MacWhisper vs SnailText — which one fits you?

It's tempting to frame MacWhisper and SnailText as competitors because both run Whisper locally and both are loved by people who care about privacy. But they solve different jobs. MacWhisper is for turning a recording into a transcript — interviews, podcasts, recorded calls, video files. SnailText is for turning your voice in the moment into typed text in whatever app you're using.

The dividing line is whether you have an audio file already, or whether you're about to start speaking. If you have the file, MacWhisper has a years-long head start on every part of that workflow — batch processing, speaker diarisation on Pro Plus, subtitle export to SRT/VTT, a transcript editor, drag-and-drop ingest. If you're about to start speaking, SnailText is the workflow we built — press a hotkey, speak, and the words land in the field where your cursor is.

Plenty of users actually want both. We genuinely recommend MacWhisper for file transcription if you're on a Mac. We're built for the other half of the workflow, and we're not trying to replace what Jordi has built for file work.

MacWhisper's pricing is roughly $25 once for Pro and roughly $49 once for Pro Plus. That's a real differentiator: a one-time fee with no subscription, ever. SnailText Pro is $7.49/month or $89/year, and the truth is that for a Mac-only user who'd use MacWhisper anyway, our subscription is harder to justify on pure cost.

The math: at our annual price of $89/year, you spend $89 in year one. MacWhisper Pro Plus is around $49 one-time. So even in year one, MacWhisper is cheaper, and from year two onward, MacWhisper is free and we are not. Over three years: $267 from us vs $49 once for them.

Where our subscription stops looking expensive is when the use case is different. If you use Windows, MacWhisper isn't an option, so the comparison is between $89/year and not having a tool at all. If you split between Mac and Windows, our one subscription covers both at the same price; with MacWhisper you'd pay once on Mac and still need a separate Windows tool. And if your job is live dictation rather than file transcription, you're using two different products to begin with.

We may add a lifetime tier eventually. We're not in a hurry to ship a half-baked one to match a feature — and we wouldn't expect it to compete with MacWhisper for users whose main job is file transcription anyway.

We don't ship file transcription in 2026. Not a small subset, not a beta — it's not in the product. The audio buffer stays in RAM during a recording session and we don't store it; there's no "open this MP4 and transcribe it" workflow. We've thought about adding it for a Phase 2 release, but it would be a meaningful product expansion, not a feature flag.

If you have a backlog of interviews to transcribe, recorded meetings to turn into searchable text, or video files that need subtitles — MacWhisper is the right tool, and we'd be doing you a disservice by suggesting otherwise. Pro Plus handles diarisation (who said what), batch processing for queues of files, SRT/VTT subtitle export, and a built-in editor for cleaning up the transcript before you ship it. That's a mature product surface and we're not catching up to it any time soon.