Last updated: 28 June 2026
Amazon Polly vs Azure: TTS Pricing Comparison
Amazon Polly is 75% cheaper starting at $0.004/1k chars. Here's the full breakdown of pricing, quality, latency, and language support.
Price Comparison
| Characters | Amazon Polly Standard | Amazon Polly Generative | Azure Neural Standard |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10,000 | $0.04 | $0.30 | $0.16 |
| 100,000 | $0.40 | $3.00 | $1.60 |
| 1,000,000 | $4.00 | $30.00 | $16.00 |
Feature Comparison
Amazon Polly
Best for: High-volume, cost-sensitive applications already running on AWS.
Strengths
- ✓ Cheapest pay-as-you-go option
- ✓ AWS ecosystem integration
- ✓ Free tier (5M chars/mo for 12 months)
- ✓ SSML support
Azure
Best for: Enterprise applications needing the widest voice variety and Microsoft ecosystem integration.
Strengths
- ✓ 500+ voices
- ✓ 140+ languages
- ✓ Free tier (500k chars/mo)
- ✓ Custom neural voice cloning
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Amazon Polly or Azure cheaper for text-to-speech?
Amazon Polly is cheaper, starting at $0.004 per 1,000 characters with Amazon Polly Standard. That’s 75% less than Azure Neural Standard at $0.016 per 1,000 characters.
How much does Amazon Polly TTS cost compared to Azure?
Amazon Polly pricing starts at $0.004 per 1k chars (Amazon Polly Standard), while Azure starts at $0.016 per 1k chars (Azure Neural Standard). For 1 million characters, that’s $4.00 vs $16.00.
Which has better voice quality, Amazon Polly or Azure?
Based on TTS Arena benchmarks, Amazon Polly scores higher on voice quality. Amazon Polly’s best model scores 4.1/5 while Azure’s best scores 3.9/5.
Amazon Polly vs Azure: which is faster?
Azure has lower latency. Amazon Polly’s fastest model has 200ms time-to-first-audio, while Azure’s fastest is 150ms.