How Sophist Compares
An honest, feature-by-feature comparison of the leading Mac dictation tools — checked against the vendors’ public pages and the shipping apps in September 2026.
| Feature | Sophist | Wispr FlowWebsite | WillowWebsite |
|---|---|---|---|
| Platform & availability | |||
| macOS | macOS 26 or later¹ | ||
| Windows | |||
| Native Mac app, no embedded browser runtime | Electron | ||
| App size on disk² | 71 MB | ~596 MB | ~113 MB |
| Dictation modes | |||
| Push-to-talk (hold a key, speak, release) | |||
| Hands-free / toggle mode | |||
| Auto-stop when you stop speaking | stops on ‘no audio’ or at the 20-minute cap | ||
| Works system-wide, in every app | |||
| Custom hotkeys | |||
| Wake word — start dictating by voice, recognised on-device | |||
| Just Talk — dictation starts the moment you speak into a mail draft | Beta³ | ||
| Say ‘send it’ to insert the text and send the message | opt-in | ||
| Spoken formatting commands (new line, bullet points …) | |||
| Speech engines | |||
| Choose your own speech engine | 23 providers⁴ | one in-house model | two in-house models, tied to the plan |
| On-device engines (nothing leaves the Mac) | 5 engines⁵ | Pro, opt-in, ~3 GB download⁶ | |
| On-device engine is the out-of-the-box default | |||
| Cloud engines | 18 providers | ||
| Bring your own API keys — billed by the provider at cost, no markup | |||
| Languages | depends on the engine; up to 99 on-device (WhisperKit), 60+ live (Soniox) | 100+ | 100+ |
| Key terms / custom vocabulary | |||
| Text snippets triggered by voice | sync on Pro | ‘Shortcuts’ | |
| Transcribe audio and video files (drag & drop) | |||
| AI writing features | |||
| AI clean-up and formatting | |||
| Clean-up strength you control | 4 levels, verbatim by default | 4 levels | dictation vs. Scribe |
| AI clean-up can run fully on-device (local AI model) | Apple Intelligence / MLX | ||
| Choose your own AI provider and model | 11 providers⁷ | ||
| Edit selected text by voice (Compose Mode) | Pro⁸ | Scribe: 20 uses/week free, unlimited on Pro⁹ | |
| Compose a message from a spoken brief | via Compose Mode (Pro) | Scribe (20/week free, Pro) | |
| Fix one misheard word by saying it (‘not Christine — Kristin with a K’) | opt-in | ||
| Improve or translate any selected text with one hotkey, no voice needed | |||
| Per-app rules: your own prompt, speech engine and AI model per app | automatic tone per app | automatic style per app category (Pro) | |
| Knowledge base — answers drawn from your own documents (RAG) | ¹⁰ | ||
| Agentic assistant (‘Hey Anna’) with your own custom actions | |||
| Ask Anything — speak a question, get a floating answer, optional web search | Willow Assistant | ||
| Live translation while you dictate — speak German, English appears | 24 target languages, cloud¹¹ | translates selected text (Compose Mode, Pro) | translates selected text (Scribe) |
| Read any text aloud (text-to-speech) | cloud voices¹² | ||
| Style matching — writes the way you write | learned from your own texts | Pro | |
| Context awareness (selection, clipboard, what is on screen) | screen capture is opt-in | ||
| Meetings & live conversations | |||
| Record meetings without a bot (system audio + microphone) | Notetaker, Mac only | ||
| Live transcript while the meeting runs | |||
| Speaker separation | |||
| Meeting languages | depends on the engine; German confirmed | English only¹³ | — |
| AI summary, minutes and custom AI actions | |||
| Tasks created from the meeting | action items | ||
| Ask your meeting — chat over the transcript | |||
| Live translation of the conversation | EN · DE · FR · ES · PT, cloud¹¹ | ||
| Souffleur — live answer suggestions from your own documents during a call | ¹⁰ | ||
| Meeting Coach — rates your own performance, tracks progress meeting to meeting | |||
| Calendar meeting detection | calendar used for participant names | ||
| Screenshots anchored in the meeting timeline | |||
| Voice-following teleprompter | Beta | ||
| Fully on-device meeting transcription option | Apple Speech, without speaker labels | ||
| Hand transcripts to other AI tools via MCP | |||
| Tasks & notes | |||
| Voice tasks — say it, it becomes a task | meeting action items only | ||
| Quick notes by voice | meeting notes only | ||
| Sync across your devices | tasks & notes via iCloud, opt-in; settings not yet | via account | via account |
| Privacy & security | |||
| Fully offline capable | Pro, opt-in⁶ | ||
| Dictate without any audio leaving your Mac | default | Pro, opt-in⁶ | |
| No account, no login | |||
| No analytics or telemetry SDKs inside the app | ¹⁴ | ¹⁴ | |
| Privacy mode | forces on-device processing | zero retention, still cloud | enforced zero retention on Business; offline on Pro |
| Air-gapped environments | after the one-time model download¹⁵ | ||
| Vendor certifications (SOC 2 / ISO 27001 / HIPAA) | n/a — no Sophist server ever handles your data¹⁶ | SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, HIPAA BAA (vendor statement) | SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA (Business / Enterprise) |
| Teams | |||
| Team admin, SSO / SAML | Enterprise | Enterprise | |
| Shared team dictionary and snippets | Teams | Team plan | |
IncludedPartial, opt-in or limitedProPaid plan onlyEnterpriseEnterprise plan onlyNot found on the vendor’s public pages
Notes
- 1Sophist requires macOS 26 (Tahoe) or later and an Apple-silicon Mac.
- 2Installed app bundle, measured on our own Macs in August 2026: Sophist 1.38 71 MB, Wispr Flow ~596 MB, Willow ~113 MB. Sophist’s installer (DMG) is about 34 MB.
- 3Just Talk is a beta feature, off by default, and currently works in Microsoft Outlook and Superhuman.
- 423 speech engines as of 1.38: 5 on-device (see ⁵) and 18 cloud providers, among them Soniox, ElevenLabs, Speechmatics, Deepgram, AssemblyAI, OpenAI, Mistral Voxtral, xAI, DeepL Voice, Rev AI, Cartesia, Gradium, Muse Voice (Meta), Cohere and OpenRouter.
- 5On-device engines: Apple Speech, Cohere Transcribe (MLX), FluidAudio Parakeet, WhisperKit and Qwen3-ASR. Cohere Transcribe (MLX) is the default on a fresh install.
- 6Willow’s Offline Mode is an opt-in feature of the Pro plan on Mac and iOS. It requires a separate local model download of roughly 3 GB and is positioned by Willow as a fallback ‘for moments when wifi drops’. The standard mode processes audio in Willow’s cloud.
- 711 AI providers as of 1.38: Apple Intelligence (on-device), MLX local models (on-device), Anthropic, OpenAI, Groq, xAI, Mistral, Cerebras, Inception, OpenRouter and DeepL Write.
- 8Wispr Flow Compose Mode requires a paid plan, is available on Mac and Windows only, and must be switched on under Settings → Experimental.
- 9Willow Scribe: 20 uses per week on the free plan, unlimited on Pro. Covers composing from a brief, replying with on-screen context and rewriting selected text.
- 10Sophist’s knowledge base and Souffleur use OpenAI embeddings for document search, so they need an OpenAI API key; the documents themselves stay on your Mac. Not available in Privacy Mode.
- 11Live translation uses cloud speech engines (Soniox, Gradium or an AI model of your choice). Dictation translation offers 24 target languages; meeting translation covers English, German, French, Spanish and Portuguese.
- 12Read Aloud uses cloud voices from ElevenLabs or Soniox with your own key.
- 13Wispr Flow Notetaker is English-only and Mac-only at the time of writing; Windows and mobile are announced as ‘coming soon’. The free plan has a weekly meeting cap.
- 14Our hands-on inspection of the shipping Mac apps in August 2026 found Segment, PostHog and Sentry in Wispr Flow, and PostHog and Sentry in Willow. Sophist contains no analytics or crash-reporting SDK.
- 15Sophist has no account, no licence server and no telemetry. After the one-time download of the on-device models it runs with no network connection at all. Apple Speech and Apple Intelligence come with macOS.
- 16Sophist processes audio either on your Mac or at the cloud provider you selected, under your own API key. There is no Sophist server in the path, so there is nothing for us to certify; the provider’s own certifications apply.
Pricing
| Sophist | Wispr Flow | Willow | |
|---|---|---|---|
| App price | Free | Free tier + subscription | Free tier + subscription |
| Free tier | The whole app. No word limit. On-device engines cost nothing. | 2,000 words/week on Mac and Windows, 1,000/week on iPhone. Notetaker with a weekly meeting cap. | Unlimited dictation on the smaller Frontier Mini model. 20 Scribe uses/week. Limited personalisation. |
| Paid plan | — Cloud engines are billed by the provider at cost, on your own key. | Pro: $15/month, or $12/month billed annually. Unlimited words, Compose Mode. | Pro: $15/month, or $12/month billed annually. Frontier Pro model, style memory, unlimited Scribe, Offline Mode. Business: $35/month, or $28/month annually. |
| Enterprise | — | Growth / Enterprise from $23 per user/month ($18 annually) or custom. SSO/SAML, audit logs. | Custom. SSO/SAML, invoicing, dashboards. |
| Word limits | None | Free plan: weekly cap | Free plan: no word cap, smaller model |
Information from the vendors’ public websites and help centers as of 5 September 2026, plus hands-on checks of the shipping Mac apps installed on our own Macs in August 2026. Features and prices change; we re-check this page regularly. If you spot an error, please contact us and we will correct it. Prices as published by the vendors on 5 September 2026.
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