# Alternatives to Whisper OpenAI's open source speech recognition. Whisper ranks #8 of 8 in Transcription tools, with an Alt Score of 55. It is licensed under MIT, free and available on Windows, macOS and Linux. 10 of 10 checklist rows are verified against a public source. Source: https://altcatalog.com/alternatives/whisper/ Category: Transcription tools ## Overview - **Who it's for**: Developers and researchers who need to add speech-to-text transcription or translation to an application, or who want to run automatic speech recognition locally without a hosted API. - **What you get**: An open-source, general-purpose speech recognition model trained on 680,000 hours of multilingual and multitask supervised audio data. It transcribes speech in many languages and can translate that speech into English text. Whisper is released as pretrained checkpoints in multiple sizes (tiny through large), letting users trade off speed, resource usage, and accuracy, along with the training/inference code. - **How it works**: Install the Python package (with ffmpeg) and run the `whisper` command-line tool on an audio file, or call the Python API directly, choosing a model size; Whisper's encoder-decoder Transformer then outputs a transcript or English translation, optionally with timestamps. ## Profile - **License**: MIT (verified 2026-07-10) - **Pricing model**: Free (verified 2026-07-10) - **Starts at**: ? - **Platforms**: Windows, macOS, Linux - **Status**: active (verified 2026-07-10) ## Ranked alternatives | # | App | Alt Score | Licence | Platforms | |---|-----|-----------|---------|-----------| | 1 | [Rev](https://altcatalog.com/alternatives/rev.md) | 91 | Proprietary | Web, iOS, Android | | 2 | [Fireflies](https://altcatalog.com/alternatives/fireflies.md) | 82 | Proprietary | Windows, macOS, iOS, Android | | 3 | [Otter.ai](https://altcatalog.com/alternatives/otterai.md) | 78 | Proprietary | Windows, macOS, iOS, Android | | 4 | [Sonix](https://altcatalog.com/alternatives/sonix.md) | 73 | Proprietary | Web | | 5 | [MacWhisper](https://altcatalog.com/alternatives/macwhisper.md) | 64 | Proprietary | macOS | | 6 | [Trint](https://altcatalog.com/alternatives/trint.md) | 64 | Proprietary | Windows, macOS, iOS, Android | | 7 | [superwhisper](https://altcatalog.com/alternatives/superwhisper.md) | 60 | Proprietary | macOS, Windows, iOS | Alt Score = Verified coverage (90%) + Visibility (10%). See https://altcatalog.com/how-alt-score-works/ ## Feature comparison Legend: Yes / No / Partial / ? (not verified). | Transcription tools checklist | Whisper | Rev | Fireflies | Otter.ai | Sonix | MacWhisper | |---|---|---|---|---|---|---| | Pricing model | Free | Freemium | Freemium | Freemium | Usage-based | Freemium | | Starts at | ? | $0.25/minute (AI captions) | $10 per seat / month, billed annually | $8.33/user/month (Pro, billed annually) | $10 per hour | €64 one-time (MacWhisper Pro, Personal Use) | | License | MIT | Proprietary | Proprietary | Proprietary | Proprietary | Proprietary | | Platforms | Windows, macOS, Linux | Web, iOS, Android | Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, Web, Browser extension | Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, Web, Browser extension | Web | macOS | | Accuracy (benchmark class) | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | ? | | Speaker diarization | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | | Languages supported | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | | Runs locally / offline | Yes | ? | ? | ? | ? | Yes | | Meeting bot (auto-join) | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | | Summaries & action items | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Partial | | Export formats (SRT, VTT) | Yes | Yes | Yes | Partial | Yes | Yes | | API access | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Partial | | Free tier limits | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Partial | Yes | | Human review option | No | Yes | ? | ? | Partial | No | ## Sources Sources for Whisper. Each alternative is sourced on its own page. - **License**: MIT — (verified 2026-07-10) - Quote: “MIT License” - **Pricing model**: Free — (verified 2026-07-10) - Quote: “Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy” - **Platforms**: Windows, macOS, Linux — (verified 2026-07-10) - Quote: “# on MacOS using Homebrew (https://brew.sh/) brew install ffmpeg # on Windows using Chocolatey (https://chocolatey.org/) choco install ffmpeg” - **Status**: active — (verified 2026-07-10) - Quote: “Pin pre-commit hook revisions to immutable commits (#2760)” - **Accuracy (benchmark class)**: Yes — (verified 2026-07-10) - Quote: “accuracy on speech recognition and translation is near the state-of-the-art level” - **Speaker diarization**: No — (verified 2026-07-10) - Quote: “They may exhibit additional capabilities, particularly if fine-tuned on certain tasks like voice activity detection, speaker classification, or speaker diarization but have not been robustly evaluated” - **Languages supported**: Yes — (verified 2026-07-10) - Quote: “a multitasking model that can perform multilingual speech recognition, speech translation, and language identification.” - **Runs locally / offline**: Yes — (verified 2026-07-10) - Quote: “You can download and install (or update to) the latest release of Whisper with the following command:” - **Meeting bot (auto-join)**: No — (verified 2026-07-10) - Quote: “Whisper is a general-purpose speech recognition model.” - **Summaries & action items**: No — (verified 2026-07-10) - Quote: “Whisper is a general-purpose speech recognition model. It is trained on a large dataset of diverse audio and is also a multitasking model that can perform multilingual speech recognition, speech trans” - **Export formats (SRT, VTT)**: Yes — (verified 2026-07-10) - Note: --output_format", "-f", type=str, default="all", choices=["txt", "vtt", "srt", "tsv", "json", "all"]" - **API access**: Yes — (verified 2026-07-10) - Note: turbo") result = model.transcribe("audio.mp3") print(result["text"])" - Quote: “import whisper model = whisper.load_model(” - **Free tier limits**: No — (verified 2026-07-10) - Quote: “Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy” - **Human review option**: No — (verified 2026-07-10) - Quote: “Whisper is a general-purpose speech recognition model.” --- Ranked by verified data, never by who paid. https://altcatalog.com/trust/