ElevenLabs vs PlayHT: this comparison no longer has two sides
PlayHT is gone. Meta confirmed it had acquired the PlayAI team on 13 July 2025, the Voice API and TTS service were deprecated within weeks, and as of 3 September 2026 the play.ht domain does not resolve at all. So there is no ElevenLabs-versus-PlayHT decision left to make — the real question is which live tool replaces the job PlayHT was doing, and on published list prices that is usually Cartesia on cost or ElevenLabs on voice quality.
What actually happened to PlayHT
PlayHT — later branded PlayAI — was a text-to-speech and voice-cloning platform that creators routinely shortlisted as the cheaper counterweight to ElevenLabs. It no longer exists. The timeline below separates what is confirmed from what is only widely reported, because the vendor's own site is no longer reachable to check.
| Date | Event | How solid is it |
|---|---|---|
| 13 July 2025 | Meta confirms it acquired the PlayAI team; an internal memo says the "entire PlayAI team" is joining, folded into Meta's Superintelligence Labs work on AI Characters, Meta AI and wearables. | Confirmed. Reported by TechCrunch, with a Meta spokesperson confirming to Bloomberg. |
| 30 July 2025 | Integration partners begin notifying their own customers that PlayHT voices have stopped working. AudioStack's changelog states plainly that "PlayHT has officially deprecated support for its Voice API and TTS services" and attributes it to the acquisition. | Confirmed via a third-party deprecation changelog from a platform that had integrated it. |
| 31 December 2025 | Full platform sunset — studio, API and Voice Agents — with accounts, voice clones and saved audio reportedly deleted and no export tooling offered. | Reported, not first-party verified. The date is consistent across many migration write-ups, but CartSignal cannot confirm it against a PlayHT announcement because the site is gone. |
| 3 September 2026 | play.ht returns no DNS record at all. There is no shutdown notice, no redirect and no archive of pricing to check. | Confirmed. CartSignal resolution check on the date shown. |
The practical consequence is that every "ElevenLabs vs PlayHT" article, course module and comparison table written before mid-2025 is now wrong, and a lot of them are still ranking. If you arrived here from one of those, the sections below are the part that still matters.
What to use instead, with September 2026 prices
PlayHT served two fairly different jobs: a cheap TTS API for developers, and a browser voiceover studio for creators. The replacement depends on which one you were paying for.
| Tool | Replaces PlayHT for | Entry price (official, Sept 2026) | What to watch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cartesia | Low-cost TTS and real-time voice APIs | Free 20K credits/mo; Pro $5/mo for 100K credits (~133 min TTS); Startup $49/mo for 1.25M (~1,667 min); Scale $299/mo for 8M (~10,667 min) | Text to speech and speech to text share the same credit pool; voice agents are metered separately in dollars at $0.06/min. The advertised TTS minutes assume ~750 characters per minute — see the Cartesia profile for the credit-rate breakdown. |
| ElevenLabs | Voice realism, cloning and dubbing | Free 10K credits/mo; Starter $6/mo for 30K; Creator $22/mo for 121K; Pro $99/mo for 600K | Text to speech burns 1 credit per character, but dubbing runs 2,000–10,000 credits a minute. Check the rate for your product, not the sticker price. |
| Murf AI | Timeline voiceover studio work with team seats | Studio from $19/mo on annual billing | Three separate meters — Studio subscription, API characters, Dub credits — and unused Voice Generation Time carries forward only one cycle. |
| Resemble AI | Deepfake detection and watermarking — no longer hosted voice | Detection only: Flex $0, Team from $280/mo annual, Business from $800/mo, plus usage from $0.015/sec | Resemble said on 13 August 2026 it is "not selling voice AI to new customers". Its voice models are still free to self-host under the MIT licence as Chatterbox, but there is no hosted TTS to buy. |
The cost gap PlayHT used to fill
PlayHT's pitch was "most of the quality, less of the ElevenLabs bill." On published list prices that slot now belongs to Cartesia, and the gap is wider than most people expect. The arithmetic below is CartSignal's, applied to each vendor's own published figures.
ElevenLabs prices text to speech at 1 credit per character. Assuming roughly 900 characters per spoken minute, its plan allowances convert to about $0.18 per narration minute on Starter, $0.16 on Creator and about $0.15 on Pro — the rate barely improves as you go up, so the larger tiers buy headroom rather than a discount. Cartesia publishes its own minute estimates instead: about 133 minutes on the $5 Pro plan works out near $0.038 a minute, and the $49 Startup plan near $0.029.
Read the per-minute column with care. Cartesia's own estimates imply 750 characters per minute while the ElevenLabs figures above assume 900, so dividing one column by the other overstates the gap — it produces about 4.8x when the true like-for-like difference is exactly 4x. Per character, which needs no density assumption, Cartesia Pro is $50.00 per million against ElevenLabs Starter's $200.00. The whole voice field ranked in that unit — including the finding that ElevenLabs' own API undercuts every ElevenLabs subscription — is in ElevenLabs alternatives.
| Plan | Price | Approx. TTS minutes | Cost per minute |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cartesia Pro | $5/mo | ~133 | ~$0.038 |
| Cartesia Startup | $49/mo | ~1,667 | ~$0.029 |
| ElevenLabs Starter | $6/mo | ~33 | ~$0.18 |
| ElevenLabs Creator | $22/mo | ~134 | ~$0.16 |
That is roughly a five-fold difference per minute at the entry tiers. It is not a like-for-like quality claim, and CartSignal has run no listening tests: the two vendors count their allowances differently, Cartesia's minute figures are its own estimates, and the 900-characters-per-minute assumption moves the ElevenLabs numbers if your scripts are denser or sparser. But if cost per minute was why you picked PlayHT, that is the comparison worth running first — and ElevenLabs' separately priced API meter, covered on its profile, lands cheaper than its own subscription pool.
If you are migrating off a dead integration
- Assume the audio is gone. There is no site to log into and no export path. Rebuild from your source scripts rather than trying to recover renders.
- Voice clones do not transfer. A cloned voice is not a portable file; you will need to re-consent and re-clone with the new vendor, under that vendor's policy.
- Re-check the rights terms, not just the price. Commercial-use licensing differs by tier — ElevenLabs' free tier, for example, carries no commercial licence.
- Price the product you actually use. Credit pools hide enormous rate differences between narration, dubbing and agent voice. The per-minute tables on each profile exist for this reason.
- Watch for disclosure duties. If you publish synthetic voice into the EU, see the Article 50 labelling rules — a vendor watermark does not discharge your own obligation.
Frequently asked questions
Is PlayHT still available in 2026?
No. Meta confirmed the PlayAI acquisition on 13 July 2025, partners reported the Voice API and TTS service deprecated by 30 July 2025, and the play.ht domain does not resolve as of 3 September 2026.
Why does this comparison page still exist?
Because the query is still being searched, largely by people working from pre-shutdown articles. A correction with current pricing is more useful than a feature table against a product that no longer runs.
What is the closest replacement for PlayHT?
Cartesia if you chose PlayHT on price or needed a TTS API; Murf AI if you used it as a browser voiceover studio; ElevenLabs if voice realism was the deciding factor.
Can I still export my PlayHT voice clones or audio?
No working export path exists. Deletion at sunset with no export tooling is widely reported but not first-party verifiable, since the site is gone. Treat the audio as lost.
Is this a hands-on comparison?
No. Prices come from official pricing pages checked in September 2026, the shutdown timeline is sourced above, and the per-minute figures are CartSignal's arithmetic on published rates.
Sources
- TechCrunch — Meta acquires voice startup Play AI (13 July 2025)
- AudioStack changelog — PlayHT deprecation notice (30 July 2025)
- ElevenLabs official pricing (checked September 2026)
- Cartesia official pricing (checked September 2026)
- play.ht DNS resolution check, 3 September 2026 — no record returned