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 324 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. 324 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: 324 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.