Riff and Wispr Flow

Wispr Flow is dictation for Mac, Windows, iPhone, and Android. You hold fn, talk, and Flow pastes the text where you were typing. It also has Notetaker, which takes meeting notes on Mac and Windows. Riff dictates the same way on a Mac, transcribes speech on your Mac instead of in the cloud, needs no account, and writes meeting notes around the ones you typed.

Facts about Wispr Flow are as of September 28, 2026, each linked to Wispr’s own page.

	Riff	Wispr Flow
Price	Plus One Pro, $19.99/mo or $199/yr	Pro $15 a month, or $12 a month billed yearly
Free tier	None	2,000 words a week on desktop and 1,000 on mobile
Where transcription runs	On your Mac	In the cloud
Where writing runs	Apple’s Private Cloud Compute, or the model on your Mac	Cloud services, with OpenAI and Baseten among its subprocessors
Account required	No	Yes
Trains models on your data	No	On by default for Free and Pro, with an opt-out
Where dictations are kept	On your Mac	On Wispr’s servers by default
Context sent with a dictation	None	On by default, and can include text on screen and a screenshot
Dictation key	Hold fn, or double-tap it for hands-free	Hold fn, or double-tap it for hands-free
Cleanup levels	Off, Light, and Polished	None, Light, and Medium
Custom vocabulary	Words, replacements, and snippets	Dictionary with corrections
Meeting notes without a bot	Yes	Yes, Notetaker on Mac and Windows
Notes written around yours	Yes	No, your notes and the summary are separate
Citations to the transcript	Every line Riff writes	Ask answers name their sources
App technology	Native Swift app in the App Sandbox	Electron, with a separate helper process
Platforms	Mac with Apple silicon and macOS 27	Mac with macOS 12 on Apple silicon or Intel, Windows, iPhone, and Android

The main difference

Wispr says that for Flow, “Transcription always occurs on the cloud.” Riff transcribes on your Mac with Apple Speech, Parakeet, or Cohere Transcribe, so your voice does not leave it. Riff sends text to Apple’s Private Cloud Compute for cleanup, and Apple says it stores no prompts.

Riff reads the characters before the caret on your Mac to fit spacing and capitals, and sends no screen text or screenshot with a dictation. Wispr’s context awareness is on by default, and you can turn it off.

Meeting notes

Flow’s Notetaker keeps your notes and its summary apart. Riff writes its notes around the ones you typed, keeps your words as you wrote them, and ties each line it adds to the transcript and the audio. Notes written around yours shows how.

When Wispr Flow is the better choice

Wispr Flow is the better choice if you dictate on Windows, iPhone, or Android as well as a Mac, since your dictionary syncs across devices with your account. It is also the better choice on an Intel Mac or a Mac that can’t run macOS 27, or if you dictate in many languages, since Flow dictates in more than 100 languages and detects the language on Mac.

If you want dictation and meeting notes on your Mac, with speech transcribed there and no account, Riff covers that. Dictation in any app describes it.