Head to head / AI Voice

Cartesia vs Unreal Speech

The verdict
  • Unreal Speech is cheaper per million characters ($16 vs $39.2).
  • Cartesia is cheaper to start ($5/mo vs $49/mo).
ComparedCartesiaUnreal Speech
Cost / 1M chars$39.2$16
Starting price$5/mo$49/mo
Free tier
Visit CartesiaVisit Unreal Speech

Feature by feature

FeatureCartesiaUnreal Speech
Languages40+8
Voice cloningYesNo
APIYesYes
Commercial usePaid plansYes (free needs attribution)
Styles/emotionsYesLimited (pitch/speed)
OutputMP3, WAV, PCMMP3/PCM/WAV + timestamps

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

Unreal Speech

Developers who need cheap, scalable TTS for high-volume apps, narration, or captions.

  • +Among the cheapest per-character TTS
  • +Low-latency real-time streaming
  • +Per-word timestamps for subtitles
  • +Generous 250k-character free tier

Compared on the metrics we track for this category. Prices are the cheapest paid tier. Some links are affiliate links.