Comparison
ElevenLabs Reader, the app is called ElevenReader, pairs cloud AI voices with a library of more than 200,000 audiobooks, free for 10 hours of listening a month before a subscription kicks in. Timber keeps the voice generation on your iPhone and gives you 300+ voices with no hour limit and no account. Here is the honest version, including the parts where ElevenReader wins.
† ElevenReader figures read from its own pricing page on 20 September 2026
Timber: on your iPhone. The speech is generated on the device, so it works on a plane and nothing is uploaded to be read.
ElevenReader: in the cloud. Every voice, including the free plan’s, is generated by ElevenLabs’ own AI voice service.
Timber: nothing, and no account. 300+ voices across 71 languages are included. Extra features are an optional one-time or subscription purchase.
ElevenReader: free for 10 hours of text-to-audio a month, about one 400-page book. Its Ultra plan is $11 a month, or $8.25 a month billed annually, for unlimited listening on your own files.
Timber: 300+ without paying, in 71 languages, counting Apple’s own voices, plus your Apple Personal Voice.
ElevenReader: 1,000+ voices included free, narrating in more than 30 languages. Custom voice cloning is an Ultra-plan feature.
Timber: 0.5x to 1.25x free, and the full 0.3x to 3x with Pro. The slow end is as useful as the fast end for anyone learning a language or following a hard page.
ElevenReader: up to 4.0x, listed as a free-plan feature on its own pricing page.
Timber: whole webpages, PDFs including scanned ones, EPUB books, Word and PowerPoint files, a photo of a printed page, RSS feeds, Project Gutenberg, and every tab open in your browser.
ElevenReader: your own books, PDFs and articles through its Upload & Listen feature, plus its built-in library of over 200,000 premium audiobooks and thousands of free ones.
Timber: iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch. iOS 18 and later. No Android, no web version.
ElevenReader: iOS, Android, a Chrome extension, and reading online in the browser. It reaches Android and any desktop browser, but has no dedicated Mac or Apple Watch app.
Timber: mark passages while you listen and hand out what you marked as a worksheet, with MLA and APA citations built in. Repeating headers and footers in a scanned chapter can be silenced across the whole document in one tap.
ElevenReader: gives students a free year of its Ultra plan rather than in-app teaching tools; its Ultra plan can skip headers, footers and filler text when importing a file.
A comparison page that only flatters its own product is an advertisement. These are real:
Over 200,000 titles you can start listening to right away, not just your own files. Timber has no built-in library.
1,000+ voices and thousands of free audiobooks before anyone pays anything, on top of 10 hours a month of your own files.
A server with no battery or memory budget can push voice realism further than a phone can, and Ultra lets you create a custom cloned voice. Timber’s voices are good and improving, but this is a real trade worth hearing for yourself.
Android and any desktop browser through a Chrome extension. Timber is Apple only.
The honest summary: ElevenReader is a cloud AI audiobook service that also reads your own files. Timber is a reader that happens to need no library subscription, no server, and no hour limit to do the reading.
It takes about a minute and costs nothing to find out which one you like listening to.