Comparison
Two apps that turn reading into listening, built on opposite ideas. Speechify sends your text to a server and charges a subscription for the good voices. Timber does the listening on your iPhone and gives you 300+ voices without an account. Here is the honest version, including the parts where Speechify wins.
† Speechify figures read from their 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.
Speechify: in the cloud. Your text goes to their servers to be turned into audio.
Timber: nothing, and no account. 300+ voices across 71 languages are included. Extra features are an optional one-time or subscription purchase.
Speechify: a free tier with 10 voices their own page describes as “robotic sounding”, capped at 1.5x speed. Premium is $29 a month billed monthly, or less billed yearly.
Timber: 300+ without paying, in 71 languages, counting Apple’s own voices, plus your Apple Personal Voice.
Speechify: 10 on the free tier, over 1000 in 60+ languages on Premium.
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.
Speechify: 1.5x on free, up to 5x on Premium.
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.
Speechify: webpages, PDFs, docs, and a Scan & Listen camera mode on Premium, plus Google Drive, Dropbox and OneDrive.
Timber: iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch. iOS 18 and later. No Android, no web version.
Speechify: iOS, Android, Chrome, and the web.
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.
Speechify: AI summaries and a chat assistant on Premium.
A comparison page that only flatters its own product is an advertisement. These are real:
Android, Chrome and the web. Timber is Apple only, and that is unlikely to change soon.
Summaries, a chat assistant you can ask about a document, and generated podcasts. Timber has an on-device summary and nothing else of that kind.
A server with no battery or memory budget can run larger models than a phone can. Timber’s voices are good and they are getting better, but this is a real trade and it is worth hearing both before you decide.
The honest summary: Speechify is a cloud AI product that also reads aloud. Timber is a reader that happens to need no one’s permission, no one’s server, and no one’s subscription to do the reading.
It takes about a minute and costs nothing to find out which one you like listening to.