Side by side

AssemblyAI vs Whisper

Both stand on speech-to-text software. Which one you can start free with, which one lets you read the code, and what each costs once you pay.

AssemblyAI

Free plan APISelf-hostedWeb

AssemblyAI offers a broad set of speech capabilities and usage-based plans, with a free tier subject to stated limits. Compare the language coverage and rates for each model to the needs of your application.

Visit AssemblyAI

Whisper

Free plan Open source APILinuxMac+2

Whisper provides multilingual speech-processing capabilities as locally installable, MIT-licensed code and model weights. Performance varies by language, and the turbo model is not intended for translation.

Visit Whisper

The facts

	AssemblyAI	Whisper
Free plan	Yes	Yes
Open source	Not published	Yes
Runs on	API, Self-hosted, Web	API, Linux, Mac, Self-hosted, Windows
Lowest paid plan	See the plans	See the plans
Plans published	13	3
Maker	Not published	Not published
Website	assemblyai.com	github.com
On speech-to-text software	#2 of 35	#1 of 35

AssemblyAI: what it does well

Speech features include diarization, summaries, and sentiment analysis.
States support for 99 languages.
Offers managed-cloud and self-hosted deployment.
Free tier includes audio credits.
Monthly billing is based on actual usage.

What to know first

Free tier has streaming and transcription limits.
Universal-3.5 Pro Realtime is listed for 18 languages.
Pay-as-you-go charges vary with usage.

Whisper: what it does well

Supports transcription, translation and language identification
Includes six model sizes with different tradeoffs
Code and weights are MIT-licensed
Offers command-line and Python interfaces
Exports TXT, VTT, SRT, TSV, JSON and JSONL

What to know first

Requires ffmpeg for installation
Rust may be needed if a prebuilt wheel is unavailable
VRAM needs range from approximately 1 GB to 10 GB
Turbo is not trained for translation

Alternatives to AssemblyAI Alternatives to Whisper The whole list