VoiceLab vs ElevenLabs: which tool for your phone messages?

You search “create phone messages with AI” and every answer points you to ElevenLabs. Fair enough — their voices are among the best on the market. But when you actually try to build a complete phone greeting or on-hold message with ElevenLabs alone, you hit a wall pretty quickly.

ElevenLabs generates speech. That’s what it does, and it does it well. What it does not do: mix that speech with background music, export the result in A-law or u-law format for your PBX, normalise the loudness to telephony standards, or give you a royalty-free music catalogue.

VoiceLab does all of that. And here’s the twist: VoiceLab actually uses ElevenLabs as its TTS engine under the hood. So you get the same voice quality, wrapped in a workflow built specifically for phone messages.

This article breaks down where each tool fits, what it does well, and where it falls short.

What is ElevenLabs?

ElevenLabs launched in 2022 and quickly became the reference in AI voice generation. Over 1,000 voices, 30+ languages, and voice quality that regularly fools listeners into thinking they’re hearing a real person.

The use cases go well beyond telephony: audiobook narration, video voiceovers, podcast production, conversational AI agents, dubbing. ElevenLabs recently added SIP trunking for real-time AI call agents, and offers a full REST API for developers building speech into their own products.

Their Multilingual v2 and Flash models produce speech with natural prosody and minimal robotic artifacts. On a phone line compressed to 8 kHz G.711, most callers cannot tell the difference from a human voice.

ElevenLabs uses a character-based credit system, billed in USD (tax excluded). The free tier gives you 10,000 characters per month. Paid plans: Starter at $5/month (30,000 characters), Creator at $11/month (100,000 characters), Pro at $99/month (500,000 characters, plus higher-quality WAV exports at 44.1 kHz), Scale at $330/month (2 million characters).

Where ElevenLabs excels: raw voice quality, voice variety, a developer API, and voice cloning from audio samples.

Where it falls short for telephony: ElevenLabs generates speech files, period. No built-in music mixing, no telephony-specific export formats (A-law, u-law, 8 kHz mono), no LUFS normalisation, no background music catalogue. You get a voice file. What you do with it after that is your problem.

What is VoiceLab?

VoiceLab does one thing: professional phone messages. Greetings, on-hold messages, IVR prompts, after-hours voicemail. That’s it.

Under the hood, VoiceLab uses ElevenLabs for the voice generation. Same voices, same quality. The difference is what happens next.

VoiceLab has an online mixing console where you layer voice over background music. You set timing, volume, fade-ins and fade-outs directly in the browser. Then you export in whatever format your PBX expects: WAV PCM, A-law, u-law, MP3 — all at 8 kHz mono. The audio gets normalised to telephony LUFS standards (-16 LUFS for voice, -20 LUFS for the final mix), so callers don’t get blasted when switching from the greeting to the on-hold loop.

There’s also a built-in catalogue of royalty-free music cleared for commercial telephony use. No SABAM/SACEM/GEMA licence to worry about.

Pricing is in EUR, VAT included: free plan with 50 credits, Starter at 12.99 EUR/month (80 credits), Premium at 24.90 EUR/month (200 credits), Business at 59.90 EUR/month (400 credits). One credit = one complete message (voice + music + mix + export).

VoiceLab is not a general-purpose TTS tool. If you need audiobook narration, podcast voices or an API to plug into your own software, look elsewhere. But if you need a phone message you can upload to your 3CX or FreePBX in ten minutes, this is what it was built for.

The comparison table

Criterion	VoiceLab	ElevenLabs
Voice quality (TTS engine)	ElevenLabs voices (same engine)	ElevenLabs native
Voice+music mixing console	Yes, built-in browser editor	No (you need a separate DAW)
PBX export (WAV/A-law/u-law 8 kHz)	Yes, one-click export	No (WAV 44.1 kHz or MP3 only)
Telephony LUFS normalisation	Automatic (-16 / -20 LUFS)	No
Built-in royalty-free music	Yes, curated catalogue	No
Multilingual in a single file	Yes (mix languages in one message)	Multilingual voices, but single-language per generation
Target use case	B2B telephony (greetings, on-hold, IVR)	Generic TTS (audiobooks, videos, agents, API)
Pricing currency	EUR, VAT included	USD, tax excluded
Pricing entry point	Free (50 credits) / 12.99 EUR/mo	Free (10k chars) / $5/mo
Voice cloning	No	Yes (paid plans)
Developer API	No	Yes, full REST API
GDPR / EU hosting	Yes, EU servers	Partial (US-based company, some EU processing)
Commercial usage rights	Included in all plans	Paid plans only

Three scenarios where VoiceLab is the better pick

Scenario 1: A dental practice needs five phone messages by Friday

Dr. Martin opens a second practice and needs a greeting, on-hold message, IVR, after-hours voicemail and a seasonal closure announcement. All in French and Dutch.

With ElevenLabs alone, Dr. Martin would generate the speech for each message, then need to find royalty-free music somewhere, download it, open an audio editor (Audacity, GarageBand, or similar), mix voice and music manually, adjust volumes by ear, then convert each file to the right format for their 3CX system (WAV PCM 8 kHz mono). For someone who spends their days doing root canals, that’s a lot of steps.

With VoiceLab, the whole process happens in the browser. Type the script, pick a voice, pick background music from the catalogue, adjust the mix, export in 3CX format. Ten messages (5 in French, 5 in Dutch) in under an hour.

Scenario 2: A franchise network with 20 locations

Each location needs its own address, phone number and opening hours in the greeting and after-hours messages. That’s 40+ messages with slight text variations but the same voice and music.

ElevenLabs can generate all 40 voice tracks. But then someone still has to add music to each one, normalise the levels, convert to the right PBX format, and keep track of which file goes where. That’s a production job. In VoiceLab, you build one template, swap the location details, and export. Forty messages in an afternoon instead of a week.

Scenario 3: Quarterly message updates

A real estate agency refreshes their on-hold messages every quarter: new property highlights, seasonal greetings, updated team info. Four updates per year, three messages each time. Twelve production cycles.

The first time around, you might tolerate the ElevenLabs-plus-Audacity workflow. By the third quarter, you really won’t. VoiceLab keeps the music, volume levels and format settings from the previous version. Open, edit, regenerate, download. Done.

When ElevenLabs is the right choice

VoiceLab is not trying to replace ElevenLabs. The two tools do different things, and there are clear situations where ElevenLabs is the better fit.

You need a developer API. If you’re building an application that generates speech programmatically — a chatbot, a notification system, an e-learning platform — ElevenLabs’ REST API is what you need. VoiceLab does not offer an API.

You need voice cloning. ElevenLabs lets you clone a voice from audio samples (with consent). If your company has a specific brand voice that needs to be reproduced in AI, ElevenLabs is the only option of the two.

You need speech for non-telephony content. Audiobooks, YouTube videos, podcast intros, e-learning modules, game dialogue. These are ElevenLabs’ home turf. VoiceLab is built for phone systems, not content production.

You want maximum control over audio quality. ElevenLabs Pro and Scale plans export at 44.1 kHz, 16-bit WAV. If you’re working in a professional audio production pipeline and need high-resolution source files, ElevenLabs gives you that. VoiceLab optimises for telephony, which means 8 kHz output.

When VoiceLab is the right choice

The short version: you want a file you can upload to your PBX and be done with it.

More specifically, VoiceLab makes sense when you need voice and music mixed together (every on-hold message does), when your phone system expects A-law, u-law or 8 kHz mono WAV, and when you want consistent loudness across all your messages. LUFS normalisation is one of those things nobody thinks about until their callers get a volume spike between the greeting and the hold loop.

It’s also the simpler path if you don’t want to deal with music licensing. VoiceLab’s catalogue is cleared for commercial telephony use — no SABAM, SACEM or GEMA paperwork. And for European SMEs, pricing in EUR with VAT included means one less line item to sort out at the end of the quarter.

For a broader look at what goes into a professional phone message, see our complete phone messages guide.

FAQ

Does VoiceLab use ElevenLabs voices?

Yes. VoiceLab uses ElevenLabs as its text-to-speech engine. The voice quality is identical. VoiceLab adds the telephony layer on top: mixing, music, PBX export formats and LUFS normalisation. You get ElevenLabs’ voice technology without needing to handle audio post-production yourself.

Can I use ElevenLabs directly for phone messages?

You can generate the speech portion with ElevenLabs, but you will need additional tools to produce a finished phone message. Specifically, you would need audio editing software to mix voice with background music, a format converter for PBX-compatible output (A-law, u-law, 8 kHz mono), and a loudness normalisation tool. It works, but it is a multi-step process that requires some technical knowledge.

Which is cheaper for phone messages?

It depends on volume, but for the specific use case of phone messages, VoiceLab typically costs less per finished message. A complete message on VoiceLab (voice + music + mix + export) costs between 5 and 13 EUR depending on the plan. With ElevenLabs, the speech generation alone might cost less per character, but you still need to account for the time and tools required for mixing, normalisation and format conversion. For a comparison of costs between AI and traditional studios, see our AI studio vs traditional studio article.

Do I need both tools?

No. If your only need is phone messages (greetings, on-hold, IVR, voicemail), VoiceLab covers the full workflow. You do not need a separate ElevenLabs account. If you need both phone messages and general-purpose TTS (for videos, apps, or other content), then using both makes sense — VoiceLab for telephony, ElevenLabs for everything else.

The bottom line

These two tools sit at different levels of the same stack. ElevenLabs turns text into speech. VoiceLab takes that speech (literally the same engine), mixes it with music, normalises the loudness and spits out a file your PBX can play.

If you need a voice file to feed into your own app or audio production pipeline, go with ElevenLabs directly. If you need a greeting message that’s ready to upload to your Asterisk, 3CX or Yealink by the end of the afternoon, VoiceLab saves you the post-production work.

Try VoiceLab free — 50 credits, no card required

---

ElevenLabs pricing retrieved from elevenlabs.io (March 2026). VoiceLab pricing from voicelab.cloud. ElevenLabs is a trademark of ElevenLabs, Inc. VoiceLab is a product of Digitis SRL.