Cartesia vs Deepgram vs ElevenLabs vs Rime Labs
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
Cartesia
Low-latency speech models built on state space models, for voice agent...
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Deepgram
Speech-to-text, text-to-speech and voice-agent APIs for developers
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ElevenLabs
Expressive AI voices, cloning, dubbing and voice agents on one credit...
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Rime Labs
Low-latency text-to-speech for phone agents, built by linguists
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| RECATOOLS Score | 7.6 / 10 | 8 / 10 | 8.6 / 10 | 7.4 / 10 |
| Capability | ||||
| Value for money | ||||
| Ease of use | ||||
| ASEAN readiness | ||||
| API quality | ||||
| Pricing | Freemium | Usage_based | Freemium | Usage_based |
| Free tier | Free: 20K credits a month (about 27 minutes of Sonic speech) plus $1 a month of prepaid voice-agent usage | $200 one-time credit on Pay As You Go: no credit card, no expiry; promotional credits are non-transferable | 10,000 credits a month across all products, no commercial licence, no credit rollover | One-time trial credit for new accounts, no card required; Rime gives it as ~800 minutes on the pricing hero and 3,000 minutes in its FAQ and docs |
| Paid from | $5/month (Pro: 100K credits, commercial licence, instant voice cloning) | Usage-based: Nova-3 batch $0.0043/min; streaming $0.0048/min promo (regular $0.0077) | $6/month Starter (30,000 credits), or $5/month billed annually | $0.03 per 1,000 characters (Mist v3), or $0.05 on Coda |
| Has API | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Free to use | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Users | — | 200,000+ developers | 1M+ users | Serves Fortune 500 and major restaurant brands |
| Founded | 2024 | 2015 | 2022 | 2022 |
| Maker | — | — | Mati Staniszewski, Piotr Dabkowski | Lily Clifford (CEO, Stanford NLP PhD dropout), Brooke Larson (PhD linguist, ex-Amazon Alexa), Ares Geovanos (Stanford engineer, product veteran) |
| Verdict | Cartesia is built for real-time voice: Sonic-3.6 starts speaking in under 90 milliseconds across 44 languages, Ink-2 transcribes with built-in turn detection, and Managed Agents ties them into phone agents. Its leaderboa... |
Deepgram is one of the strongest speech APIs for developers: fast, accurate, per-second billing, and a coherent stack for building voice agents, now with an APAC headquarters in Singapore and growing Southeast Asian lang... |
ElevenLabs remains the reference point for synthetic voice. Eleven v4 adds finer control through audio tags and natural-language direction, v4 Turbo targets live agents at about 100 milliseconds of median inference by th... |
Rime is a strong choice for English-first voice agents on the phone: Coda and Mist v3 stream fast enough for live conversation, handle codes and numbers carefully, and can run inside your own network with SOC 2 Type II r... |
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Comparisons cover up to 4 tools. Scores are RECATOOLS editorial assessments; verify current pricing on each vendor's site.