Music · Head-to-head
ElevenLabs vs Chatterbox
ElevenLabs vs Chatterbox: pricing, features, and which to pick in 2026.
The verdict
Pick ElevenLabs if…
- →your primary use case is creators, publishers, and developers who need realistic tts or cloning, and teams that want claude or claude code to manage elevenlabs agents over hosted oauth.
Pick Chatterbox if…
- →your primary use case is developers and teams who want to self-host an open-source, zero-shot voice cloning and text-to-speech model instead of a closed api.
Side-by-side specs
| Spec | ElevenLabs | Chatterbox |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Music | Music |
| Pricing model | freemium | freemium |
| Headline pricing | Free $0 (10k credits) + Starter $6/mo (30k) + Creator $22/mo (121k, first month $11) + Pro $99/mo (600k) + Scale $299/mo (1.8M) + Business $990/mo (6M) + Enterprise custom. Credits are shared across products. Annual is 10 months prepaid. | Free MIT open-source model + paid Resemble AI hosted platform |
| Free tier | 10,000 credits per month, non-commercial, no rollover. Shared across products. elevenlabs.io/pricing 28 Aug 2026. | The complete Chatterbox model is free under the MIT license — self-host it, use it commercially, no usage caps. You only pay if you opt into Resemble AI's hosted platform. |
| AI Score | 9.2/10 | 8.8/10 |
| Best for | Creators, publishers, and developers who need realistic TTS or cloning, and teams that want Claude or Claude Code to manage ElevenLabs agents over hosted OAuth. | Developers and teams who want to self-host an open-source, zero-shot voice cloning and text-to-speech model instead of a closed API. |
| Editor's pick | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Use cases | content-creation media development | media development content-creation |
| Date added | 2026-04-30 | 2026-06-27 |
Pros and cons
ElevenLabs
Music · freemium
Pros
- ✓Still the realistic-voice default for TTS and short-sample cloning
- ✓Hosted MCP with OAuth in Claude and Claude Code, so agents can be managed in the assistant you already use
- ✓Shared credit pool is at least honest: one budget across speech, music, and dubbing
- ✓Commercial license starts at Starter ($6/mo)
Cons
- ×Credits are shared, so music or dubbing will eat the TTS budget faster than the headline number suggests
- ×Free is non-commercial and does not roll over unused credits
- ×MCP is documented for Claude and Claude Code today — other assistant logos on the marketing page are not a ship claim
- ×Starter is $6/mo now, not the $5 we previously published
Chatterbox
Music · freemium
Pros
- ✓Fully open-source under MIT — commercial use, self-hosting, no royalties or per-character caps
- ✓Zero-shot voice cloning from a short sample, no per-voice training step
- ✓Emotion and intensity controls go beyond flat, monotone TTS
- ✓Imperceptible watermark on every output keeps synthetic audio detectable
- ✓Massive adoption (~25k GitHub stars, 1M+ HF downloads) means active maintenance and integrations
Cons
- ×Self-hosting needs your own GPU and technical setup — there's no polished consumer app for the free model
- ×Quality and naturalness vary across the 23+ languages; English is the strongest
- ×Hosted-platform pricing is separate and not transparently listed alongside the open model
- ×Open voice cloning raises real misuse risk; the watermark mitigates but doesn't prevent it
Related comparisons
Updated 2026-08-28. Spec data sourced from official product pages and tracked in our public directory at /tools.