Local dictation apps for macOS, compared
The column that matters is the last one. Every roundup asserts that an app is private; this one says how that was checked and on what date, so you can repeat it or catch us being wrong.
| App | Price | Engine | Network calls | How that was checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vocula | One payment | Whisper or Parakeet, your choice — both pinned by SHA-256 | Update checks, daily; can be switched off | Source published; both network calls named in its README |
| superwhisper | $8.49/mo — $249.99 once | Whisper, local and cloud | Yes, optional cloud routing | Their terms of service, June 2026 |
| MacWhisper | €65 once | Whisper, local | Licensing analytics | Their own privacy policy |
| VoiceInk | $29 / $49 / $69 once | whisper.cpp from master | Licence activation | Source read, 2026-08-21 |
| Handy | Free, MIT | Whisper and Parakeet | Update checks | Binary and source inspected |
| FluidVoice | Free, GPL-3.0 | Parakeet, Nemotron | Analytics, on by default | Analytics key committed to its own public repo |
| MacParakeet | Free, GPL-3.0 | Parakeet | Analytics, on by default | 102-event pipeline found in source |
| Dictato | €19.99 once | Four, incl. Apple SpeechAnalyzer | Not measured | Vendor claim only — unverified here |
| VoxTap | $39 once | Local | Not measured | Vendor claim only — unverified here |
| Spokenly | Free local tier | Local and cloud | Yes, cloud tier | Vendor documentation |
| Wispr Flow | $15/mo | Cloud | Always — audio is uploaded | Their privacy page, verbatim |
| macOS built-in | Free | Apple | Varies by language and Mac | Apple’s own legal notice |
All rows checked on 21 August 2026. Rows marked unverified here carry the vendor’s claim and nothing more — we would rather show the gap than launder a marketing sentence into a table cell.
A note on the engine column
Two model families do almost all the local dictation on the Mac. Whisper is OpenAI's, covers about a hundred languages, and runs on the GPU. Parakeet is NVIDIA's, covers 25 European languages, is a third of the size, and runs on the Neural Engine. Several apps here ship one or the other; Handy and Vocula let you choose between them.
Which is better is not a question this table answers, and we have not benchmarked their accuracy against each other — five clean fixtures matching is not an accuracy comparison. What is worth knowing before you pick either: Parakeet holds to one alphabet per phrase, so an English term inside a Cyrillic or Greek sentence can come back transliterated, and it cannot transcribe Japanese, Chinese, Arabic or Hindi at all. The two engines, side by side.
Three things this table does not say
- Which is most accurate. We have not benchmarked them, and anyone publishing such a benchmark on a page selling you one of the entries chose the conditions. Try two on your own voice.
- Which is best. Several here are better products than Vocula on features today — VoiceInk has AI cleanup and custom vocabulary, MacWhisper transcribes files, superwhisper has per-context modes.
- What happens to the transcripts. Of the nine local apps measured, none encrypted its stored history. “Offline” and “private on disk” are separate questions.
What “offline” actually means, in three tiers · How to check any of this yourself