Head to head / AI Voice
Amazon Polly vs Cartesia
- →Amazon Polly is cheaper per million characters ($16 vs $39.2).
- →Amazon Polly has a free tier to start; Cartesia does not.
| Compared | Amazon Polly | Cartesia |
|---|---|---|
| Cost / 1M chars | $16 | $39.2 |
| Starting price | — | $5/mo |
| Free tier | Yes | — |
| Visit Amazon Polly | Visit Cartesia |
Feature by feature
| Feature | Amazon Polly | Cartesia |
|---|---|---|
| Languages | 30+ | 40+ |
| Voice cloning | No | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Commercial use | All usage | Paid plans |
| Styles/emotions | Limited | Yes |
| Output | MP3, OGG, PCM | MP3, WAV, PCM |
Amazon Polly
Developers and AWS teams needing cheap, scalable programmatic TTS at high volume.
- +Very cheap per-character pricing
- +Rock-solid AWS scale and uptime
- +SSML, lexicons, speech marks
- +Generous free tier first year
Cartesia
Developers building real-time voice agents where latency matters most.
- +Ultra-low latency streaming
- +Instant cloning from ~10s audio
- +40+ languages on one model
- +Competitive per-character pricing
Compared on the metrics we track for this category. Prices are the cheapest paid tier. Some links are affiliate links.