Alternatives to MeloTTS
An open-source multilingual text-to-speech engine from MIT and MyShell.ai with a command line and web UI. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
MeloTTS
An open-source multilingual text-to-speech engine from MIT and MyShell.ai with a command line and web UI.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as MeloTTS.
Piper
A fast neural text-to-speech engine that runs locally, even on modest hardware like a Raspberry Pi.
Piper is a GPL-3.0 local engine fast enough for a Raspberry Pi, running on Windows, macOS and Linux through the command line, Python or a C library.
Kokoro
Small, fast open-weight text-to-speech model you can run locally.
Kokoro is a small, fast Apache-2.0 open-weight model run locally as a Python library on Windows, macOS and Linux, without MeloTTS's web UI.
Kokoro-FastAPI
A Dockerized, OpenAI-compatible server for running the Kokoro-82M text-to-speech model on your own hardware.
Kokoro-FastAPI serves the Kokoro model through a Docker server with an OpenAI-compatible endpoint, voice mixing, SSML and caption timestamps.
Coqui TTS
Deep learning toolkit for training and running text-to-speech models.
Coqui TTS is an MPL-2.0 toolkit with pretrained models in many more languages and training support, but it has not been updated since mid-2024.
RHVoice
A free, open-source speech synthesizer for Russian and other languages, used with screen readers and desktops.
RHVoice is a lightweight open-source synthesizer for Linux and Android with strong Russian support, sounding less natural than neural text-to-speech.
CosyVoice
An open-source multilingual text-to-speech model with zero-shot voice cloning, inference and training code.
CosyVoice is an Apache-2.0 multilingual model that adds zero-shot voice cloning and training code, but needs a GPU for practical use.
Tortoise TTS
Open source multi-voice text-to-speech system tuned for quality.
Tortoise TTS is an Apache-2.0 multi-voice system focused on realistic prosody, notably slower to generate than MeloTTS and not updated since late 2024.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
Speaches
A self-hosted, OpenAI API-compatible server for local speech-to-text, translation and text-to-speech models.
AllTalk TTS
A local text-to-speech server with voice cloning, model finetuning, a settings page and a JSON API.
Speech Note
A Linux app for offline speech-to-text, text-to-speech and machine translation using local models.
Balabolka
A free Windows program that reads text aloud with installed voices and saves it as audio files.
F5-TTS
Open-source text-to-speech model that can clone voices, with a local Gradio interface for running it.
Orpheus TTS
An open text-to-speech model built on a language model, aimed at natural, emotionally expressive speech.
