Parakeety vs SuperWhisper

SuperWhisper is built on OpenAI's Whisper. Parakeet support arrived in July 2025 as an optional extra, with the better model selection still gated behind the Pro tier. The free tier ships with Whisper tiny and Whisper base, which lag a long way behind Whisper Large V3 or Parakeet TDT v3 on accuracy.

Parakeety runs Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3 as its only engine. There is no model picker. The model that ships is the model that runs. Parakeet TDT v3 currently ranks first on the Hugging Face Open ASR Leaderboard, with a 6.32% word error rate against Whisper Large V3's 7.44%.

Sticking to one engine is a deliberate scope decision rather than a technical limit. It keeps the app small (around 2 MB without the model file), the install simple, and testing focused on a single happy path.

The headline number for Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3 is a real-time factor of 3,333x on Apple Silicon, from NVIDIA's published benchmarks. In practice that means a ten-minute dictation transcribes in around 0.2 seconds. Close enough to instant that you only feel keyboard latency, not transcription latency.

Whisper Large V3 sits at 146x. Whisper Large V3 Turbo, the model SuperWhisper Pro upgrades you to, runs at around 350x. Both are usable; both are roughly an order of magnitude slower than Parakeet on the same hardware.

Parakeety is $30, paid once, with every future update included. SuperWhisper's monthly and annual tiers are recurring, and its $249.99 lifetime tier is roughly 8x the price of Parakeety. Against the annual at $84.99, $30 breaks even inside the first four months.

Both apps support local transcription. The difference is what "local" means by default.

• Parakeety. Local only. The audio does not leave your Mac. The only outbound traffic is the one-time speech-model download from Hugging Face on first launch and license checks against the license backend.
• SuperWhisper. Local models alongside cloud models such as Nova and GPT-4o. The BYOK ("bring your own key") feature routes transcribed text to OpenAI or Anthropic for post-processing. None of this is hidden, but it does mean privacy depends on configuration rather than on architecture.

For most users that distinction will not matter. For anyone dictating client briefings, medical notes or anything you would rather not have a copy of sitting on someone else's servers, the architectural answer is preferable to the configuration answer. We covered the broader compliance angle in Does Wispr Flow run locally?.

Worth knowing for anyone deep in the weeds. SuperWhisper's Parakeet implementation is not the vanilla NVIDIA model. It is a proprietary build from Argmax, who have patched a few specific edge cases in the upstream model: short utterances of fewer than three words sometimes drop, streaming mode posts a higher word error rate than batch mode, and custom vocabulary is not supported in the upstream release. Argmax's fixes are licensed commercially and not publicly available.

Parakeety uses the standard NVIDIA model. We have not seen the short-utterance issue in everyday push-to-talk use, and we do not currently support custom vocabulary. If either of those is core to your workflow, that is a fair point to flag and to test against on a trial.

• AI post-processing. Cleaning spoken text into emails, summaries or formatted notes. Parakeety does not do this. If that workflow is the value, SuperWhisper Pro is the more complete tool.
• Bigger model menu. Cloud models when you want maximum accuracy and do not mind cloud routing.
• More configuration. Dictation modes, custom prompts, integrations.
• Track record. A longer-running product with more polish in the corners.

• One engine, one price, fewer choices to get wrong.
• $30 once. No subscription, no tiered features locked behind a paywall.
• On-device by architecture, not by configuration.
• Roughly an order of magnitude faster than the Whisper variants on the same Mac.
• 2 MB app, 600 MB model downloaded once.

• SuperWhisper: multi-model menu, local and cloud options, AI post-processing, $8.49/month or $249.99 lifetime.
• Parakeety: Parakeet TDT v3 only, fully local, no AI post-processing, $30 once.

If Wispr Flow is also on the shortlist, Parakeety vs Wispr Flow is the cloud-vs-local read.

Parakeety is a Mac menu-bar app. Hold the section key, talk, release; your words paste at the cursor in whichever app you were typing into. Audio never leaves the machine. There is a free 7-day trial with no card required. After that it is $30 once.

Try Parakeety free →