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light estimateLast updated 2026-08-20

ElevenLabs vs OpenAI

ElevenLabs Multilingual v2 / Eleven v3 vs OpenAI gpt-4o-mini-tts for text-to-speech. TTFA: 653 ms vs 775 ms — edge ElevenLabs Langs: 29 vs 50 — edge OpenAI Computed from public benchmarks with dated sources; updated 2026-08-20.

Head to head
ElevenLabs Multilingual v2 / Eleven v3 compared with OpenAI gpt-4o-mini-tts per decision axis
AxisElevenLabs Multilingual v2 / Eleven v3OpenAI gpt-4o-mini-ttsEdge
Price$100 per 1M chars$15 per 1M chars*—
ELO1179——
TTFA653 ms775 msElevenLabs
Langs2950OpenAI
streaming✓✓—
cloning✓——

* token-/credit-priced — the headline understates real per-unit cost, so no price edge is awarded.

Strengths & caveats
ElevenLabsLargest production adoption and most mature voice-library/cloning ecosystem, with both instant and professional cloning; Eleven v3 is the strongest ElevenLabs model on the Artificial Analysis Speech Arena at 1179 ELO (rank 12 of 99). Most expensive per-character of the comparable group ($100/1M chars at $0.10/1K, charged for both Eleven v3 and Multilingual v2); the $0.05/1K Flash/Turbo and v3 Conversational tiers are cheaper but different models. Independent Coval TTFA is slow for the flagship tiers: 653ms P50 for Eleven v3 and 1262ms for Multilingual v2, against 212ms for the cheaper Flash v2.5 — the 264ms previously listed here was a Turbo v2.5 figure, not a flagship one. Language counts differ per model on the pricing page (29 for Multilingual v2, 32 for Flash/Turbo, 70+ for Eleven v3); the 29 shown is the Multilingual v2 figure. Multilingual v2 ranks only 33rd on the Arena (1104 ELO).OpenAICheap, developer-friendly, with steerable tone/emotion via a free-text 'instructions' parameter and tight integration into the OpenAI stack; ~11-13 built-in voices. Token-based pricing (unchanged at $0.60/1M text input tokens + $12/1M audio output tokens); the ~$15/1M-chars figure is a community estimate, so vergelijkbaar=false — note OpenAI's older tts-1 is separately listed at a real $15/1M characters, which is easy to confuse with it. Not ranked on the Arena: gpt-4o-mini-tts does not appear among the 99 leaderboard models, where OpenAI is represented only by tts-1, tts-1-hd and GPT-Realtime-2. Independent Coval TTFA is 775ms P50, the slowest in this table apart from ElevenLabs Multilingual v2. The ~50-language claim is vendor-stated and was not re-verified in this refresh. No voice cloning.
Sources