Cartesiavs
Deepgram
Deepgram: Deepgram offers comparable real-time speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and voice agent APIs.
Cartesia
Real-time voice AI platform for speech generation, transcription, and voice agents
As of 29 August 2026, Cartesia has a free plan and paid plans start at $4/month. Real-time voice AI platform offering text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and a voice agent platform built on state space models. Softwr lists it under AI. Cartesia is available on Web, API.
Overview
What Cartesia does
Cartesia is a voice AI platform offering real-time speech and transcription models purpose-built for voice agents. It provides three core products: Sonic for text-to-speech, Ink for speech-to-text, and Line, a voice agent platform, built on state space models for low-latency, long-context processing, with cloud, on-premise, or on-device deployment options.
What people use it for
- Building low-latency voice agents for customer support
- Real-time transcription for conversational applications
- Voice cloning for branded synthetic voices
- On-device or on-premise voice AI for regulated industries
Related searches
The honest half
Where it falls short
Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Cartesia.
- Instant and professional voice cloning are gated behind paid Pro and Startup tiers, unavailable on the free plan.
- Voice agent calls carry a separate per-minute usage fee ($0.06/minute) on top of subscription credits.
- Enterprise features like SSO and BAAs require a custom sales conversation rather than self-serve upgrade.
- Free tier concurrency limits (2 TTS, 8 STT concurrent requests) may be restrictive for testing production-like load.
Cross-shopped
What people choose instead of Cartesia
Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.
- CartesiavsResemble AI
Resemble AI: Resemble AI provides voice cloning and text-to-speech as an alternative synthetic voice platform.
Pricing
What Cartesia costs
Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.
Free
Free
- 20,000 credits/month
- TTS and STT included
- 2 concurrent TTS requests, 8 concurrent STT requests
- 1 voice agent slot
Pro
$4 /mo
- 100,000 credits/month
- Commercial use license
- Instant voice cloning
Startup
$39 /mo
- 1.25M credits/month
- Professional voice cloning
- Organizations support
Scale
$239 /mo
- 8M credits/month
- Priority support
- High concurrency limits
Enterprise
On request
- Custom concurrency
- DPAs/BAAs
- SSO
- Security questionnaires
Capabilities
Features
Sonic text-to-speech
Generates real-time speech with low latency and no quality tradeoffs.
Ink speech-to-text
Provides real-time transcription optimized for voice agent pipelines.
Line voice agent platform
Combines STT, TTS, and orchestration into a deployable voice agent platform.
Instant and professional voice cloning
Clones voices instantly or via a higher-fidelity professional cloning workflow.
Flexible deployment
Supports cloud, on-premise, and on-device deployment for data residency.
Telephony integration
Provides Cartesia phone numbers for direct voice agent telephony.
Answered, with sources
Questions people ask
Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
What does Cartesia cost?
Cartesia offers a free plan, Pro at $4/month, Startup at $39/month, Scale at $239/month, and custom Enterprise pricing, each including a monthly credit allotment, with annual billing saving 20%.
SourceIs there a free plan, and what are its limits?
The Free plan includes 20,000 credits per month, both TTS (Sonic) and STT (Ink), 2 concurrent TTS requests, 8 concurrent STT requests, and 1 voice agent slot.
SourceHow is usage metered?
Usage draws down a monthly credit allotment, with voice agent calls additionally billed at $0.06/minute and telephony via Cartesia phone numbers at $0.014/minute.
SourceKeep looking
Where to go from Cartesia
- Cartesia alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- Cartesia pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- Cartesia badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All AI softwareThe full category
- Best AI softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
Best AI software for
Compare Cartesia with
- Deepgram
- Resemble AI
- Play.ht
- ElevenLabs
- You.com
- LOVO
- Rev
- Murf
- Lindy
- AI21 Labs
- Tabnine
- Pika
- Claude
- Copilotly
- CoreWeave
- DeepSeek
- Grok
- ElevenLabs
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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Cartesia, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.
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