Bark (Suno)
Leading#2 in Open sourcehigh confidence
Suno's transformer TTS (~39.2k GitHub★) — highly expressive speech plus non-speech sounds (laughter, sighs, music). A recognized open leader.Our read
Why it ranks #2
About 39k GitHub stars and still one of the best-known expressive open speech generators, repeatedly included in local-TTS lists for producing speech, laughter, music and other audio from one model.Here is the catch
slow and memory-heavy compared with newer TTS models
limited deterministic control over timing and wording
voice cloning and commercial usage are not its strongest path
Does this well
unusually expressive output beyond conventional TTS
simple experimentation with pretrained checkpoints
large community and extensive derivative tooling
Pricing
Checked by hand on 2026-07-23. Prices in this category change often — if this looks wrong, it probably is.
Key features
expressive text-to-audio generationspeech plus laughter, sighs and musicmultilingual voice presetslocal inference
Sources we read
Quick facts
More in this area
The rest of the Open source column.- 1Coqui TTS (XTTS)The gold-standard open-source TTS / voice-cloning toolkit (~45.8k GitHub★) — XTTS v2 clones a voice from a 3-second clip across many languages.
- 3OpenVoice (MyShell)MyShell's instant voice cloning (~37k GitHub★) — strong tone/emotion control and low-latency inference. Widely adopted open cloner.
- 4RVC (Retrieval-based Voice Conversion)The de-facto open voice-conversion tool (~36.6k GitHub★) — best balance of quality, speed and ease for real-time voice changing/cloning.
- 5Fish Speech (fishaudio)Fast, high-quality multilingual TTS / cloning (~31.4k GitHub★) — a newer entry gaining strong traction for its speed-quality balance.
- 6Chatterbox (Resemble AI)Resemble AI's open TTS (~25.7k GitHub★) — a top 2026 pick for expressive, production-grade local speech with emotion control.
- 7F5-TTSA fast diffusion-transformer TTS with strong zero-shot cloning (~15k GitHub★) — notable and actively used, below the top repos on adoption.