ElevenLabs was tuned for studio audio. Gladia was tuned for real conversations.

Yes, especially if your audio is real conversations rather than clean or scripted recordings. On Switchboard's conversational speech benchmark, Solaria-3 scores 33.9% WER against ElevenLabs Scribe v2's 55.2% — the widest gap in Gladia's open benchmark suite. If your primary use case is transcribing audiobooks, parliamentary recordings, or other clean formal-speech audio, ElevenLabs Scribe performs very well on those specific benchmarks.

Yes. Gladia's REST and WebSocket APIs are built for straightforward parameter mapping, and Gladia's team can walk teams through moving a Scribe integration to a Gladia one without restructuring the rest of the voice stack.

Scribe v2 and Scribe v2 Realtime are ElevenLabs' speech-to-text models, supporting 90+ languages with automatic language detection. Gladia's equivalents are Solaria-1 (real-time, 100+ languages with live code-switching) and Solaria-3 (async, optimized for real-world English and European-language audio). On Gladia's open benchmarks, Solaria models outperform Scribe v2 on conversational speech and diarization; Scribe v2 outperforms Solaria on clean, formal-speech datasets like VoxPopuli and Multilingual LibriSpeech.

Gladia supports 100+ languages, all with live code-switching and translation. ElevenLabs Scribe supports 90+ languages with automatic language detection, but doesn't publish code-switching as a supported feature.

It depends on the audio. On real-world conversational speech (Switchboard), Gladia's Solaria-3 beats ElevenLabs Scribe v2 by a wide margin — 33.9% vs 55.2% WER. On diarization (DIHARD III), Gladia's Solaria-1 is roughly 5x more accurate than ElevenLabs' Scribe-v1 on telephone speech specifically. On clean, formal-speech audio — audiobooks (Multilingual LibriSpeech), parliamentary recordings (VoxPopuli), and single-file financial calls (Earnings22 Full) — ElevenLabs Scribe v2 outperforms Gladia. Gladia publishes its full benchmark methodology so you can test both providers on your own audio rather than take either vendor's word for it.

Not to the same degree. ElevenLabs' diarization is batch-only — it isn't available on Scribe v2 Realtime. Gladia's diarization is also a batch/async feature, but it's markedly more accurate: on DIHARD III's telephone-speech domain, Gladia's error rate is roughly 5x lower than ElevenLabs Scribe-v1. Code-switching is a real difference in real time — mid-sentence language switching isn't a documented Scribe feature at all, while all of Gladia's 100+ supported languages handle live code-switching and translation.

ElevenLabs prices Scribe per audio-minute using credits shared across its entire platform — text-to-speech, music generation, dubbing, and voice cloning draw from the same pool as transcription, with entity detection and keyterm prompting billed as separate add-ons. Gladia's per-hour pricing is all-inclusive and dedicated entirely to transcription and audio intelligence, so your STT budget isn't competing with other products.

Gladia is a French company, which puts it under GDPR and EU jurisdiction by default. It holds SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, ISO 27001, ISO 27701, and HDS (French healthcare hosting) certifications, and never uses customer audio to retrain models. ElevenLabs holds comparable certifications (SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, PCI DSS Level 1, HIPAA via BAA) and offers a Zero Retention Mode, but EU data residency is available only as an Enterprise option rather than the default posture.

Yes. Gladia offers a free tier to start building immediately — generate an API key from the developer console and make your first transcription call in a single API request, the same way you would with an ElevenLabs API key.