ElevenLabs vs Speechify: Making Audio or Listening to It

The short answer: this pair is two pairs. To listen to your own reading pile, Speechify Premium costs $29 a month or $139 a year and plays at up to 5x speed (Speechify pricing), while ElevenLabs' reading app, ElevenReader, gives 10 hours of text to audio a month free and unlimited listening on Ultra at $11 a month (ElevenReader pricing). To produce audio other people hear, ElevenLabs Starter is $6 a month with a commercial licence (ElevenLabs pricing), and Speechify's separate Studio starts at $100 a year (Studio pricing). All checked on 26 October 2026. Choose Speechify if the job is reading faster at your desk and on the move; choose ElevenLabs if the job is making the voice.

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Sort the pile first:

1. Put a year of each next to the other. For listening, Speechify Premium at $139 a year against ElevenReader Ultra at $8.25 a month billed annually, 12 x $8.25 = $99 (Speechify pricing, ElevenReader pricing). For producing, Speechify Studio Starter's 86,400 credits at 1 credit per second of voiceover are 86,400 / 3,600 = 24 hours a year for $100 (Studio pricing); ElevenLabs Creator lists about 121 minutes a month, roughly 24 hours a year, for $220 on annual billing, since a year costs ten months of $22 (ElevenLabs pricing).
2. Name the files you already have. PDFs, Google Docs, Kindle books and saved articles are a listening job. Scripts for product videos, ads or a podcast intro are a production job, and only the production plans let you publish the result.
3. Count what you abandon. For listening: documents opened and left unfinished last month, against the month after. For production: completion rate of the voiced video against its silent or captioned version.

Four products, side by side

Read on 26 October 2026: Speechify's pricing, Studio pricing, terms and podcast article; ElevenLabs' pricing, ElevenReader pricing and GenFM cost article.

Where they part

The licence, before the voice

Speechify's terms grant the reader app for personal, non-commercial use, exempt only Speechify Voice Over Studio, and list generating audio for public distribution without a Studio licence among the reasons an account can be suspended (Speechify terms, sections 4.1, 4.4 and 6.5). So an MP3 of your whitepaper made in Premium is for your ears. ElevenLabs puts the commercial licence on every paid plan from Starter (pricing). If anything you make will reach a customer, the question is settled before the voices are compared.

Reading tools, or production tools

Speechify's Premium is built around reading: scan and listen, AI summaries and chat about what you are reading, voice typing and cloud-drive imports (pricing). ElevenReader covers listening with offline downloads and audiobooks, but the depth of ElevenLabs sits on the production side: cloning, Dubbing Studio, music and sound effects on one credit pool (pricing). A founder who reads board packs on a train is a Speechify user. A content team publishing an audio edition each week is an ElevenLabs one.

How a retake is charged

In Speechify Studio, any change to pitch, speed or emotional delivery goes back through the AI and costs credits, while volume changes and re-exports are free (Studio pricing). ElevenLabs bills per character generated and states before you generate whether a regeneration is free (pricing FAQ). Lock the script before the first render on either.

One agent step: a report turned into a two-host briefing

ElevenLabs' GenFM lives in Studio under Audio, Workflows, Generate a podcast. Upload the report as a PDF or paste its URL, choose a host-and-guest conversation or a short bulletin, set focus topics, and generate; the script appears for editing before any audio is made, and only the conversion to audio is charged, at the usual speech rate, with the credit cost shown before you confirm (GenFM guide, cost article). The human check sits in that gap: whoever owns the research reads the script against the report, corrects every figure and claim, and deletes anything the hosts embellish, then converts. Speechify's AI Podcasts do the same from a link or file on Premium, 30 a month; set web insights to Off so the episode uses only your document (podcast article).

Choose Speechify if your job is

• Getting through PDFs, docs and web pages faster, with summaries, highlights and voice typing on every device.
• Listening faster than 4x, where Premium's 5x ceiling matters (Speechify pricing).
• Buying voiceover hours as one yearly line through Studio.

Choose ElevenLabs if your job is

• Producing audio that customers hear, with a licence from a $6 plan.
• Cloning a voice, dubbing a video or scoring it from the same account.
• Listening on a budget, starting from ElevenReader's free 10 hours of text to audio a month.

Background on each: the ElevenLabs entry and the Speechify entry.

Two weeks on the free tiers

Load the same five documents into ElevenReader's free plan and Speechify's free plan, and listen for two weeks. ElevenReader's 10 free hours a month are about a 400-page book by its own reckoning (ElevenReader pricing); Speechify's free plan caps speed at 1.5x (pricing). If the free hours run out first, ElevenReader's paid plan is the cheaper fix; if the speed cap is what hurts, Speechify's is the one built for it.

ElevenReader's banner sells the first Ultra month for $1 against a listed $11, an offer that turns a free plan you have not yet outgrown into a subscription before your own two weeks of listening have said whether you need one (ElevenReader pricing).

FAQ

Is ElevenReader part of ElevenLabs?

Yes. It is ElevenLabs' reading app: its pricing page carries the press coverage of ElevenLabs launching it, and ElevenLabs' own help pages cover publishing books to it (distribution and publishing).

Can I share Speechify audio with my team?

Speechify lets you share what you are listening to with someone without the app (sharing article), but its terms treat the reader as personal and non-commercial and warn against sharing subscriptions (terms). For audio a team publishes, use Studio.

Does GenFM cost more than plain text to speech?

No. Generating the podcast script is free; you pay the normal cost of converting that text to audio, shown before you confirm (GenFM cost article).