Superwhisper vs Wispr Flow (2026): The Local One and the Everywhere One

Both of these turn speech into finished text in any app on your machine. The difference that decides it is where the processing happens. Superwhisper can run the whole thing on your own hardware and sells a one-time licence for $249.99. Wispr Flow runs in the cloud, has no offline mode at any price, and costs $144 a year, and it is the only one of the two with an Android app.

By the VoiceBoard editorial teamUpdated August 28, 2026

Almost every comparison you will find says Superwhisper is a Mac app. That stopped being true a while ago. Several also say Wispr Flow runs on "Mac, Windows and iOS", which leaves out Android, where it has more than a million installs. We will get to why both vendors publish comparison pages that are out of date about each other.

How this was checked

Nobody in this field has run both apps on the same audio, and neither did we. So this page does not pretend to be a lab test. What we did on 27 August 2026 was read everything both companies publish: pricing pages, documentation, release notes, security and privacy pages, platform pages, and the comparison pages each one writes about the other. We pulled current store ratings ourselves through Apple's lookup API and the Google Play listing on that date. Where the two companies contradicted their own documents, we went to the Internet Archive to see which version came first.

Where you see a speed or accuracy number below, it belongs to whoever measured it, and we say who and when. None of them belong to us.

Head to head

Where your voice actually goes

This is the whole argument, and both vendors flatten it.

Wispr Flow is simple to describe. Audio goes to Wispr's servers, gets transcribed and cleaned up there, and comes back as finished text. Processing and storage are in the United States, there is no offline mode on any plan, and two settings are worth a minute after you install: Context Awareness, which shares what is on your screen so names and jargon come out right, and the model training toggle. Both can be switched off. That is the trade you are making, and it buys you the thing Wispr Flow is actually good at, which is never having to configure anything.

Superwhisper is where it gets interesting, because "local" turns out to be two separate questions. The vendor's own sensitive data guide splits every dictation into two independent stages. Stage one turns audio into raw text. Stage two takes that raw text and formats it, cleans up the filler words and matches the tone. Each stage is set separately, and each can be local or cloud.

Stage one has been local for years: Whisper models running through whisper.cpp, or Nvidia's Parakeet, downloaded to your machine and run there. Stage two is the part nobody has written about. Until 19 August 2026, every language model in Superwhisper's documentation was a cloud model: Claude, GPT-5, Groq's Llama, or Superwhisper's own S1-Language. Which means the polished output that makes these apps worth paying for was going over the network even when your audio was not.

That changed on 19 August 2026, when the company shipped S1-mini, a 484 MB, 0.6 billion parameter language model with open weights on Hugging Face, that does the cleanup with, in their words, "zero network requests". It brings a tone slider with five settings from all-lowercase casual to fully punctuated formal, and it handles the thing raw transcription never does: you say "the meeting is on Tuesday I mean Thursday" and you get "the meeting is on Thursday".

Two qualifications matter before you count on it. First, the vendor's documentation says plainly: "Local language models are currently supported on macOS only. Windows users can use cloud language models or configure a mode without AI post-processing." So on a Windows machine, "fully offline Superwhisper" means transcription without the cleanup, which is a different product. That sits awkwardly next to the company's own Windows page, which promises "On-device AI models. Your audio never leaves your machine."

Second, the fully local setup Superwhisper itself recommends is Cohere Transcribe for the audio and S1-mini for the cleanup. Cohere Transcribe is a 2B open model the two companies shipped together on 28 July 2026, and it covers 14 languages. The 100-plus figure applies to the Whisper models and the cloud ones.

None of this makes Superwhisper's privacy case fake. It is real, it is the reason to buy it, and if your audio genuinely cannot leave the building it is the only one of these two you can use. It is just newer and narrower than the field says, and on Windows it is not there yet.

Platforms, which is where most people's answer actually lives

Superwhisper runs on macOS, on Windows 10 and 11, and on iPhone. Its Windows FAQ confirms both x64 and ARM64, which means a Snapdragon Surface works. Its iOS FAQ says iPad works but "full iPad support is coming". One Pro licence covers all of it, with no device limit on Macs and PCs, which is unusual and genuinely generous.

Wispr Flow runs on macOS 12 and up, Windows 10 and 11 on x64, iPhone from iOS 18.3, and Android 13 through 16. The exclusions are stated just as plainly by the vendor: iPad, Linux, Chromebooks, virtual machines and remote desktop are not supported, and Windows on ARM is refused with an error about x64 architecture.

So the platform question splits cleanly, and it is not the split the comparisons describe:

• On an Android phone, there is no contest. Superwhisper does not publish an Android app. Wispr Flow does, and it sits as a floating button over whatever keyboard you already use rather than replacing it. It has passed a million installs and rates 4.8. It is also the newest thing Wispr has built, and the help centre still labels it a beta, so expect the rough edge occasionally.
• On a Surface with an ARM chip, or an iPad, there is also no contest, and it goes the other way.
• On Mac and Windows, both work, and the choice comes down to everything else on this page.

One honest note on the Windows side of each. Wispr Flow's Windows client is Electron based, and independent reviewers who profiled it in May 2026 reported roughly 800 MB of RAM and around 8% CPU while idle. Superwhisper's Windows client is younger than the field assumes: its comparison page says "Windows 10/11 support shipped in 2024", but the Internet Archive's first copy of superwhisper.com/windows, from 18 February 2025, is a page reading "BETA for Windows. Sign up for Beta", and it still read that way in October 2025. The company's own Windows documentation currently lists five features that macOS has and Windows does not, including config sync across machines and the agentic coding integrations.

Price, and the arithmetic on that lifetime licence

Superwhisper's lifetime price is the single most guessed-at number in this category, because the vendor's pricing page renders it with a script and the figure is not in the page source. It is, however, printed in two places you can check. The Superwhisper Pro documentation has a pricing table, and Apple's App Store listing shows the same three in-app purchases:

Superwhisper also lists 40% off for students on its pricing card, and a 30-day refund on every plan. Wispr Flow gives students three months free and then $6 a month, and runs one regional price list, in India, at ₹400 a month or ₹320 billed annually.

The arithmetic that matters:

• Against Wispr Flow's $144 a year, Superwhisper's $249.99 lifetime pays for itself in about 21 months.
• Against Superwhisper's own $84.99 annual plan, the lifetime takes about 35 months, so it only makes sense if you are confident you will still be dictating in three years.
• Over three years, you are comparing $432 to $249.99.

Worth knowing before you assume the one-time licence is a free lunch. It is a licence for a piece of software from a small company, not an endowment: the value of "lifetime" depends entirely on the company still shipping. Superwhisper's changelog shows twenty-five macOS releases since the start of 2026, which is a good sign. And one small oddity we could not resolve: Superwhisper's own documentation says buying through the App Store costs more "due to Apple's platform fees", but on 27 August 2026 the App Store showed exactly the same $8.49, $84.99 and $249.99 as the website.

The free tiers are shaped completely differently

Wispr Flow's free plan is a weekly allowance. Two thousand words a week on Mac and Windows, one thousand on iPhone, and the vendor's help centre documents a second number nobody mentions: a hard stop at 5,000 on desktop and 1,500 on iOS, with warnings well before you get there. Two thousand words is roughly fifteen minutes of steady talking, so a daily user hits the warning midweek. The paid trial is 14 days by default, 30 through a referral link, and three months for verified students.

Superwhisper's free tier does not expire and is not metered by words. It gives you dictation in any app, meeting recording, 100-plus languages and custom prompt control, forever, with a separate 3,000 words of Pro features to try. That trial was 15 minutes until 26 August 2026, when the company changed it, and the same release note says all local Whisper models are now free on macOS. Which is the sort of change that quietly invalidates a lot of published advice. The most recently updated comparison in these search results was refreshed on 25 August, and the free Mac tier changed underneath it the following day.

Two cautions on that. The change is stated for macOS, so on Windows and iPhone assume local models still need Pro. And Superwhisper's own Free vs Pro table in its documentation has not caught up: it still lists local voice models as a Pro feature. When a vendor's release notes and its documentation disagree, the release notes are newer.

Languages

Both say 100-plus, and that number is doing different work in each case.

Wispr Flow publishes something rarer than a big number, which is an honest tier list. Seven languages have been trained to match English-level quality including punctuation and regional formatting: French, German, Hindi, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Thai. Around fifteen more get accurate dictation without the formatting polish, including Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Arabic, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Turkish and Ukrainian. Beyond that sit 75 or more with basic support. Mixed-language dictation, switching mid-sentence, is the single most praised thing in reviews from users who do it daily.

Superwhisper's 100-plus comes from Whisper, which has covered that many languages for years, and from its cloud models. There is no published quality tier list. What there is instead is choice: if a given model handles your language badly, you can switch to another one, including one you pay for yourself through your own API key. That is more work and more control, which is the pattern for this whole comparison.

The one thing to hold onto: if you go fully offline on Superwhisper using the setup the vendor recommends, you are on Cohere Transcribe and its 14 languages, not on the headline figure.

Control versus not thinking about it

Superwhisper hands you the machine room. Modes for voice, message, email, note and meeting, plus custom modes with your own system prompts. A Super Mode that reads your screen. A model picker with local Whisper and Parakeet options, cloud options from Deepgram and Superwhisper's own S1, language models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Groq, and a slot for your own API keys. A vocabulary list that remembers your names and jargon. Deep links, a CLI, and MCP so you can pipe your transcription history into Claude Code.

Wispr Flow gives you a hotkey. It reads which app you are in and matches the tone: Slack gets something loose, Gmail gets something that reads like an email. There is a personal dictionary, snippets, and shared dictionaries for teams. There are no models to pick, because Wispr picked them.

Which is better depends entirely on you, and this is the axis where people most often buy the wrong one. If tinkering with prompts and models sounds like a good evening, Superwhisper will repay it. If it sounds like a second job, Wispr Flow is the one you will still be using in a month.

Speed and accuracy: what is claimed, and why you should not lean on it

Superwhisper published a benchmark on 19 August 2026 for its S1-Voice cloud model. It reports a 6.8% average word error rate across eight datasets, 2.2% on LibriSpeech, transcription "up to 46x faster than it took you to speak", most results appearing 0.32 seconds after you stop talking, and a blended score of 83 out of 100, adding: "For comparison, WisprFlow scored a 76 (finishing in 4th place)."

Read that for what it is. It is a company benchmarking its own new model against its competitors, with the datasets named only by category, no published methodology and no third-party replication. That does not make it false. It makes it unusable as the basis for a purchase, and it is the only head-to-head number that exists anywhere.

On the other side there is no vendor benchmark at all. The closest thing is Zachary Proser, who works in applied AI at WorkOS and published his own Wispr Flow dashboard on 1 August 2026: 182,718 words dictated across 36 applications at an average of 184 words per minute, against his own typing baseline of 90. That is one person's usage statistics from inside the app, not a comparison, and he says so.

The most careful hands-on writing in this field came from Dani Jones at tl;dv on 21 June 2026, who spent two weeks with Superwhisper and reported roughly 98% accuracy on ordinary prose against roughly 88% on technical material, with a name spelled three different ways and a figure of €4,217 arriving as €4,270. That last one is the finding worth carrying with you into either app: the cleanup stage is a language model, and a language model can produce text that reads perfectly and is wrong. Check your numbers and names, whichever of these you buy.

What people rate them, where the sample is big enough to mean something

Every comparison in this field quotes Product Hunt, where Superwhisper sits at 4.9 from 21 reviews and Wispr Flow at 4.7 from 76. Twenty-one reviews is a rounding error.

Here is what the stores said when we pulled them on 27 August 2026:

That gap is worth a moment, because it runs the opposite way to the field's summary of these two products. It is also not the whole story: an iPhone rating measures the iPhone app, and both companies do most of their work on the desktop. But it is the largest body of real user opinion available on either, and it is a long way from the picture you get by reading comparison blogs.

One number you will still see quoted that you should ignore entirely: a Trustpilot score of 2.7 for Wispr Flow, which several currently ranking articles build whole sections on. Checked on 27 August 2026, that Trustpilot profile has been removed and the score cannot be verified at source. Any article presenting it as current has not looked.

Both vendors publish a comparison page, and neither is current

This is unusual enough to be worth stating plainly. The top two results for this exact question are written by the two companies being compared, neither page carries a date, and each contains claims that its own documents or its rival's contradict.

Superwhisper's page says Wispr Flow runs on "macOS, Windows, iOS", omitting Android, where Wispr Flow has a million installs. Its FAQ says "Wispr Flow gives you a 7-day trial", where Wispr's help centre documents 14 days as standard, 30 through a referral and three months for students. The same FAQ describes its own free trial as "15 free minutes of Pro", which its release notes replaced with 3,000 words on 26 August 2026. And its correction that "Windows 10/11 support shipped in 2024" is contradicted by the archived copies discussed above.

Wispr Flow's page lists Superwhisper as a "Mac and iOS app", which has not been true since the Windows client shipped, describes it as "Basic transcription, users report manual cleanup needed" when its whole design is AI post-processing through modes, and says "No public certification info" when Superwhisper runs a Trust Center and publishes an enterprise compliance page. The page also does not state Wispr Flow's own prices.

We are not reading motives into any of that. Comparison pages age badly and these two products change every fortnight. It just means neither is the place to start, which is most of the reason this page exists.

Meetings, files and work machines

Meetings. Superwhisper has had a meeting mode for a long time, on every platform, with speaker separation on Pro. Wispr Flow shipped Notetaker on 5 August 2026: it captures system audio without joining the call, produces a live transcript, summaries, decisions and action items, reads your calendar to know who is in the room, and connects to Claude and ChatGPT over MCP. The constraints at launch are real, though: Mac only, English only.

Files. Superwhisper transcribes uploaded audio and video on Pro. Wispr Flow's Notetaker records meetings and voice memos rather than offering general file upload.

Compliance. Wispr Flow's pricing page lists SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and a HIPAA-ready BAA on the Enterprise tier, with data sharing controls and a training opt-out on every plan. Superwhisper lists SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA, offers self-serve DPA and BAA signing, and gates the actual report behind an NDA in its Trust Center, so we have not read it. Superwhisper also has one route Wispr Flow structurally cannot offer: a fully local configuration where no BAA with the vendor is needed for those models, because nothing leaves the device.

If you are choosing for a regulated team rather than yourself, that last sentence is probably your whole decision.

Who should skip both

You are on Linux, a Chromebook, or an iPad you actually work on. You dictate rarely enough that a free built-in tool covers you. You need dictation as assistive technology rather than a convenience, in which case start with your operating system's accessibility voice control before spending anything. Or you want a maintained local app for one Mac and nothing more, where a smaller one-time licence does the job. All of those routes are covered in the best dictation apps for Mac and Wispr Flow alternatives.

Making the call

If your audio can go to a server, pick the one you will not have to think about. Wispr Flow works on every machine most people own including an Android phone, needs no setup beyond a hotkey, and by the volume of ratings across two app stores is the one people keep. Take the 30-day trial rather than the standard 14, because a fortnight goes on retraining your own habits rather than testing the software, and see whether you still want it in week four.

Start the 30-day Wispr Flow trial

That is our affiliate link, and it gets you the longer trial and gets us a commission if you eventually pay. Both halves are true and you should weigh them accordingly.

If your audio cannot go to a server, or you would rather own than rent, go and get Superwhisper instead. There is no affiliate link on that one because there is no programme, and it is the correct answer for a real set of people.