The best free audiobook apps, honestly compared

Most "best free audiobook app" lists are affiliate pages wearing a disguise. This one names its own site in the table below alongside everybody else, and tells you what each one is bad at — including us.

At a glance

Libby

The best free audiobook app there is, and it is not close — if you have a library card. Libby connects to your local library's digital collection, so everything on it is properly licensed and completely free. The catch is the catch of every library: popular titles have waiting lists, sometimes weeks long, and the South African collections are thinner than the American ones the app was built for.

Best for: mainstream bestsellers, if you are patient and have a card.

LibriVox

Volunteers reading public-domain books. LibriVox is free forever with no account at all, and the catalogue runs to tens of thousands of titles. The trade-off is twofold: recording quality swings wildly between volunteers, and because it is public domain, nothing published in roughly the last seventy-five years is there. It is a classics library, not a current one.

Best for: the classics, and for not signing up for anything.

Spotify

If you already pay for Spotify, you already have audiobooks — a set number of listening hours a month included in Premium at no extra cost, which most subscribers do not realise. The interface is not built for books, so keeping your place across a long title can be irritating, and the included hours run out faster than you expect on a long novel.

Best for: people already paying for Spotify who did not know.

YouTube

An enormous amount of audio content, much of it uploaded without the rights. Free, no account needed, and genuinely useful for out-of-copyright material. Be aware that a great deal of what is on YouTube should not be, and it disappears without warning when a rights holder notices.

Best for: public-domain material, with a clear conscience about what you are playing.

Audible

Not free, but worth naming because it is the default. Audible gives you a genuinely free month, after which it is a monthly fee for a credit or two, and the catalogue is the largest in the world by a wide margin. Credits expire, and books you only borrowed from the rotating catalogue leave with you when you cancel.

Best for: almost any mainstream book, if you are willing to pay.

No Safe Word

Ours, and we will be straight about where it sits. This is not a library of other people's books — it is one publisher's own catalogue, so it is small next to every other name on this page and always will be. What it has that none of them do is Black South African romance and erotic fiction, written here and narrated end to end.

The whole of chapter one is free to hear on every story, no account and no card. It plays in the browser with nothing to install. Past the free portion it is R29 for a single story or R55 a month for everything, and that one price covers both reading and listening.

Best for: stories set where you actually live, in the voice they were written in.

The thing the other five have in common

Between them the five above cover the bestseller list, the classics, and most of what has ever been recorded in English. What they do not have is fiction written here, about people who live here.

Search any of them for a romance set in Soweto, or a story that uses the word shweshwe without a glossary, and you will find very little. That is not a criticism of the apps — it is a gap in what gets licensed and recorded at all, and it is the entire reason we started narrating our own catalogue.