Speechify Costs $139/Year. CastReader Is Free.

Yes. CastReader is 100% free with no limits — no daily character caps, no account required, no premium tier. It's not a trial. It works forever.

Speechify's premium voices ($139/year) are the best in the industry. CastReader uses Kokoro AI voices that sound natural and handle emphasis well — most users find them comparable for article reading. If studio-quality narration is your top priority, Speechify wins. For everything else, CastReader is free and good enough.

CastReader can read Kindle books — Speechify cannot. Amazon uses encrypted fonts on Kindle Cloud Reader that break every TTS extension. CastReader bypasses this with OCR. It's the only Chrome extension that works on Kindle.

CastReader is a Chrome/Edge extension — no mobile app. However, its Send to Phone feature streams audio to your phone via Telegram. Open a book on your laptop, tap Send to Phone, and listen on your phone. Speechify has mobile apps but charges $139/year for them.

Yes. CastReader highlights the current paragraph on the actual webpage as it reads — you see the highlight move down the real page. Speechify does word-level highlighting in a separate reader view. CastReader's approach preserves the original page layout and context.

CastReader reads webpages and documents in your browser — PDFs, Google Docs, Kindle Cloud Reader, and any website. For offline documents, upload them to the CastReader web app at castreader.ai/upload. Speechify also supports document import.