Fish Audio vs ElevenLabs
Fish Audio is an open-model, developer-friendly voice platform with 2M+ community voices, emotion tags, and low-cost cloning (Free $0 with 8,000 credits/mo; Plus $15/mo; Pro $100/mo, per October 2026), while ElevenLabs is the commercial benchmark for voice quality and cloning with a full studio and API (Free $0; Starter $6/mo; Creator $22/mo; Pro $99/mo, per October 2026). Fish Audio leans open and developer-first; ElevenLabs leans polished and product-complete. We did not run a hands-on test on either tool; no quality winner is declared.
| Decision point | Fish Audio | ElevenLabs |
|---|---|---|
| Best suited to | Developers building voice-enabled apps, game and animation teams needing expressive voices, and multilingual creators who want cloning plus an API at competitive rates. The open model weights suit sel | Drafting narration or dialogue, then adjusting voice and delivery across selected passages. |
| Plans and cost | Free: $0 (8,000 credits/month, ~7 minutes, personal use only). Plus: $15/month (250,000 credits, commercial use, API access). Pro/Max tiers higher. API billed separately at $15 per million UTF-8 bytes. Prices as of Oct 2026 — promos change them often; verify at checkout. | The pricing page lists a free plan and regular paid prices of $6/month for Starter and $22/month for Creator. First-month promotions are separate from renewal pricing. Confirm the billing currency, current offer and renewal amount before subscribing. |
| Limitations | The free tier's commercial-use terms conflict across Fish Audio's own pages — assume free output is not safe for monetized channels. Credits reset monthly and do not roll over. Promo pricing swings wi | Free-plan output has no commercial license; paid access, credit use, voice permissions, and beta-service terms affect what you can publish. |
Use the same input
A game studio needing expressive multilingual voices on a budget.
What a successful result must preserve
Voice quality, emotion control, API access, licensing, and price.
Evidence and test status
Specifications, pricing, and plan terms were compared from official pricing pages and help documentation as reported in October 2026; prices change, so check the official site. We did not run a hands-on test on either tool; no quality winner is declared.
- Fish Audio — Official website ↗ (reviewed 2026-10-24)
- ElevenLabs — Official plans, credits, and pricing ↗ (reviewed 2026-10-15), Official publishing and commercial-use terms ↗ (reviewed 2026-10-15), Official credit-use guidance ↗ (reviewed 2026-10-15), Official Voice Library permissions addendum ↗ (reviewed 2026-10-15)