Spokenly is a genuinely capable local-first dictation app with the widest platform reach in this category — macOS, Windows, Linux, and iOS. It's closed source and has no Android app. OpenWispr is MIT-licensed and covers Android.
Spokenly is a real on-device peer, not a cloud pitch dressed as private — its local models (Whisper and Parakeet) are, in their own words, "free forever, unlimited, no account," and its bring-your-own-key cloud option is also free. Only their *managed* cloud tier costs money, at $9.99/mo. It also ships a hard privacy switch called "Local Only Mode" that blocks all network requests, plus a CLI and an MCP server for AI coding agents — more surrounding tooling than most apps in this category.
The two clearest gaps run in opposite directions. Spokenly covers macOS, Windows, Linux, and iOS (Pro) — broader desktop and mobile reach than OpenWispr has today. OpenWispr covers Android, which Spokenly doesn't, and is MIT-licensed source you can read line by line; Spokenly explicitly chose not to open source, citing the speed of shipping across four platforms.
If you need Windows, Linux, or iOS dictation today, Spokenly covers all three and OpenWispr doesn't. Its CLI and MCP server also make it useful outside a typical dictation workflow — batch-transcribing files to SRT or feeding an AI coding agent through a standard protocol is real, shipped functionality OpenWispr doesn't have an equivalent for.
Its "Local Only Mode" is a good, explicit pattern: one switch that blocks all network requests, so a user who wants a hard local-only guarantee doesn't have to trust marketing copy to get it — they can verify it by watching network traffic.
Spokenly has no Android app at all, on a platform where OpenWispr already ships. And where Spokenly's local-only claim rests on a toggle you have to trust (and remember to enable), OpenWispr has no server-side code to point that toggle at in the first place — there's no cloud path, on or off.
Spokenly's own site explains that it isn't open source because closed-source development let them ship faster across four platforms — a reasonable tradeoff for them, but it means Spokenly's actual behavior can't be verified by reading source, only by observing outputs. OpenWispr's MIT license makes every claim on this page checkable against the code that produces it.
Open source and entirely on your device. Android from Google Play, macOS from GitHub — no account, no sign-up, just a download.