Speechify Alternatives

ElevenReader is the reading app of ElevenLabs, the company behind some of the most realistic AI voices on the market. You load a PDF, an EPUB, an article or a web page, pick one of 1,000+ voices and listen on iOS, Android, the web or a Chrome extension, with your place synced between devices. That is the same job Speechify does.

The free plan is where it pulls ahead. It gives you 10 hours of text turned into audio every month, roughly a 400-page book, with the full voice library and playback up to 4x. Speechify's free plan stops at 10 robotic voices and 1.5x. Ultra, the paid plan, costs $11 a month on monthly billing or $8.25 a month billed annually ($99 a year), against $29 or $139 for Speechify Premium. The meter only bites on the free plan: Ultra lets you listen to your own files up to 24 hours of audio a day and adds 20 hours a month of premium audiobooks, so a heavy reader who outgrows 10 free hours has a clear upgrade. Offline downloads, custom voices and priority support are Ultra features too, and Ultra starts with a 3-day free trial. For voiceovers and cloning, ElevenReader is not the tool: that is the ElevenLabs platform, covered in our full ElevenLabs review and priced plan by plan in our ElevenLabs pricing breakdown.

NaturalReader is the closest like-for-like replacement for Speechify's reader. One subscription covers a web app, a mobile app and a Chrome extension, and it reads PDF, EPUB, DOCX, PPTX, Pages and more. It adds the study layer Speechify users ask for: OCR to read images and scanned documents, a pronunciation editor, annotations, and an AI filter that skips page numbers, charts and tables. The free plan gives unlimited listening with the free voices and 5 minutes a day of the better Plus AI voices.

Paid plans are cheaper than Speechify on yearly billing: Lite at $79 a year ($13.90 a month on monthly billing), Plus at $119 ($20.90) and Pro at $159 ($25.90). Lite is $60 a year less than Speechify Premium but only uses the Lite voices; the natural voices start on Plus, which is still $20 a year less. Two limits to read before you buy: Plus voices are capped at 500,000 characters a day, and audio made on any personal plan is licensed for personal use only, so MP3s for a YouTube channel need the separate commercial product. Every paid plan also exports up to 1 million characters a month as MP3 files with the Lite voices, which is how you listen offline.

Voice Dream Reader is one of the oldest reading apps on Apple devices and a long-time favorite of blind, low-vision and dyslexic readers. It imports PDFs, EPUBs, Word documents, PowerPoint files and web pages, and its App Store listing states that all voices work offline and keep playing in the background with the screen locked. It comes with 36 free built-in iOS voices in 27 languages, and offers 200+ premium voices in 30 languages from Acapela, NeoSpeech and Ivona.

The app now needs a subscription: the App Store lists a $4.99 monthly subscription and yearly options between $39.99 and $79.99, with a free trial for new users. Even the top yearly price stays below Speechify's $139. Individual premium voices are also listed as separate in-app purchases at $4.99 each, so check which voices your plan includes before buying one. The trade-off is the platform: it runs on iPhone, iPad and Mac, with no Android app, and its voices are the classic synthetic kind rather than the newest AI voices. If you read on a plane or a subway without signal, that offline promise is the reason to choose it.

Amazon Polly is not an app: it is the AWS text-to-speech API. You send text, it returns an audio file or a stream. That makes it the right alternative for the readers of this page who used Speechify's voices to produce audio at volume, or who want a read-aloud button inside their own product. Polly supports SSML to control phrasing, emphasis and intonation, and offers four voice engines: Standard, Neural, Long-Form and Generative.

Billing is per million characters, on usage: $4 for Standard, $16 for Neural, $30 for Generative and $100 for Long-Form. AWS's pricing examples put one million characters at about 23 hours of audio, so a Neural voice costs roughly $0.70 per hour of speech, a fraction of a seat-based app if you produce a lot. The free tier gives 5 million Standard characters a month, and 1 million Neural characters a month for the first 12 months only. New AWS accounts opened since mid-2025 also receive up to $200 in Free Tier credits, to use within 12 months; the free plan itself lasts 6 months. The limit is obvious: without a developer, you have nothing to click.

Murf is a voiceover studio, not a reading app. You paste or import a script, choose among 200+ voices in 30+ languages and accents, fix pronunciation on any plan, and add emphasis and variability controls on Business. It plugs into Canva, Google Slides, PowerPoint, Articulate 360 and Adobe Captivate, which is why e-learning teams use it, and into automations through its Make integration. Read the plan grid first: Canva comes with Creator, but PowerPoint and Google Slides need Business. If you left Speechify because you produce narration rather than listen to it, Murf answers that need better than any reader on this page.

Creator costs $19 a month billed annually ($228 a year) or $29 billed monthly, and Business $66 or $99. The free plan is a demo: 10 minutes of generation, no downloads and no commercial rights. Watch two points before paying: annual Creator caps generation at 24 hours a year (2 hours a month on monthly billing), and a refund is only possible within 24 hours of purchase and under 10 minutes of generated audio. Our full Murf review goes through each plan. If voice realism matters more than editing tools, compare it with ElevenLabs in our ElevenLabs vs Murf comparison, or the wider list of Murf alternatives.

Balabolka is a free Windows program that reads text aloud with the voices installed on your computer through Microsoft's Speech API (SAPI). It opens a long list of formats (DOC, DOCX, EPUB, MOBI, FB2, PDF, RTF, ODT and more), and it saves the on-screen text as an audio file, so you can turn a document into a file for your phone. A portable version runs from a USB drive without installation, which helps on a locked-down work laptop.

The price is nothing: its author lists it as freeware. That is $139 a year less than Speechify Premium. The program has had no new version since 2.15, released in 2019, and it needs at least one voice installed in Windows. What you give up is polish and voice quality: the interface looks dated, the voices are only as good as the ones installed in Windows, and it runs on Windows only, without a phone version or sync. For a student who needs to listen to a 40-page reading on a PC tonight, it does the job.