Fish Audio vs ElevenLabs

The Short Answer

Fish Audio and ElevenLabs both sell realistic text-to-speech and voice cloning to creators and developers, but they compete on different strengths. ElevenLabs is the broad market leader: its newest model, Eleven v4, sits inside a platform that also covers speech-to-text, dubbing, sound effects, music, voice agents and team workspaces. Fish Audio is the value challenger: its S2 and S1 models, open-source research roots, generous subscription allowances and a flat, low API price make it attractive for high-volume narration, character voices and cost-sensitive apps.

Choose ElevenLabs when you want one platform for many audio jobs, polished studio tools and enterprise features. Choose Fish Audio when the main job is generating a lot of natural speech, or cloning voices, at the lowest cost per hour.

Prices and limits in this guide come from ElevenLabs' and Fish Audio's official pricing pages and developer documentation, checked on October 1, 2026. ElevenLabs pricing, ElevenLabs API pricing, Fish Audio plans, Fish Audio API pricing.

Models and Platforms

ElevenLabs' current lineup is led by Eleven v4, which supports 90+ languages with up to 10,000 characters per request. Eleven v4 Turbo targets real-time use with a median inference latency of about 100 ms, Eleven v3 covers 70+ languages, and Flash v2.5 offers about 75 ms latency across 32 languages for voice agents. Around those models, ElevenLabs offers Studio for long-form projects, Dubbing Studio, Instant and Professional Voice Cloning, Voice Design, sound effects, music, speech-to-text with Scribe, and ElevenAgents for conversational voice agents.

Fish Audio's current models are the S2 family (S2.1 Pro and S2 Pro) and S1. The company publishes open research models, including Fish Speech and OpenAudio, alongside its hosted product. The web app covers text-to-speech, voice cloning, a voice changer, Story Studio, audio separation and translation, sound effects, and Voice Design on paid plans, and there is a pay-as-you-go API plus an MCP server for agents.

The practical difference is scope. ElevenLabs is an audio platform with many products. Fish Audio concentrates on speech generation and cloning, priced to undercut the leader.

Subscription Plans Compared

Fish Audio's annual prices reflect a limited-time 50% discount on yearly billing; without it, Fish Audio says yearly billing saves about 33% against monthly. Fish Audio estimates that one minute of generation costs roughly 600 to 625 credits. ElevenLabs credits map to characters, and Creator plans and above currently get a two-week offer in which up to twice their monthly text-to-speech credits used on v4 do not count against the balance in the web and mobile apps.

On minutes per dollar at the entry level, Fish Audio Plus offers about 200 minutes for $15 a month, while ElevenLabs Starter's 30,000 credits cover far fewer minutes for $6. ElevenLabs' advantage is everything else included in the plan.

API Pricing

Fish Audio's documentation says one million UTF-8 bytes is about 180,000 English words, or about 12 hours of speech, which puts an hour of narration near $1.25. For ElevenLabs, the hour estimate assumes about 900 characters per minute of speech; actual counts vary with the text. At list prices, Fish Audio is roughly three times cheaper than Eleven v4 per hour, and still cheaper than ElevenLabs' promotional v4 price.

Where ElevenLabs Wins

Breadth of the platform. One ElevenLabs subscription covers text-to-speech, cloning, dubbing, sound effects, music, transcription and voice agents. Teams that need several of those avoid stitching together vendors.

Model range for different jobs. Eleven v4 for quality, v4 Turbo and Flash v2.5 for real-time agents, v3 for expressive multilingual speech. Developers can pick the trade-off per use case.

Team and enterprise features. Scale and Business plans include shared workspaces and seats, and Enterprise adds custom SSO, DPAs, SLAs and HIPAA BAAs.

Production tools. Studio, Dubbing Studio and Productions support long-form projects and managed dubbing, which creators and localization teams rely on.

Where Fish Audio Wins

Cost per hour. At $15 per million bytes, about $1.25 per hour of speech, Fish Audio's API is one of the cheapest high-quality options. Subscription minutes are also generous: about 200 minutes on Plus and 1,620 on Pro.

Voice cloning value. Paid plans include professional voice slots, from one on Plus to 15 on Max, and Plus already includes unlimited public and 10 private voice slots.

Open research. Fish Audio publishes open models such as Fish Speech and OpenAudio, which matters to developers who want to experiment or self-host, and its enterprise tier offers zero data retention and on-premise deployment.

Large requests. Plus allows up to 15,000 characters per generation and Pro up to 30,000, which suits audiobook chapters.

Voice Cloning, Rights and Consent

Both platforms make cloning easy, which makes consent important. On ElevenLabs, Instant Voice Cloning starts on the $6 Starter plan and Professional Voice Cloning on Creator, with professional clones also counted by plan: Scale includes 3 and Business 10. On Fish Audio, paid plans include professional voice slots, one on Plus, five on Pro and 15 on Max, and Fish Audio's FAQ says premium subscribers can use verified voices they own for commercial purposes, while free-plan output is limited to personal, non-commercial projects. On either platform, only clone voices you have permission to use, keep written consent from the speaker, and check the commercial terms of the plan before publishing.

Languages and Quality Trade-offs

ElevenLabs' language coverage is clear by model: Eleven v4 lists 90+ languages, v3 70+, Multilingual v2 29 and Flash v2.5 32. That makes it easy to pick a model per market. Fish Audio does not publish a per-model language count on its pricing page, and creators often use its S2 and S1 models for character voices and long narration. Quality differs by language and voice, so test the specific languages you need rather than relying on the headline count.

Long-form limits also differ. Fish Audio allows up to 15,000 characters per generation on Plus and 30,000 on Pro, which suits audiobook chapters. ElevenLabs' v4 accepts up to 10,000 characters per request, and its Studio tool manages long projects by splitting them into chapters and paragraphs.

Team and Enterprise Considerations

ElevenLabs' team plans are seat-based: Scale includes 3 workspace seats and Business 10, with Enterprise adding custom SSO, more seats, HIPAA BAAs, DPAs and SLAs. Fish Audio includes 3 team seats on Pro and 10 on Max, and its Enterprise plan adds organization-level controls, zero data retention, on-premise deployment and SOC 2 compliance, with custom SSO listed as coming soon. Regulated teams should compare these contracts directly, because the right choice depends more on data handling terms than on voice quality.

Budget Example: A Weekly Narration Channel

A creator publishing four 15-minute narrated videos a month needs about 60 minutes of speech, plus retakes. On Fish Audio, the Plus plan's roughly 200 minutes cover that with room to spare for $15 a month, or $5.50 with the current annual discount. On ElevenLabs, Starter's 30,000 credits would run out quickly at that volume, so the realistic plan is Creator at $22 a month with 121,000 credits, which also adds Professional Voice Cloning. Through the APIs, 60 minutes costs about $1.25 on Fish Audio and about $4.32 on Eleven v4 at list price.

Decision Framework

How to Choose

Run the same script through both: a two-minute narration, a short dialogue with two characters, and a cloned voice from a clean sample. Score naturalness, pronunciation of names and numbers, and how well the clone holds the speaker's accent. Then calculate what a month of your real volume would cost on each, using the API rates above or the subscription allowances.

Most teams find that ElevenLabs is worth paying for when they use several of its products together, and that Fish Audio wins when speech generation is the main cost. A common split is Fish Audio for bulk narration and ElevenLabs for dubbing, agents or premium voices. Check the ElevenLabs promotion end date of October 12 before signing an annual contract, since list prices return afterward.