ElevenLabs and Cartesia both sell text to speech (TTS), speech to text and voice agent tools, and both pitch low latency for real-time conversation. The difference is who they are built for. ElevenLabs serves creators and developers, with a studio, dubbing, music and sound effects as well as its API. Cartesia is a developer and enterprise voice AI provider focused on fast speech models and voice agents. I compared the two using each vendor’s own pricing and product pages on 27 October 2026. I have not run my own latency benchmark, so latency figures below are the vendors’ own.
Cartesia and ElevenLabs at a glance
Cartesia’s homepage describes the company as building the full stack for interactive intelligence: Sonic for text to speech, Ink for speech to text and Managed Agents for building voice agents. It says its models run on state space model architectures for low latency at scale, and that they can be deployed in the cloud, on-premise or on-device. It also says it was ranked first in the Speech Arena and Speech to Text leaderboards by Artificial Analysis.
ElevenLabs splits its product into ElevenCreative (TTS, Studio, dubbing, music, sound effects, image and video), ElevenAgents and the ElevenAPI. Its newest model is Eleven v4, which it calls its most emotive model yet, with audio tags for fine control.
TTS voice models and streaming latency
ElevenLabs lists several TTS models on its API pricing page:
- v4: $0.08 per 1,000 characters, audio tags, 90+ languages.
- v4 Turbo: $0.04 per 1,000 characters, about 100ms latency, built for real-time and agents.
- v3: $0.08 per 1,000 characters, expressive delivery and multi-speaker dialogue.
- Flash/Turbo: $0.04 per 1,000 characters, about 75ms latency, 32 languages.
Cartesia’s current TTS model is Sonic-3.6, which it calls the fastest, ultra-realistic voice synthesis model. Its pricing page measures usage in credits and minutes rather than per character, and adds a fee of 225 credits for each added voice accent when localising a voice.
If latency is critical to your product, the honest advice is to run your own test with your own agent stack. Both vendors make speed claims, but network distance, region and the LLM in your pipeline will change the actual result. Cartesia’s offer of regional endpoints and on-premise or on-device deployment may matter for data residency.
Voice agent comparison
Cartesia’s Managed Agents are priced simply: $0.06 per minute of call time on every plan, plus $0.014 a minute when you use a Cartesia phone number. Each plan includes prepaid agent dollars equal to the plan price (for example, $49 on Startup), and Cartesia says LLM usage during calls and evaluations are free for UI-created agents for a limited time. Plans also include Cartesia-provisioned phone numbers (1 on Free up to 10 on Scale).
ElevenLabs runs a separate ElevenAgents product with its own pricing tab. Its API page also lists new Realtime speech to speech models (v1 Mini and v1 Max) at $0.08 a minute plus LLM usage, which it says are compatible with the OpenAI Realtime API. ElevenLabs also offers a Startup Grants Program with 12 months free and 33 million characters for building conversational agents.
Pricing compared
| Plan | ElevenLabs | Cartesia |
|---|---|---|
| Free | 10,000 credits a month | 20,000 credits a month, $1 agent credit |
| Entry | Starter $6: 30,000 credits, commercial licence, instant cloning | Pro $5: 100,000 credits, commercial licence, instant cloning |
| Middle | Creator $22: 121,000 credits; Pro $99: 600,000 credits | Startup $49: 1.25M credits, pro voice cloning |
| Scale | Scale $299: 1.8M credits, 3 seats | Scale $299: 8M credits, priority support |
| Top | Business $990: 6M credits; Enterprise custom | Enterprise custom |
On included TTS minutes, ElevenLabs lists about 10 minutes on Free, 30 on Starter, 121 on Creator and 600 on Pro. Cartesia lists about 27 minutes on Free, 133 on Pro, 1,667 on Startup and 10,667 on Scale. On those vendor numbers, Cartesia includes more TTS minutes per dollar at every tier. ElevenLabs runs promotions too (its Starter plan was $1 for the first month when I checked), and its unused credits roll over for up to two months.
Product breadth
This is where ElevenLabs pulls ahead. Beyond TTS and agents, its plans include Studio projects, Dubbing Studio, voice changer, voice isolator, sound effects, music and image and video tools, all drawing from one shared credit pool. Cartesia is focused on speech models and agents, and does not list creator tools of that kind.
How to compare the voices yourself
Both vendors have free plans, so the cheapest way to choose is to generate the same short script on each. Pick two or three voices you would actually use, include the awkward words your product says often (brand names, numbers, addresses) and listen for pronunciation, pacing and how expressive each generated sample sounds. For an agent, measure the time to first audio from your own server region rather than relying on either vendor’s figure.
Which voice AI provider should you test first?
I would test Cartesia first if you’re a developer building a phone or web voice agent and want cheap minutes and a simple agent price. Its $5 Pro plan is an easy way to trial Sonic and Ink with a commercial licence.
I would pick ElevenLabs if you need one vendor for both product voice features and content creation, need a wider choice of TTS models, or want the expressive v3 and v4 models for narration and dialogue.
Alternatives
- Murf AI: a voiceover studio with a TTS API aimed at business content.
- Speechify: better known for reading text aloud, with a voice API for developers.
- OpenAI’s realtime and TTS models: an option if your agent already runs on OpenAI.
