Stilou vs Wispr Flow
Wispr Flow is the best-known AI dictation app on the Mac, and it is very good at the job it picked. This page is about the job it did not pick.
Choose Wispr Flow if you dictate across Windows, iPhone or Android, or need SOC 2 and HIPAA paperwork today — it is a mature, cross-platform product and its transcription is excellent. Choose Stilou if you are Mac-only and want dictation that works offline and keeps what you said as searchable memory, rather than typing it and forgetting it.
Which one should you actually use?
These are not the same product with different logos. One is a dictation tool that has grown a notetaker; the other is a memory system whose first door happens to be your voice.
Wispr Flow runs on macOS, Windows, iOS and Android. Stilou is macOS only, with no phone app and none planned for this year. If half your dictation happens on a phone, this decision is already made and nothing further down the page changes it.
Wispr Flow's Enterprise tier carries SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and a HIPAA-ready BAA, with SAML SSO, SCIM and audit logs. Stilou has none of those yet. In a regulated org this is not a preference, it is a procurement gate.
In Wispr Flow the transcript's job is to reach your cursor. In Stilou every dictation is also a dot in a local brain — searchable by meaning, linked to the person and project it was about, and usable later by Chat, Signals and Neo.
Wispr Flow's own documentation states that transcription always happens in the cloud. Stilou's Private mode transcribes on your Mac, so it works on a plane, and the audio never leaves the machine.
Plenty of people could reasonably run both, on different keys — Wispr Flow on the phone, Stilou on the Mac. We would rather say that than pretend the choice is obvious.
Czym jest Wispr Flow?
Wispr Flow is an AI dictation app for macOS, Windows, iOS and Android. You hold a key, speak, and formatted text appears in whatever application is in front of you — email, Slack, a document, a code editor. It handles punctuation and paragraphing on its own rather than making you say “comma” and “new line”, supports over a hundred languages, and learns the proper nouns you use often through a dictionary.
It has since grown past pure dictation. There is a Notetaker for meetings with speaker identification, calendar and Slack integration, and the ability to ask questions about a meeting afterwards. Pro adds unlimited dictation, longer meeting retention and access to more capable models; the free tier gives you roughly two thousand words a week on desktop.
It is, on the evidence of its own users, extremely good at the thing it does. Our dictation page borrows their category name on purpose. If what you need is fast, accurate speech-to-text in every app on every device you own, Wispr Flow is a completely defensible answer and this page is not going to argue otherwise.
Stilou vs Wispr Flow, side by side
Prices and features checked on their own site on 10 August 2026 and listed in full at the bottom of this page.
| Stilou | Wispr Flow | |
|---|---|---|
| Platforms | macOS only | macOS, Windows, iOS, Android |
| Where transcription happens | On your Mac in Private mode; cloud in Connected mode | In the cloud, always |
| Works with no network | Yes, in Private mode | No |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes — about 2,000 words/week on desktop |
| Paid price | From $29/mo | $15/mo, or $12/mo billed annually |
| Removes filler words automatically | Yes | Yes |
| Writes in your own style | Yes, via your Voiceprint | Learns your dictionary and snippets |
| Languages | Many | 100+ |
| What happens to the transcript | Kept as a dot — searchable, linked to people and projects | Delivered to your cursor; history in the app |
| Searchable months later by meaning | Yes, across everything you captured | Meeting notes searchable in-app |
| Meeting notes | Yes, via Joey, no bot in the call | Yes, via Notetaker (macOS) |
| Screenshots, notes, mail and chat in the same memory | Yes — one brain | No |
| Team features and SSO | No | Yes, on Enterprise |
| SOC 2 / ISO 27001 / HIPAA BAA | No | Yes, on Enterprise |
| Opt out of model training | Private mode sends nothing at all | Yes — Privacy Mode, any tier |
Read that table honestly and Wispr Flow wins more rows than we do. Most of those rows are about reach and assurance, which are real things to want. The two rows that would make us switch are the two about what happens to the words afterwards.
The difference is what happens after the words land.
A dictation app is judged on a single moment: you stop speaking, and text appears. Wispr Flow has optimised that moment about as hard as anyone. But look at what the moment produces. The words go into a text field owned by some other application — a Slack message, an email, a pull request comment — and from that instant they are that application's problem. Six weeks later, you remember explaining something well and you cannot find where you said it, because it is in one of nine places and none of them know about the other eight.
This is not a flaw in Wispr Flow. It is the correct behaviour for a tool whose category is typing. Typing does not remember. But it means the most articulate, highest-value thing you produce all week — you, explaining something out loud, fluently, without editing — is treated as disposable output.
In Stilou the same keystroke produces the same text in the same field, and also a dot. The dictation is transcribed, kept on your Mac, indexed by meaning rather than keyword, and linked to the people and projects it mentions. When you later ask Chat “what did I tell Alex about the pricing change”, the answer can come from something you said out loud on a Tuesday, because it was never thrown away.
Transcription always occurs in the cloud as the best way to provide accurate, low latency transcription.
Wispr Flow Help Center — Security and compliance FAQ
The second difference follows from that quote, and it is worth being precise about, because it is easy to get wrong in both directions. Wispr Flow offers a Privacy Mode, and it does what it says: your dictation is not used to train or improve models, by them or by any third party. That is a genuine, meaningful control and more than many competitors offer. What it does not do — and their documentation is admirably direct about this — is change where the audio goes. Their own security FAQ states that Wispr's backend must decrypt audio to perform transcription, and that the product does not provide end-to-end encryption in the strict cryptographic sense.
So the honest framing is: with Wispr Flow your voice reaches a server and you are trusting a policy, an audited one, not to misuse it. With Stilou in Private mode your voice reaches a model running on your own Mac, and there is no policy to trust because there is no transmission. Those are different kinds of promise. If you dictate client material, medical detail, salary conversations or anything under NDA, the difference is the whole decision. If you dictate Slack replies, it may be worth nothing to you at all.
Where Wispr Flow is the better choice
Written straight, because a comparison page that cannot do this is an advert.
- It works everywhere you domacOS, Windows, iOS and Android. Stilou is a Mac app and will be for the foreseeable future. Dictation is a habit, and a habit that breaks the moment you pick up your phone is a worse habit. For a lot of people this single row settles it.
- The cloud-always decision is defensibleWe frame it as a cost, and for privacy it is. But it is also why their transcription is as fast and as accurate as it is: a large server-side model beats what fits comfortably on a laptop, and they chose that trade deliberately rather than by accident.
- It is further along, and can prove itSOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, a HIPAA-ready BAA, SSO, SCIM, MDM and audit logs. Stilou has an argument about architecture; Wispr Flow has certificates from auditors. In an enterprise purchase those are not equivalent, and pretending otherwise would be silly.
- Real team featuresShared dictionaries and snippets, centralised billing, usage analytics. Stilou has no team layer at all — your brain is yours, which is the point, but it also means there is nothing to roll out to twelve colleagues.
- A more generous free tier for casual useTwo thousand words a week on desktop, unlimited on Android, with a 14-day Pro trial and no card required. If you dictate occasionally, you may never need to pay them anything.
If, having read all of that, Wispr Flow is the right tool for you — use it. We would rather be the second app you tried and rejected for good reasons than the one you bought on a page that lied to you.
Looking for a Wispr Flow alternative?
People usually arrive at that search for one of three reasons: they want dictation that works with no network, they are uncomfortable with audio leaving the machine, or they have realised that everything they have dictated for the past year is effectively gone. Stilou answers all three, on the Mac, and does not answer the fourth reason — price — because our paid tier costs more than theirs.
There is no import path, and pretending otherwise would waste your afternoon. Wispr Flow's history lives in their app; Stilou starts empty. The good news is that a memory tool becomes useful from the material you capture after you install it, not before, so the cost of starting over is a couple of weeks rather than a year.
- Install Stilou and keep Wispr FlowDo not uninstall anything yet. Put Stilou's dictation on a different key for a week and use whichever one your hands reach for.
- Turn on Private modeThis is the thing you cannot test anywhere else. Dictate a long passage with Wi-Fi switched off and see whether the quality is good enough for your actual work.
- Capture for two weeks before you judge itDictation alone is a fair fight that Wispr Flow may well win. The argument for Stilou only appears once there are a few hundred dots in the brain and Chat can answer a question you had forgotten you knew.
- Then decide, or keep bothPhone dictation in Wispr Flow, Mac capture in Stilou is a perfectly sensible setup, and a fair number of people will land there.
Warto wiedzieć. If offline dictation is the only thing you came for, and you do not care about memory, look at Superwhisper too — it runs Whisper models locally on Apple silicon and is cheaper than either of us. We would rather point you at it than sell you a brain you did not want.
Najczęstsze pytania
Does Wispr Flow work offline?
No. Wispr Flow's own help centre states that transcription always occurs in the cloud, and that their backend must decrypt audio in order to transcribe it. There is no on-device transcription mode. Stilou's Private mode runs the model on your Mac, so dictation works on a plane or with Wi-Fi off.
Is Wispr Flow private?
It depends what you mean, and the distinction matters. Wispr Flow's Privacy Mode stops your dictation being used to train or improve AI models, by them or by any subprocessor, and they hold zero-retention agreements with the AI providers they use. That is a real control and it is available on every tier.
What it does not do is keep your audio on your machine. Their documentation is explicit that the product does not provide end-to-end encryption in the strict cryptographic sense, meaning the service provider can decrypt content. So: strong policy, audited, but your voice does travel. Stilou's Private mode is a different kind of answer — nothing is transmitted, so there is no policy to rely on.
Which is cheaper, Stilou or Wispr Flow?
Wispr Flow. Their Pro tier is $15 a month, or $12 a month billed annually, against $29 a month for Stilou. Both have a free tier. If dictation is all you need, we are the expensive way to buy it, and you should weigh the other twelve tools honestly rather than assume you will use them.
Is Stilou a Wispr Flow clone?
No, though our dictation covers similar ground and we say “like Wispr Flow” on the homepage precisely so nobody has to guess what the feature is. The difference is scope: Wispr Flow is a dictation product with a notetaker attached, while Stilou's dictation is one of eight capture doors into a single local memory that also holds your screenshots, notes, meetings, mail and chat threads.
Can I use both?
Yes, and it is a reasonable setup. They are separate apps on separate hotkeys and they do not conflict. The common arrangement is Wispr Flow on the phone, where we do not exist, and Stilou on the Mac, where the capture feeds the brain.
Does Wispr Flow do meeting notes like Joey?
It has a Notetaker, currently macOS only, with speaker identification and calendar and Slack integration, and you can ask questions about a meeting afterwards. The structural difference is the same one as with dictation: those notes live in Wispr Flow, while Joey's land in the same brain as your dictations, screenshots and threads, linked to the client and the people involved.
Skąd te informacje
Wszystko, co napisaliśmy wyżej o produkcie Wispr Flow, pochodzi z jego własnej strony i dokumentacji, sprawdzonych w podanym dniu. Produkty się zmieniają — jeśli znajdziesz tu coś nieaktualnego, napisz na hi@stilou.app, a poprawimy.
- Wispr Flow — Pricingsprawdzono 10 Aug 2026
- Wispr Flow Help Center — Security and compliance FAQsprawdzono 10 Aug 2026
- Wispr Flow Help Center — Understanding Privacy Mode and Private Cloud Syncsprawdzono 10 Aug 2026
- Wispr Flow — Privacysprawdzono 10 Aug 2026