ElevenLabs vs PlayHT
Short answer: one of these no longer exists.
Last revised 2026-09-17
Our pick
ElevenLabs, because PlayHT is gone
Meta acquired the PlayAI team in July 2025 and the standalone service was wound down. Groq, which hosted its text-to-speech models, notified users in December 2025 and shut them off at the end of that month. There is nothing to compare and nothing to buy, which is why this page exists.
Murf AI: Cheaper studio-style narration if you were using PlayHT for volume, not nuance.
Side by side
| ElevenLabs AI Voice Our pick | PlayHT AI Voice | |
|---|---|---|
| Our score | 4 cydersWorth pouring | 1 cydersTip it out |
| Starting price | $6/mo | $39/mo |
| Free plan | Yes10,000 characters/month, 3 voices | Yes12,500 characters, no commercial use |
| What the paid plans are | Starter at $5/mo, Creator at $22/mo, Pro at $99/mo | Creator at $39/mo, Pro at $99/mo, Enterprise available |
| Best for | PodcastersAudiobook CreatorsContent Creators | DevelopersContent CreatorsAudiobook Producers |
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| Price checked | 2026-09-16 | Not verified by us |
| Visit | ElevenLabs → | PlayHT → |
What happened to PlayHT
Meta acquired PlayAI, the company behind Play.ht, in July 2025 and absorbed the team. The standalone service was subsequently wound down. Groq, which had hosted the playai-tts models, notified users on 23 December 2025 and shut them down on 31 December. The domain no longer serves a public site.
If you are here because an old comparison article or a listicle still recommends PlayHT's 800-voice library, that article is out of date. There is no plan to buy and no support to call.
If you were a customer
Check your card statement for a recurring charge that no longer has a product behind it, and check whether any audio you generated is still hosted somewhere you can retrieve it. Migrating away from a shut-down voice provider is mostly an asset-recovery exercise: pull your generated files before the storage goes too.
Where to go instead
ElevenLabs is the obvious landing spot and the best voice quality available, with an entry tier cheaper than PlayHT's old Creator plan. Its caveats are real and worth knowing: a consumer experience well below its enterprise scores, safety controls that have been publicly bypassed, and a biometric privacy class action filed in Illinois in 2026 over voiceprints allegedly taken from third-party recordings.
If you were using PlayHT for a large volume of straightforward narration and cost matters more than expressiveness, Murf is the cheaper studio-style alternative and is aimed at teams rather than developers.
How we would buy it
- •Replacing PlayHT for product or content audio: ElevenLabs.
- •Replacing it for corporate narration on a budget: look at Murf.
- •Still being billed by anything PlayHT-related: dispute it with your card issuer rather than waiting for support.
- •Reading a 2025 article that recommends PlayHT: treat everything else in that article as equally stale. The category changes fast enough that a year-old roundup is close to useless.
ElevenLabs
4.0Worth pouringThe best synthetic voice available, and not a close contest. Two caveats: the consumer experience (3.0 on Trustpilot) is a long way below the B2B scores, and its safety controls have been publicly bypassed, including by journalists cloning banned political voices. Superb product, ugly externalities.
Full ElevenLabs reviewPlayHT
1.0Tip it outDo not buy this. Meta acquired the team in July 2025 and the service has since been reported shut down. We are keeping the page up so people searching for it find out here rather than after paying.
Full PlayHT reviewOther comparisons
Scores are our own editorial verdicts in cyders out of 5, not an average of other people's ratings. How we score. Prices come from each vendor's own pricing page on the date shown above, and vendors change plans often, so confirm before you buy.
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