTS/xtts-v2 is best for AI voice generation in non-commercial prototypes, multilingual narration, or any hobby project where you need the same voice in ten languages without re-recording.

5. Tortoise TTS

Tortoise offers high quality AI text to speech but at low speed. A ten-minute wait can give you audio that passes for human speech, which is why it can be worth it for audiobook production.

Key Features

• Diffusion model built for accurate prosody and speaker similarity
• Clones a voice with roughly three minutes of clean audio
• Eight-candidate ensemble mode picks the best output automatically

Pros

• ✅ Output often passes for human speech in blind tests
• ✅ Apache-2.0 licence; commercial use is allowed
• ✅ Runs offline; no API calls or credits
  You can adjust how the voice talks—its tone, feeling, speed, and more—by changing the text prompt you give it (Like typing “I am sad” in text makes the ai voice sound sadder).

Cons

• ❌ Speed is slow: about one sentence every two minutes on a mid-range GPU
• ❌ Download size exceeds 10 GB; several checkpoints required
• ❌ Speaker identity drifts if prompts are too short or noisy

Best For

Audiobooks, podcasts, or any project where quality matters more than generation speed.

6. GPT-SoVITS

GPT-SoVITS bundles every helper you need—ASR, audio splitting, one-minute fine-tuning—into one web page. It is the quickest way to turn a short recording into a working voice clone.

Key Features

• GPT style encoder plus SoVITS vocoder for voice cloning and singing
• WebUI includes ASR, audio separation, and one-click dataset slicing
• Cross-lingual synthesis: reference audio in one language, prompt in another

Pros

• ✅ New voice ready after one minute of training data
• ✅ Inference runs faster than real-time on an RTX 4090
• ✅ MIT licence; commercial use is permitted

Cons

• ❌ First install downloads 6 GB of models and tools
• ❌ Singing output can sound metallic if the reference has noise
• ❌ Windows requires Visual Studio Build Tools before pip install will finish

Best For

Creators who need quick voice doubles or royalty-free singing vocals without hiring session singers.

6. Piper

Piper is a C++ inference engine that loads quantized models and speaks instantly on a Raspberry Pi. If your product must work offline on cheap hardware, Piper is the smallest reliable option.

Key Features

• ONNX and quantized TensorRT models for x86, ARM and MIPS
• Model files range from 30 MB to 90 MB
• Supports English, Spanish, French, German, Italian and more via espeak-ng

Pros

• ✅ Real-time speech on a $35 Raspberry Pi 4
• ✅ Apache-2.0 licence – commercial embeds are fine
• ✅ No Python stack needed; static binaries compile to a few megabytes

Cons

• ❌ Voices sound flat; no emotion control
• ❌ Cannot clone new speakers – you’re stuck with the released checkpoints
• ❌ Phoneme mis-stress can occur if espeak-ng is misconfigured

Best For

Personal home assistants, Kiosks, GPS units or any device that needs tiny, royalty-free prompts without a fan.

7. F5-TTS

F5-TTS is a free and fast AI voice generator which offers great quality voiceovers on your local PC.

It swaps diffusion for flow matching, cutting generation steps from hundreds to fewer than thirty. You get clean audio faster, and the MIT licence covers commercial work.

Key Features

• Flow-matching decoder with Sway sampling for stable prosody
• Clones a speaker with roughly ten seconds of audio
• Handles mixed-language prompts without extra tokens

Pros

• ✅ Inference runs at 3× real-time on an RTX 4070
• ✅ Training code is included – roll your own voice in an afternoon
• ✅ MIT licence – sell the output without legal headaches

Cons

• ❌ Still needs a GPU; CPU fallback is experimental and slow
• ❌ Voice similarity drops if the reference clip has background noise
• ❌ No built-in emotion tags – style control is limited to prompt wording

Best For

YouTube narrators, course creators or anyone who wants good clones today and the freedom to monetise tomorrow.

8. Dia by Nari Labs

Dia writes an entire conversation in one pass, complete with speaker tags, breaths and laughs. It is built for scripts, not single sentences.

Key Features

• Multi-speaker output using [S1], [S2] tags in one prompt
• Generates non-verbal cues: breath, cough, laugh, throat-clear
• 1.6-billion parameters, ~8 GB VRAM for inference

Pros

• ✅ Single call produces ready-to-use dialogue audio
• ✅ Apache-2.0 licence—commercial use is allowed
• ✅ Speaker turns and emotions are timed naturally

Cons

• ❌ GPU-only; no CPU fallback yet
• ❌ Float32 model uses ~8 GB VRAM (keeps cheaper GPUs out)
• ❌ Prompt syntax is strict; missing tags create garbled overlaps

Best For

Podcast dramas, game NPC chatter, or any scene with two or more speakers talking back and forth.

9. Higgs Audio

BosonAI Higgs Audio v2 is a 5.8 B audio LLM. It clones a voice from three seconds. It laughs, whispers, or sobs on command. All runs in a free Colab.

Voice Samples

Cloning character voices in Shrek:

Video showing live translation of speech using Higgs audio:

Key Features

• 24 kHz neural codec at 25 fps
• ChatML tags steer mood and speaker
• Apache code, weights on Hugging Face
• One pip line installs server and demo

Pros

• ✅ Beats ElevenLabs on emotion and MOS
• ✅ 40 ms latency on RTX 4090
• ✅ Zero-shot, no fine-tune needed
• ✅ 50 plus languages out of box
• ✅ Full repo open, not locked API

Cons

• ❌ Weights CC-BY-NC-SA, commercial use is paid
• ❌ 10 GB VRAM minimum, 24 GB for big batches
• ❌ Output 24 kHz only, no 48 kHz yet
• ❌ Tiny community, few fine-tune guides
• ❌ 13 GB download, breaks free Colab timeouts

Best For

Non-commercial usage, multilingual voice cloning, and multi speaker AI voice generation.

10. StyleTTS 2

StyleTTS 2 treats speech like an image: a diffusion network paints each phoneme until it sounds human. The result is close to studio speech, but you pay in VRAM and training time.

Key Features

• Diffusion decoder trained with adversarial and WavLM losses for natural rhythm
• Latent prosody model lets you transfer speaking style across voices
• Zero-shot voice cloning available with a short reference clip

Pros

• ✅ Published scores match human ratings on LJSpeech and VCTK
• ✅ MIT licence – commercial use is allowed
• ✅ Community Gradio and Docker images are one click away

Cons

• ❌ Needs 12 GB+ VRAM for full-quality inference
• ❌ Fine-tuning requires a 24 GB card and several hours
• ❌ Slower than flow-matching models; real-time is only possible with a 4090 and batch size 1

Best For

Audiobooks, corporate explainers or any job where listeners expect broadcast-level flow.

Some other notable open source AI TTS models:

• Mycroft AI - great for offline personal assistants
• Bark by Suno AI - great for wildcard/random speech generation, singing

Free AI Voice Generators (Non Open-source)

1. Gemini AI Studio

Google’s free tier now includes 15+ TTS voices that accept a simple temperature slider. No API key, no credit card—just sign in and paste text.

Try it here: https://aistudio.google.com/generate-speech

Key Features

• 15+ voices, 15 languages, 24 kHz output
• Temperature 0.0–1.2 controls expressiveness
• Same Google account works in Colab notebooks for batch jobs

Pros

• ✅ Instant access—no install, no GPU
• ✅ Conversational style sounds natural at temp 1.0+
• ✅ Free quota resets monthly

Cons

• ❌ Closed-source; terms can change without notice
• ❌ No voice cloning—fixed speaker list only
• ❌ Audio watermark present (not audible, but detectable)

Best For

Quick demos, prototypes or any time you need decent speech in under five minutes.

2. PlayHT Free Tier

PlayHT gives you 12,500 free characters each month. Voices are higher bitrate than Gemini, but the quota is small.

Key Features

• 132 voices, 60 languages, 48 kHz WAV download
• SSML tags accepted: break, emphasis, prosody
• Chrome extension reads Google Docs aloud

Pros

• ✅ Higher sample rate than most free tiers
• ✅ Full SSML control for pacing and pitch
• ✅ Extension lets you proof-listen long docs in place

Cons

• ❌ 12,500-character cap is easy to burn on a single article
• ❌ Requires account and email verification
• ❌ Commercial use needs paid plan

Best For

Small marketing clips or proof-of-concept videos where 48 kHz clarity matters.

3. Amazon Polly Free Tier

AWS Polly offers 5 million characters per month for the first year. After that, pay-as-you-go starts at $4 per million.

Key Features

• Neural and standard engines, 60+ voices
• Real-time streaming or batch MP3/WAV
• Supports News, Conversational and Long-form speaking styles

Pros

• ✅ Large free quota for startups
• ✅ SDKs in every major language
• ✅ Neural voices sound close to modern TTS

Cons

• ❌ Requires AWS account and credit card
• ❌ Free quota expires after 12 months
• ❌ No cloning—fixed voice roster only

Best For

Apps that already live on AWS and need reliable, scalable speech without new vendors.

4. Microsoft Azure Neural TTS Free Credit

Azure gives new accounts $200 credit—enough for ~400 000 characters of neural speech. After credit, billing is per second.

Key Features

• 400+ voices across 140 languages and variants
• “Personal Voice” (preview) clones a speaker with 30 seconds of audio
• Fine-grained SSML: break, phoneme, express-as, style

Pros

• ✅ Personal Voice option is the only free cloning route in a major cloud
• ✅ Voices updated quarterly; latest models beat Polly in MOS tests
• ✅ Same subscription unlocks translation and speech-to-text

Cons

• ❌ Credit expires in 30 days; after that, cost jumps quickly
• ❌ Personal Voice is still preview—no SLA, limited regions
• ❌ Azure console is overwhelming for first-time users

Best For

Developers who want to test cloud voice cloning without paying ElevenLabs rates.

When to Choose What?

Choose Fish Audio if:

• You want the absolute best quality
• You’re okay with $9.99/month for commercial use
• You need multilingual language support
• You want instant setup without technical hassle
• Limitation: It does not have a large variety of voices as it’s new. In that case, [ElevenLabs] still shines with 10000+ voices in its community voice library.

Choose Chatterbox if:

• You need 100% free commercial use
• You’re comfortable with technical setup
• You have a powerful GPU available
• MIT license is a requirement

Choose Other Options if:

• You need ultra-lightweight (Kokoro, Piper)
• You’re experimenting with classic models (Tortoise)
• You have specific technical constraints

Need More Premium Options?

While this guide focuses on free and open-source alternatives, if you’re open to paid solutions, I’ve tested 20+ premium AI voice generators in my comprehensive AI voice generator comparison. These include:

• One-click solutions with no technical setup
• Advanced video editing features
• Professional dubbing capabilities
• Enterprise-grade APIs

View all AI voice generator options →

Don’t Have a Powerful GPU? RunPod Guide

Most of these models need at least 8GB VRAM to run well. If your computer can’t handle that, RunPod lets you rent cloud GPUs starting at $0.20/hour.

Quick Setup Guide:

1. Sign up for RunPod
2. Deploy a pre-configured template for your chosen model
3. Run your TTS generation
4. Stop the instance when done (you only pay for actual usage)

What you get:

• Pre-configured Docker images for XTTS, StyleTTS2, and GPT-SoVITS
• Pay-per-second billing
• Persistent storage for your models
• Templates for popular TTS models

Example costs:

• Testing a model for 30 minutes: ~$0.10
• Generating an hour of audio: ~$0.20-0.50
• Running Tortoise TTS on A100 for a full audiobook chapter: ~$3

Deployment Guide

After signing up, you can either:

• Use RunPod’s templates for quick deployment
• Follow their Hugging Face deployment guide for any model

This is honestly the easiest way to test multiple models without buying expensive hardware.

FAQs

Is there a truly free ElevenLabs alternative?

Yes—several open-source engines give you studio-grade speech without a credit card. Chatterbox, GPT-SoVITS, and Kokoro are 100 % free, run offline, and impose no usage caps. They install with one pip command, work on Windows, macOS, or Linux, and let you clone voices, control emotion, and batch-generate hours of audio at zero cost.

If you prefer a browser, Google’s Gemini AI Studio also offers free TTS that sounds surprisingly natural and requires no download.

What’s the best open-source AI voice generator?

For most users, Chatterbox is the best open-source AI voice generator: it wins blind tests against ElevenLabs, clones a voice from five seconds of audio, supports 17 languages, and ships under the permissive MIT license.

Sound purists who can wait pick Tortoise TTS; its 200-parameter autoregressive model still produces the richest timbre and prosody on the market, but a single sentence can take minutes on a fast GPU.

Teams that need reliability and speed in production usually settle on Chatterbox because it balances quality, velocity, and commercial freedom.

Which models support zero-shot voice cloning?

Several models excel at zero-shot voice cloning: Chatterbox (5-10 seconds), GPT-SoVITS (5 seconds), Fish Audio (10-30 seconds), XTTS v2 (6 seconds), and F5-TTS (10 seconds). Each offers varying quality levels, allowing users to choose based on their specific needs and available resources. This feature is crucial for creating personalized AI voice experiences without extensive training.

Do I need a GPU to run open-source TTS?

Not always. Kokoro and Piper are designed to run efficiently on CPUs. However, other models may be impractically slow on CPUs. For optimal performance, an NVIDIA GPU with 8GB+ VRAM is recommended. Alternatively, cloud GPU services like RunPod offer a cost-effective solution for accessing necessary hardware.

Can I use cloned voices commercially?

Commercial use depends on the license: Chatterbox (MIT), GPT-SoVITS (MIT), Tortoise (Apache), and Kokoro (Apache) permit commercial use. However, Fish Audio weights (CC-BY-NC) and XTTS v2 (Coqui Public Model License) restrict commercial applications. Always verify the current license terms before deploying cloned voices commercially.

What’s the closest open-source match to ElevenLabs quality?

Chatterbox is the best open-source text to speech model which sounds like ElevenLabs. It beat ElevenLabs in AI text to speech blind tests (63.8% listeners prefered Chatterbox). GPT-SoVITS, with fine-tuning, can achieve very similar results. Fish Audio matches the expressiveness but has licensing limitations. For pure quality, Tortoise TTS remains a top contender, despite its slower processing speed.

Last verified: September 14, 2025

Note: The open-source TTS landscape evolves rapidly. Models improve monthly, and new options emerge regularly. This guide reflects the current state of the art, but check project repositories for the latest updates for license terms.

Ready to dive in? Start with Kokoro if you’re new to local TTS, try Chatterbox for production quality, or jump straight to ElevenLabs if you need results today without technical setup.