The free, open-source
Wispr Flow alternative
Wispr Flow is a genuinely good product — fast, polished, and available on every platform. It is also $12–15/month forever, requires an account, and sends your voice to the cloud. WritHer takes the opposite trade: free, open source (MIT), and 100% offline on Windows. This page compares them honestly, including the things Wispr Flow does better.
TL;DR — Choose WritHer if you work on Windows and want unlimited, private, offline dictation (plus a local AI assistant) for $0. Choose Wispr Flow if you need macOS/iPhone/Android, want AI tone-matching and auto-editing, or prefer a managed cloud product with zero setup.
Prefer to watch? The comparison in 3½ minutes
What the subscription actually costs
Wispr Flow Pro costs $15/month billed monthly, or $12/month billed annually ($144/year). The free tier is capped at 2,000 words per week — roughly 15 minutes of normal speech — after which dictation stops until the week resets. Over three years, Pro adds up to $432–540. Dragon Professional 16, the classic desktop alternative, is a $699 one-time license.
WritHer is $0 with no word limits, no account and no tiers. It's MIT-licensed: you can read the code, fork it, and it can never be discontinued out from under you.
WritHer vs Wispr Flow, feature by feature
| Feature | WritHer | Wispr Flow |
|---|---|---|
| Price | ✓ Free forever (MIT) | ✗ $12–15/mo (free: 2,000 words/week) |
| Works offline | ✓ 100% (after model download) | ✗ Internet required |
| Voice data stays on device | ✓ Never leaves your PC | ✗ Processed in the cloud |
| Account required | ✓ None | ✗ Sign-up required |
| Open source | ✓ MIT license | ✗ Proprietary |
| Dictate into any app | ✓ | ✓ |
| Dictate symbols & code (say "forward slash" → /) | ✓ Opt-in Symbol mode | ⚠ Auto-formatting, less explicit control |
| Custom vocabulary | ✓ | ✓ |
| Voice assistant (notes, reminders, appointments) | ✓ Local LLM via Ollama | ✗ |
| AI tone-matching & auto-editing of text | ✗ | ✓ AI Commands (Pro) |
| Platforms | ⚠ Windows 10/11 only | ✓ Mac, Windows, iPhone, Android |
| Setup | ⚠ Model download; Ollama for assistant | ✓ Install and go |
| Speed on low-end hardware | ⚠ Depends on your CPU/GPU | ✓ Cloud GPUs, consistent |
What Wispr Flow does better — honestly
- Cross-platform. Mac, iPhone and Android apps. WritHer is Windows-only today (macOS/Linux ports are open contribution areas).
- AI editing. Flow's AI Commands can rewrite, adjust tone, and match your writing style. WritHer transcribes what you say — it does not rewrite it.
- Zero setup. No model downloads, no Ollama. WritHer's first launch downloads a ~250 MB Whisper model, and assistant mode needs Ollama installed.
- Consistent latency. Cloud GPUs transcribe fast regardless of your hardware. WritHer's speed depends on your machine (it runs well on a modern CPU with the default
smallmodel).
What WritHer does better
- Price. Free and unlimited vs $144+/year. No word caps, no trial clocks.
- Privacy. Speech recognition (faster-whisper), intent parsing (Ollama) and storage (SQLite) all run on your machine. Nothing is uploaded, ever — verifiable in the source code.
- Offline. Planes, trains, air-gapped machines, confidential work: dictation keeps working with the network cable unplugged.
- Symbols & code. Opt-in Symbol mode turns "open bracket", "semicolon" and spelled-out letters into real characters — "W H forward slash F A T" →
WH/FAT. - A real voice assistant. "Remind me to call Marco in one hour", "shopping list: bread, eggs, butter" — parsed by a local LLM into structured notes, reminders and appointments with Windows toast notifications.
- Open source. MIT license. Audit it, fork it, extend it. It can't be acquired, paywalled or shut down.
Other alternatives worth knowing
We'd rather you pick the right tool than pick us blindly. Here's the honest landscape:
Handy open sourceWin / Mac / Linux
MIT-licensed push-to-talk dictation that runs fully local, on all three desktop platforms. Actively maintained. If you need macOS or Linux, this is the one to try. No voice assistant, no symbol/code mode.
OpenWhispr open sourceWin / Mac / Linux
Hotkey dictation with a choice of fully local models (Whisper, NVIDIA Parakeet) or bring-your-own-key cloud processing. Flexible, cross-platform. No local LLM assistant.
WhisperWriter open sourceWin / Linux
A minimal Python tool that wraps Whisper in a press-speak-release hotkey. Great if you want something tiny and scriptable; barebones by design.
Dragon Professional 16 $699 one-timeWindows
The decades-old professional standard, popular in legal and medical work. Runs locally and offline, with deep voice-command macros. Excellent but expensive, and heavyweight for everyday dictation.
Windows Voice Typing (Win+H) freebuilt-in
Already on your PC and worth trying first. Requires Microsoft's online speech services for dictation on most setups, offers limited punctuation/symbol control, and has no vocabulary customization or assistant.
VoiceInk open sourcemacOS only
Polished local dictation for Apple Silicon Macs with per-app modes and a personal dictionary, sold as a one-time purchase with public source. Not available for Windows.
Bottom line
If you dictate more than 2,000 words a week on Windows, Wispr Flow's free tier won't hold you and Pro costs $144+/year. WritHer gives you unlimited offline dictation, symbol & code input and a local voice assistant for exactly $0 — and you can read every line of the code that touches your voice.
Pricing verified July 2026 from wisprflow.ai/pricing and Nuance resellers (Dragon Professional v16 perpetual license). If anything here is outdated or unfair, open an issue and we'll fix it.