Cartesia vs ElevenLabs

The Short Answer

Cartesia and ElevenLabs are two of the most common choices for teams building voice into products, but they are built around different priorities. Cartesia is a developer-first voice infrastructure company: its Sonic text-to-speech models, Ink speech-to-text models and managed voice agents are designed for real-time conversation, with simple usage pricing and unlimited workspace seats. ElevenLabs is a broad audio platform: Eleven v4 and its faster variants sit alongside studio tools, dubbing, music, sound effects, cloning and its own agent platform.

Choose Cartesia when you are building a real-time voice product, such as a phone agent, an in-app assistant or a game character, and you want a focused, low-cost speech stack. Choose ElevenLabs when you also need creative production tools, a large voice library and many audio products from one vendor.

Prices and model details come from Cartesia's and ElevenLabs' official pricing pages and documentation, checked on October 1, 2026. Cartesia pricing, Cartesia TTS models, ElevenLabs pricing, ElevenLabs API pricing.

What Each Company Offers

Cartesia's current text-to-speech model is Sonic 3.6, which Cartesia describes as its fastest and most natural model and which speaks 44 languages. Its speech-to-text model is Ink-2. Cartesia also runs Managed Agents for voice calls, with agent minutes billed at $0.06 per minute and telephony at $0.014 per minute when using a Cartesia-provided phone number. Every plan includes unlimited workspace seats, and paid plans add voice cloning.

ElevenLabs' current models include Eleven v4 (90+ languages), Eleven v4 Turbo with a median inference latency of about 100 ms, Eleven v3 (70+ languages) and Flash v2.5 with about 75 ms latency across 32 languages. Beyond the API, ElevenLabs offers Studio, Dubbing Studio, Voice Design, sound effects, music, Scribe speech-to-text and ElevenAgents for conversational AI.

In short, Cartesia sells the building blocks for real-time voice. ElevenLabs sells those building blocks plus a full creative audio suite.

Plans and Pricing

Cartesia's Pro plan converts its 100,000 credits into about 133 minutes of text-to-speech and about 9 hours of speech-to-text. ElevenLabs credits map to characters and are shared across its products. A key structural difference is seats: Cartesia includes unlimited workspace seats on every plan, while ElevenLabs bundles 3 seats with Scale and 10 with Business.

API Rates for Real-Time Products

For a voice agent handling 10,000 minutes of calls a month, Cartesia's managed-agent rate works out to 10,000 × $0.06 = $600, plus $140 of telephony if you use Cartesia numbers. ElevenLabs offers a comparable agent platform, but most teams compare the two on voice quality and latency in their own stack before price.

Where Cartesia Wins

Built for real-time. Cartesia's whole product line, Sonic, Ink and managed agents, targets live conversation. Its documentation and SDKs are written for streaming over WebSocket and for agent frameworks.

Low entry price for developers. The $5 Pro plan includes a commercial license, instant voice cloning, about 133 minutes of speech and $5 of agent usage, which is enough to prototype a product.

Unlimited seats. Every plan includes unlimited workspace seats, so a whole engineering team can share one account without paying per person.

Transparent agent pricing. Agent minutes at $0.06 and telephony at $0.014 make it easy to estimate the cost of a call center workload.

Where ElevenLabs Wins

Creative and production tools. Studio, Dubbing Studio, sound effects and music make ElevenLabs useful far beyond an API: creators, marketers and localization teams can work in the browser.

More languages in the top model. Eleven v4 supports 90+ languages, against 44 for Sonic 3.6, which matters for global products.

Model choice. Teams can pick v4 for quality, v4 Turbo or Flash v2.5 for latency, and v3 for expressive multilingual speech, all through one API.

Voice library and cloning ecosystem. A large community voice library and professional voice cloning from the Creator plan give product teams many ready voices.

Voice Cloning and Voice Selection

Both vendors support cloning, with different entry points. Cartesia includes instant voice cloning from the $5 Pro plan and professional voice cloning from the $49 Startup plan, and charges 225 credits per added accent when localizing a voice. ElevenLabs includes Instant Voice Cloning from the $6 Starter plan and Professional Voice Cloning from Creator, and its Scale and Business plans include 3 and 10 professional voice clones. ElevenLabs also offers Voice Design for creating new voices from text descriptions and a large community voice library, which gives product teams more ready-made voices to choose from.

Compliance and Data Handling

Voice products in healthcare, finance and customer support often need contractual guarantees. Cartesia's Enterprise plan lists DPAs and BAAs, SSO, security questionnaires and custom concurrency limits, and Cartesia offers a shared Slack channel for enterprise support. ElevenLabs' Enterprise plan lists custom terms with DPA and SLA assurances, BAAs for HIPAA customers, custom SSO, more seats and elevated concurrency. Both can serve regulated buyers; compare the specific terms, data retention options and deployment regions in your contract.

Common Mistakes When Comparing

The first mistake is comparing credits directly. A Cartesia credit and an ElevenLabs credit buy different amounts of speech, so convert both to minutes of audio for your own scripts. The second is trusting published latency alone. Latency depends on your region, network, text length and streaming setup, so measure it from your servers. The third is ignoring everything around the voice: speech-to-text accuracy, turn-taking and interruption handling decide how natural an agent feels, and Cartesia and ElevenLabs both sell agent platforms with their own pricing, so test the whole conversation loop rather than the voice alone.

Scaling Up

As usage grows, Cartesia's Scale plan at $299 a month includes 8 million credits, $299 of agent usage, priority support and high concurrency limits, with Enterprise for volume pricing beyond that. ElevenLabs' Scale plan, also $299, includes 1.8 million credits and 3 seats, and Business at $990 adds 6 million credits, 10 seats and low-latency text-to-speech from 5 cents a minute. For high-volume speech, ask both vendors for volume pricing before committing, since enterprise rates are negotiated.

Budget Example: A Support Voice Agent

Consider a support line that handles 5,000 calls a month averaging four minutes each, or 20,000 agent minutes. On Cartesia's managed agents, that is 20,000 × $0.06 = $1,200 a month, plus 20,000 × $0.014 = $280 if the calls use Cartesia-provided phone numbers, for a total near $1,480 before any LLM charges once the current free period ends. The Scale plan's $299 includes $299 of prepaid agent usage, so the effective subscription cost is mostly absorbed by usage.

An ElevenLabs build of the same agent would combine ElevenAgents pricing with the voice model you choose; Flash v2.5 at $0.04 per 1,000 characters is the low-latency option. Because each vendor packages agent minutes, telephony and language-model costs differently, ask both for a quote based on your call volume and test the same call flow before deciding.

Decision Framework

How to Evaluate

Build a small prototype with both: the same agent prompt, the same short responses and the same voice style. Measure time to first audio from your own servers, naturalness on numbers, names and dates, and how the voice handles interruptions. Latency figures in vendor documentation are measured in their conditions, so your network and region matter.

Then model a month of real traffic: minutes of speech, minutes of transcription and agent minutes. Cartesia usually wins on cost and simplicity for pure real-time products, while ElevenLabs wins when the same team also produces content, dubs videos or needs a wider language range. Note that ElevenLabs' v4 and v4 Turbo promotional prices end on October 12, so compare against list prices for long-term budgets.

Before signing, confirm four things in writing: the concurrency limit on your plan, how overages are billed, which regions host the models, and what happens to cloned voices and stored audio if you cancel. Those terms matter more to a production voice product than a few milliseconds of latency, and both vendors document them in their plan comparisons and enterprise contracts. Revisit the comparison after major model releases, since both companies ship new versions often.

For most real-time products the short list ends here; teams that also produce marketing audio or dub videos tend to keep ElevenLabs in the stack either way.