Cartesia Alternatives: ElevenLabs, Fish Audio, Resemble AI, Unreal Speech and MiniMax Audio

Why Look Beyond Cartesia

Cartesia builds voice infrastructure for real-time applications. Its Sonic 3.6 text-to-speech model covers 44 languages and is designed for streaming output with very low latency, Ink-2 handles speech to text, and its Line platform hosts complete voice agents with telephony. Every plan includes unlimited seats, which suits engineering teams that want everyone on one account.

Developers still evaluate alternatives. Some want a broader platform with dubbing, a creator studio and a large voice library. Some want lower cost per character for batch narration that does not need real-time output. Some want a second vendor for redundancy in a production agent. Others are choosing an end-to-end speech-to-speech stack rather than assembling TTS, STT and an LLM separately.

This guide compares Cartesia with ElevenLabs, Fish Audio, MiniMax Audio, Murf AI, Unreal Speech and OpenAI's GPT-Live sessions, and notes where Resemble AI fits after leaving the voice market. Cartesia, ElevenLabs, Fish Audio and Murf prices come from official reads between September 30 and October 1, 2026; MiniMax, Unreal Speech and OpenAI were read on October 4. Cartesia pricing, Cartesia TTS models, ElevenLabs API pricing, MiniMax pricing, OpenAI API pricing.

Cartesia at a Glance

Cartesia's Free plan includes 20,000 credits. Pro costs $5 a month for 100,000 credits, which Cartesia equates to about 133 minutes of TTS. Startup costs $49 a month for 1.25 million credits and Scale $299 for 8 million, with Enterprise above that. All plans include unlimited seats. Hosted agents on Line cost $0.06 a minute, plus $0.014 a minute when calls run over telephony.

At about 750 characters per minute of speech, Startup works out to roughly $0.039 per 1,000 characters and Scale to about $0.037, while Pro is about $0.05. Those are not the cheapest rates in the market, but Cartesia's pitch is latency, streaming behavior and an integrated agent stack rather than the lowest price per character.

The Alternatives Compared

ElevenLabs: Low Latency Plus Breadth

ElevenLabs is the most common alternative. Flash v2.5 runs at about 75 ms latency for $0.04 per 1,000 characters across 32 languages, and Eleven v4 Turbo runs at about 100 ms for $0.011 per 1,000 during a promotion through October 12, 2026 (list $0.04). Beyond the API, ElevenLabs offers conversational agents, dubbing, Scribe v2 transcription at $0.22 per hour and a creator studio. Choose it when one vendor needs to serve both your agent and your content team.

Fish Audio: Cheap Expressive Speech

Fish Audio's API costs $15 per million UTF-8 bytes for its S2.1 Pro, S2 Pro and S1 models, about 12 hours of speech, and its ASR costs $0.36 an hour. That makes it roughly two and a half times cheaper per English character than Cartesia's Startup plan. Test its streaming latency and stability under concurrent load before routing live calls to it; for batch narration it is an easy saving.

MiniMax Audio: Another Model Family

MiniMax's Speech 2.8 Turbo costs $60 per million characters and HD $100. Its synchronous endpoint targets real-time conversational audio, and an asynchronous endpoint handles long-form jobs of up to one million characters. Voice design costs $3 per voice and rapid cloning $1.50. Choose MiniMax as a second provider when it sounds better in your target languages.

Murf AI Falcon: Price and Speed

Murf's Falcon API costs $0.01 per 1,000 characters with under 100 ms to first audio, the lowest published per-character price among the low-latency options here. Murf also sells studio-quality TTS at $0.03 per 1,000 characters and studio plans for business narration. Choose Falcon when cost per character matters and its voices fit your product. At $0.01 per 1,000 characters it is roughly a quarter of Cartesia's Startup rate, which adds up quickly for agents that talk all day.

Unreal Speech: Batch Volume

Unreal Speech sells character bundles on Kokoro TTS: Basic $49 a month for 3 million characters (discounted to $4.99 for six months), Plus $499 for 42 million and Pro $1,499 for 150 million. It suits batch audio such as article narration rather than live agents.

OpenAI GPT-Live: An Integrated Alternative

OpenAI's GPT-Live 1 voice sessions are billed at $0.05 per minute, per second without rounding, with backend model and tool use charged separately. Instead of chaining STT, an LLM and TTS, the session handles speech in and out. Compare it with Cartesia's Line agents at $0.06 a minute when you are choosing a whole agent stack, not just a voice.

Where Resemble AI Fits

Resemble AI stopped selling voice AI to new customers and now focuses on deepfake detection. Its MIT-licensed Chatterbox Turbo targets low-latency agents if you host it yourself, which moves scaling, monitoring and consent checks onto your team.

Which Alternative for Which Need

Low-Latency TTS Options Side by Side

Vendors measure latency differently, so benchmark time to first audio from your own servers and regions before deciding.

What 10,000 Agent Minutes Cost

Comparing per-character prices hides how agents are billed. Take a support line handling 10,000 minutes of calls a month. On Cartesia's Line, that is 10,000 × $0.06 = $600 for the agent plus 10,000 × $0.014 = $140 for telephony, $740 in total before any model costs you bring. OpenAI's GPT-Live sessions would cost 10,000 × $0.05 = $500, plus backend model and tool usage.

If you assemble the stack yourself, you pay for each part. Suppose the agent speaks for 40% of each call: 4,000 minutes at about 750 characters a minute is 3 million characters, which costs $120 on ElevenLabs Flash v2.5, $30 on Murf Falcon or about $45 on Fish Audio. Transcribing all 10,000 minutes, about 167 hours, costs roughly $37 with ElevenLabs Scribe v2 or $60 with Fish Audio's ASR. Add your LLM, telephony and the engineering time to run it. A self-built stack is usually cheaper per minute but costs more to operate, so the right answer depends on your team.

Languages and Regions

Sonic 3.6 covers 44 languages, ElevenLabs' Flash v2.5 covers 32 and Eleven v4 90+. If you serve Chinese, Japanese or Korean speakers, remember that Fish Audio's byte-based pricing makes those scripts more expensive per character than English, while MiniMax and the character-priced vendors charge the same rate for every language. Always run native-speaker reviews, because a voice that sounds natural in English can sound flat or mispronounce common words elsewhere. Latency also depends on where the vendor's servers are relative to your users, so test from each region you serve rather than relying on published numbers.

Testing a Voice Agent Fairly

Agent quality depends on more than the TTS model. Measure end-to-end response time from the end of the caller's speech to the first audio back, under realistic concurrency and from the regions where your users are. Include interruptions, background noise and phone-line audio. Track transcription accuracy on names and numbers, since STT errors cause most agent failures. Finally, compare monthly cost at your real minute volume, including telephony and the LLM, because the voice is often the smaller part of the bill.

Seats, Rights and Consent

Cartesia's unlimited seats are unusual; ElevenLabs ties seats to Scale and Business plans, and other vendors vary. Commercial use is included on paid plans across these vendors, but Fish Audio's free plan is non-commercial. Any cloned voice requires the speaker's consent, and agents that call people may also need disclosure under local rules, so involve legal review before launch.

Moving From Cartesia

Keep your agent logic independent of the TTS provider so you can swap voices without rewriting prompts or call flows. Re-create voices with consented samples on the new platform, re-tune pronunciation for product names and run a shadow period where a small share of live traffic uses the new vendor before full cutover.

How to Choose

Stay with Cartesia when streaming latency, an integrated agent platform and unlimited seats are what you need. Choose ElevenLabs for breadth, Murf Falcon for low price at low latency, Fish Audio or Unreal Speech for batch volume, MiniMax for a second model family and OpenAI GPT-Live for a single speech-to-speech session.

Benchmark two alternatives against Cartesia with the same 50 test utterances and a short live-call script, measuring time to first audio, accuracy and total cost per thousand minutes.