ESPnet vs FreeTTS
ESPnet
espnet.github.ioFreeTTS
freetts.orgSide by side
| Figure | ESPnet | FreeTTS |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $19/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 2 | 5 |
| Spec score · Text-to-Speech Software | 8.9 (#17) | 9.0 (#12) |
| Spec score · Text-to-speech tools | 8.8 (#28) | 8.8 (#30) |
| API access | Yes | Yes |
| Commercial use | Yes | Yes |
| Export formats | WAV | MP3,WAV,OGG |
| Platforms | The installation guide lists Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, Windows 10, and macOS 12 as supported distributions or systems, with Windows and macOS marked installation only. | web,api,chrome_extension |
| Voice cloning | No | No |
Plans
FreeTTS
- FreeFree
- PRO$19 a month
- PRO Lifetime$199 a month
- Creator$39 a month
- Creator Lifetime$349 a month
In their own words
ESPnet
ESPnet is an open-source toolkit for speech processing, including recognition, text-to-speech, translation, enhancement, speaker diarization, and spoken language understanding. It provides complete recipes for a range of tasks, plus tutorials, notebooks, and demos for existing models. Users can install ESPnet and espnet-model-zoo with pip to run inference on existing models; published models can also run in CPU or GPU inference containers without checking out the repository. Installation supports editable pip setup and optional dependency groups for tasks such as ASR, TTS, and speech enhancement. Training requires a separate extra that includes Lightning, TensorBoard, W&B, torch_optimizer, matplotlib, and Dask. Some task-specific packages must also be installed separately when a recipe needs them. ESPnet 1 is no longer supported, while ESPnet2 users can skip installing Kaldi. The toolkit is released under Apache License 2.0 and permits commercial use. It offers API access and lists Linux, macOS, Windows, and self-hosted platforms; WAV is the listed export format.