Subtitles · Alternatives
Six approaches, four of which cost nothing. This page compares what each one is rather than what it costs this month, because prices move and shapes do not: where it runs, what it can hear, and how it puts the words in front of you. Three of the six beat this app outright for certain jobs, and those are named.
Launch week: $5 instead of $9 until 22 August · 14-day refund
| Option | Where it runs | What it can hear | How it appears |
|---|---|---|---|
| The app's own captions | Their servers, mostly | That one app | Inside its window |
| Apple Live Captions | On the Mac | Mac audio, across apps | A window you move |
| Your browser's live caption | On the Mac | Tabs in that browser | A bar in the browser |
| Cloud captions and notetakers | Their servers | Only what you send them | A web app, or a bot in the call |
| Local file transcription | On the Mac | Files you hand it | A transcript, afterwards |
| Subtitles | On the Mac, on the Neural Engine | Any app, or all of them at once | An overlay above every window |
Read the second column first. It decides more than any feature list will: whether the sound of your meetings leaves the machine it was played on. Everything else is a preference, and that one is usually a policy.
What each category actually looks like when you go searching. No prices here on purpose: every one of them changes theirs more often than this page could keep up, and the differences that matter are not the prices.
Zoom, Teams, Google Meet and Slack huddles all caption themselves, free, in more languages than macOS covers. The catch is rarely the quality. It is that the host or an admin often has to allow it, and that they stop at the edge of their own window.
Free, on-device, already installed on every Apple silicon Mac, and the first thing anyone should try. Apple says it is not available in every language, country or region, which is the usual reason it is not an option. The full comparison.
A switch in the browser's own settings that captions audio playing in a tab, on device, at no cost. If everything you need captioned is a video in Chrome, this is the answer and you can stop here.
The cloud category, Otter, Fireflies and Fathom among them: live captions plus a searchable transcript, speaker labels, and languages nothing on-device covers. Ava is built around deaf and hard-of-hearing users specifically and is worth knowing about. The audio goes to a server to get there, and in a lot of workplaces that ends the discussion.
Whisper on your own Mac, wrapped in something usable. Best-in-class accuracy on a file you already have, and the right tool for a recording. Live, across every app, in an overlay is not what they are for.
A different job wearing similar words: a summary after the meeting rather than the words during it. Complementary rather than competing, and plenty of people run both.
The closest competitor on the Mac, and the one actually worth comparing. The difference that matters is where the words go: it puts them in the notch, which keeps them out of your way and caps how much text fits and how large it can be. This draws them as subtitles instead, at whatever size you set, because a line you have to squint at is a line you stop reading. Which of those you want is a real preference rather than a verdict.
Not software, and for some hours of your life the only right answer. A medical appointment, a legal meeting, a class you are assessed on: that is what CART and professional captioners are for, and nothing running on your Mac is a substitute for one. This is for the ordinary hours in between, where the realistic alternative is not a professional. It is nothing.
In order. Stop at the first one that describes you, because the ones above it are cheaper than the ones below.
14-day refund, no questions asked.
Four things, and they are the only reasons to prefer it. Everything else on this page does something well.
You are rarely only in the call: there are notes, a browser, the document being discussed. Captions inside a window are gone the moment you switch away from it. This one sits above every window and takes no clicks, so it stays there while you work, and pointing at it makes it dissolve rather than move.
No host to enable anything, no admin to approve anything, no bot in the participant list. It taps the sound your Mac is already making, which is not something any of those apps administers.
With no country or region condition, and translation between any two of them on the Mac, which is 240 orderings rather than the to-English pairs a speech model gives you.
One model download on first run, and after that the only calls left are a version check you can decline and, once you have a key, a monthly check of it. Nothing is written to disk, on any plan, ever, because there are no plans.
macOS has this built in and free. Where it stops being enough.
Complementary, not alternatives. Notes after, captions during.
Every route to captioning system audio, and how the capture works.
If it plays sound on your Mac, it captions. The list, and the exceptions.
Nothing is written to disk, and after the model downloads the only calls left are a version check you can decline and, with a key, a monthly check of it.
A free week, then one price, every future update, and a 14-day refund.
Launch week: $5 instead of $9 until 22 August · 14-day refund
14-day refund, no questions asked
Free for 7 days, then $9 once, every future update included ·
macOS 14.2 or later · Apple silicon
Unlimited live captions, for as long as you own the Mac. No minutes to
buy, no account, no subscription.