Wispr Flow vs SnailText — which fits you?

Wispr Flow records audio on your device and immediately streams it to their servers, where their model runs. The text comes back over the network and is pasted into your active app. This is what makes their auto-edit possible — they have access to a much larger model than anything that fits on your laptop. It's also why they need an internet connection and why their privacy posture matters.

SnailText runs Whisper (and optionally Parakeet TDT v3) directly on your Mac or Windows machine. Your audio is captured into RAM, transcribed locally, and discarded. There is no network round-trip and no server-side log of what you said. The trade-off is that the models we run are smaller than Wispr's cloud model — for some accents, code-heavy speech, or extreme background noise, you'll see the gap. For everyday dictation in English or Russian, you usually won't.

• · Wispr Flow has a "Privacy Mode" with Zero Data Retention on Basic and Enterprise tiers. It reduces, but doesn't eliminate, the cloud round-trip.
• · SnailText has no Privacy Mode toggle because there's nothing to toggle — the cloud path doesn't exist.

Wispr's pricing is built for companies buying seats. Pro is $15 per user per month, or $12 per user per month if you commit annually. Each seat is one person — if the same person uses Wispr on a work laptop, a home Mac, and a Windows box, that's still one seat (and one person can sign in on multiple devices). Where it gets expensive is teams: 5 people = $75 per month, 20 people = $300, with no shared pool.

SnailText is a flat $7.49 per month or $89 per year, and one subscription covers up to 3 devices. We picked 3 because that's how most individual heavy users actually work — a work machine, a personal machine, and either a second personal device or a backup. Above 3, you'd open a second subscription, which we'll do better than a per-seat tier eventually.

Neither model is universally right. A 50-person sales team with one laptop each is genuinely better priced on a per-seat product. A solo founder with three machines pays five times more on Wispr than on us for the same coverage.

This is the biggest functional difference and worth being honest about. Wispr's auto-edit is genuinely useful — it strips filler, fixes grammar, and adapts tone per app (more formal in Gmail, more casual in Slack). When it works, it cuts the post-dictation editing pass roughly in half.

SnailText, today, doesn't auto-edit. What you dictated is what gets pasted, with whatever "ums" you said. We have basic punctuation insertion via Whisper, custom dictionary, and snippets — but no LLM cleanup pass. That's coming as an opt-in setting, but it's not what we ship today.

If real-time AI cleanup is the feature that converts you to dictation, Wispr is the better product. If you're going to edit your output anyway, the extra polish has less value.