Cartesia vs ElevenLabs

Discover key differences between Cartesia and ElevenLabs voice AI models.

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Compare Cartesia and ElevenLabs Voice AI Models

Sonic outperforms ElevenLabs Flash V2 with better voice naturalism (61.4% preference in blind tests), faster performance (40ms vs 75ms model latency), and superior features including instant voice cloning (3s vs 30s audio required) and comprehensive voice delivery controls.

Updated on:

Feb 24, 2025

Features

Latency

Latency

Latency

Voice Quality

Voice Quality

Voice Quality

Character Limits

Character Limits

Character Limits

Instant Cloning

Instant Cloning

Instant Cloning

Professional Voice Cloning

Professional Voice Cloning

Professional Voice Cloning

Pronunciation Accuracy

Pronunciation Accuracy

Pronunciation Accuracy

Voice Customizations

Voice Customizations

Voice Customizations

Telephony Optimization

Telephony Optimization

Telephony Optimization

Flexible deployments

Flexible deployments

Flexible deployments

Languages Supported

Languages Supported

Languages Supported

Concurrency

Concurrency

Concurrency

Cartesia

40ms for the Sonic Turbo model, 90ms for the Sonic 2.0 model

Consistently rated as more natural, expressive, and realistic in blinded human evaluations

Infinite request length

Requires 3 seconds of audio

Requires 30 minutes of audio

IPA support with strong contextual understanding

Fully customizable voice with speed and emotion controls + synthetic voice mixing and design

8kHz audio, telephony optimized voices

Supports both on-prem and on-device deployments

15 languages with extensive dialect coverage

Up to 15 on highest self-serve tier (60 parallel conversations), custom for enterprise

ElevenLabs

75 ms for the lower quality Flash Model, and 300ms+ for the full model

Less depth and reliability ratings in human evals

Limited to 40k characters per request

Requires 10 seconds of audio

Requires 60 minutes of audio

IPA support, isolated pronunciation

Stability, similarity, and style exaggeration controls

8kHz audio, telephony optimized voices

No on-device or on-prem support

32

Up to 15 on highest self serve tier, custom for enterprise

Cartesia - Faster and More Natural Voices

Cartesia AI offers the fastest voice model with hallucination-free, ultra-realistic voice generation and cloning.

No Hallucinations

Cartesia's AI text to speech eliminates errors, accurately follow complex transcripts like names, addresses, time, medical terms. etc.

Enterprise Ready

Enterprise-grade reliability with 99.9% uptime, SOC2 compliance, and full on-premises support.

Voice Quality

In head-to-head evaluations, our blinded human tests showed that Sonic-2 was preferred over ElevenLabs's Flash V2 model by a significant margin (61.4% vs 38.6%).

Blinded human evaluation is a method where evaluators assess generative voice model outputs without knowing which model produced them, helping reduce bias. The process involves presenting outputs from different generative voice model anonymously. This approach prevents evaluators' preconceived notions about specific generative voice model or their developers from influencing their assessment.

Latency

We measure latency using the model latency and the Time to First Audio (TTFA) latency from Asia, US and Europe. We calculate the 90th percentile score (P90) from 100 measurements for each provider.

Cartesia's Sonic-2 model achieves a model latency of just 40ms—significantly faster than ElevenLabs' Flash V2 model at 75ms. P90 latency measurements across all three locations demonstrate Cartesia's consistent performance advantage over ElevenLabs. While Cartesia maintains stable latency between 128-135ms, ElevenLabs' latency fluctuates widely from 264ms to 531ms.

This superior performance comes from Cartesia's Sonic model using State Space Models (SSMs), which provide a more efficient architecture for latency optimization than the traditional transformer architecture used by ElevenLabs and other providers.

Pronunciation Accuracy

Cartesia and ElevenLabs exhibit slight differences in sentence pronunciation. Cartesia excels at accurately pronouncing challenging content, such as acronyms, phone numbers, and uncommon words, and supports the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) for specialized use cases, like prescription drug names in healthcare. While ElevenLabs also offers reasonably accurate pronunciation, it shows less contextual awareness.

Example #1

For example, when pronouncing an abbreviated date like "Dec. 25, 2022," Cartesia delivers a more human-like pronunciation of "December," whereas ElevenLabs tends to interpret it more literally.

Cartesia

ElevenLabs

Voice Cloning

Cartesia requires only 3 seconds of audio recording to create high-quality instant voice clones, while ElevenLabs needs 30 seconds.

Cartesia offers unlimited instant voice cloning in the paid plans, whereas ElevenLabs limits cloning in tiered plans that allow 10, 30, 160, or 660 custom voices.

Cartesia's advanced embedding technology delivers consistent, high-quality voice clones, preserving accents and voice quality even with noisy source audio. With its voice mixing and design capabilities, Cartesia creates a more comprehensive range of diverse voices. The following samples of Engelbart's clones demonstrate how Cartesia produces clearer, higher-quality clones compared to ElevenLabs.

Example #1

Example with noisy background.

Cartesia better matches the original voice as well as the surrounding recording environment

ElevenLabs struggles to separate background noise from human voices, resulting in lower-quality voice clones.

Source

Cartesia

ElevenLabs

Example #2

Example with Reporter in Wildfire

Cartesia better preserves the accent and the surrounding recording environment

Source

Cartesia

ElevenLabs

Voice Design Controllability

Cartesia stands out as the only provider offering emotion and speed modulation features, enabling refined voice adjustments while preserving a natural and seamless auditory experience.

Cartesia also allows you to localize the voice to match different accents — you can start with an American voice and have it speak in a French accent, for instance. In comparison, ElevenLabs only offers controls for stability, similarity, and style exaggeration, all of which do not offer clear control for the voice.

In the following example where the speaker is addressing a customer complaint, we compare the dial effects from ElevenLabs and Cartesia to find that the ElevenLabs voice sounds similar with the various dials applied while Cartesia's emotion and speed dials convey very noticeable changes.

Cartesia

No Dials

ElevenLabs

No Dials

Cartesia

Positivity Emotion Dial

ElevenLabs

Highest Stability Dial

Cartesia

Speed Dial

ElevenLabs

Highest Similarity Dial

Pricing Plans for Cartesia and ElevenLabs

Cartesia

Free - $0 per month with 10k free credits

Pro - $5 per month with 100k credits

Startup - $49 per month with 1.25M credits

Scale - $299 per month with 8M credits

Enterprise - trusted by Fortune 500 companies

ElevenLabs

Free - $0 per month with 10k characters

Starter - $5 per month with 30k characters

Professional - $11 per month with 100k characters

Pro - $99 per month with 500k characters

Scale - $330 per month with 2M characters

Trusted by 50K+ Customers

Trusted by 50K+ Customers

Trusted by 50K+ Customers

Frequently asked questions

How does voice cloning work?

How does voice cloning work?

How does voice cloning work?

What is the latency for voice generation?

What is the latency for voice generation?

What is the latency for voice generation?

Can I customize the cloned voice?

Can I customize the cloned voice?

Can I customize the cloned voice?

How many languages does Cartesia support?

How many languages does Cartesia support?

How many languages does Cartesia support?

Real-time, multimodal intelligence for every device.

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HIPAA

SOC-2 Type II

Real-time, multimodal intelligence for every device.

Sign up for early access to new releases

HIPAA

SOC-2 Type II

Real-time, multimodal intelligence for every device.

Sign up for early access to new releases

HIPAA

SOC-2 Type II