{"kind":"compare","slug":"f5-tts","path":"/compare/f5-tts","title":"F5-TTS Alternative for Fast Speech on CPU | SuperClonica","description":"F5-TTS vs SuperClonica: a flow-matching model for zero-shot voice cloning against a Supertonic 3 engine built for CPU. Speed, languages, license and use cases.","h1":"F5-TTS vs SuperClonica: zero-shot cloning or fast CPU speech","intro":"F5-TTS is an open text-to-speech model built on flow matching with a Diffusion Transformer, first released in October 2024 and followed by an improved v1 base model in March 2025. It clones voices zero-shot: give it a short reference clip and its text, and it speaks in that voice. SuperClonica works differently. A voice is trained once into a Supertonic 3 file, which then runs fast on an ordinary CPU.\n\nIf you want an F5-TTS alternative for CPU or for commercial use, here is what changes.","sections":[{"heading":"How F5-TTS works","paragraphs":["F5-TTS is a Diffusion Transformer with ConvNeXt V2, trained on about 100,000 hours of public multilingual data from the Emilia dataset. The official base model is the Chinese–English one. You pass a reference recording and its transcript; if the transcript is left empty, a speech recognition model fills it in at the cost of extra GPU memory.","The community has fine-tuned F5-TTS for other languages, and the repository links to those models. Our table counts the two languages of the official base model."]},{"heading":"F5-TTS speed on CPU and GPU","paragraphs":["On a GPU F5-TTS is fast: the repository reports a real-time factor of 0.0402 with TensorRT-LLM and 0.1467 with PyTorch on a single NVIDIA L20 at 16 steps.","On CPU it is the slowest model in our table. The ZipVoice paper measured 37.284 at 32 steps on a single thread of a Xeon Platinum 8457C. Assuming a 2.5–7.5× effective gain from a modern 16-thread desktop CPU, we get 5–15× slower than real time: 50–150 seconds for a 10-second phrase. SuperClonica needs about 1.0–1.6 seconds."]},{"heading":"Quality and timbre stability","paragraphs":["We rate F5-TTS 3 out of 5 for quality and 3 for timbre stability, against 4.5 and 5 for SuperClonica. Zero-shot cloning rebuilds the voice from the reference on every request, so the result depends on the clip you pass. A trained voice file gives you the same starting timbre every time."]},{"heading":"License: check before commercial use","paragraphs":["The F5-TTS code is under MIT. The pre-trained models are licensed CC-BY-NC because of the Emilia training data, so the official weights cannot be used commercially under the default terms.","Supertonic 3 uses OpenRAIL-M, a royalty-free license with a list of prohibited uses rather than a non-commercial clause. Voices bought on SuperClonica are for your own projects and may not be resold."]},{"heading":"When to choose F5-TTS","paragraphs":["Choose SuperClonica for products in the 31 Supertonic 3 languages, for CPU-only machines and for long texts where speed adds up. F5-TTS fits these cases:"],"points":["Research and non-commercial experiments with zero-shot cloning.","Chinese or English speech on a GPU, or a community fine-tune for your language.","A clone from a clip right now, with no training step."]}],"faq":[{"question":"Can F5-TTS run on CPU?","answer":"Yes, but slowly. The ZipVoice paper measured a real-time factor of about 37 on a single CPU thread; our estimate for a 16-thread desktop CPU is 5–15× slower than real time."},{"question":"Can I use F5-TTS commercially?","answer":"Not with the official pre-trained models: they are CC-BY-NC because of their training data. The code itself is MIT."},{"question":"Which languages does F5-TTS support?","answer":"The official base model was trained on Chinese and English. Community fine-tunes add other languages, and their quality and licenses vary."},{"question":"What is a faster F5-TTS alternative for voice cloning?","answer":"If you can wait for training, a Supertonic 3 voice trained from your recording and run with SuperClonica: by our estimate 6.4–9.7× faster than real time on a desktop CPU. If you need cloning without training, look at Qwen3-TTS or OmniVoice, which clone from a few seconds of audio."}],"cta":{"catalog":"Try voices made for the CPU","install":"Install SuperClonica"},"sources":[{"label":"F5-TTS repository (GitHub)","url":"https://github.com/SWivid/F5-TTS"},{"label":"F5-TTS model card (Hugging Face)","url":"https://huggingface.co/SWivid/F5-TTS"},{"label":"F5-TTS paper (arXiv)","url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.06885"},{"label":"ZipVoice paper, table II: CPU speed","url":"https://arxiv.org/html/2506.13053v1#S5.T2"},{"label":"Supertonic 3 model card","url":"https://huggingface.co/supertone-oss-archive/supertonic-3"}],"published":"2026-10-17","updated":"2026-10-23","pages":[{"slug":"text-to-speech","path":"/text-to-speech","h1":"Text-to-speech that runs on your own computer"},{"slug":"supertonic","path":"/compare/supertonic","h1":"Supertonic vs SuperClonica: same model, faster and cleaner"},{"slug":"fish-audio","path":"/compare/fish-audio","h1":"Fish Audio and Fish Speech vs SuperClonica"},{"slug":"omnivoice","path":"/compare/omnivoice","h1":"OmniVoice vs SuperClonica: more languages or more speed"},{"slug":"qwen3-tts","path":"/compare/qwen3-tts","h1":"Qwen3-TTS vs SuperClonica for local text-to-speech"},{"slug":"voxcpm","path":"/compare/voxcpm","h1":"VoxCPM 2 vs SuperClonica: studio sound or CPU speed"},{"slug":"f5-tts","path":"/compare/f5-tts","h1":"F5-TTS vs SuperClonica: zero-shot cloning or fast CPU speech"},{"slug":"elevenlabs","path":"/compare/elevenlabs","h1":"An offline alternative to ElevenLabs"},{"slug":"kokoro","path":"/compare/kokoro","h1":"Kokoro TTS vs SuperClonica: two small models for local speech"},{"slug":"piper","path":"/compare/piper","h1":"Piper TTS vs SuperClonica: tiny devices or custom voices"},{"slug":"xtts","path":"/compare/xtts","h1":"Coqui XTTS-v2 vs SuperClonica: a Coqui TTS alternative"},{"slug":"chatterbox","path":"/compare/chatterbox","h1":"Chatterbox TTS vs SuperClonica: instant cloning or a trained voice file"}],"related":[{"slug":"offline-text-to-speech","path":"/guides/offline-text-to-speech","h1":"How to convert text to speech offline on your computer"},{"slug":"voice-cloning","path":"/guides/voice-cloning","h1":"Voice cloning: how to get a voice that sounds like a recording"},{"slug":"best-free-tts-models","path":"/guides/best-free-tts-models","h1":"The best free text-to-speech models for local use in 2026"},{"slug":"text-to-speech-for-videos","path":"/guides/text-to-speech-for-videos","h1":"Text to speech for videos, audiobooks, games and apps"},{"slug":"supertonic-3-voices","path":"/guides/supertonic-3-voices","h1":"Supertonic 3 voices: where to get custom voices and how to use them"},{"slug":"python-text-to-speech","path":"/guides/python-text-to-speech","h1":"Text to speech in Python: offline, free and with natural voices"},{"slug":"text-to-speech-api-docker","path":"/guides/text-to-speech-api-docker","h1":"Self-hosted text-to-speech API in Docker"}]}