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Dictave and Wispr Flow, honestly

Wispr Flow is a polished product with real strengths, and pretending otherwise would tell you nothing. The two tools make one different choice, and everything else follows from it: Wispr Flow turns your speech into text on their servers; Dictave does it on your Mac. Here is what that means in practice — including the rows they win.

	Dictave	Wispr Flow
Where speech becomes text	On your Mac. The words are made right where you spoke them.	On their servers. Their own privacy page says it plainly: “Transcription always happens in the cloud.”
Works on a plane	Yes — everything works with the network off. We wrote about why that matters.	Dictation needs a connection to their servers.
What leaves your computer	Nothing. The app has no way to send your voice anywhere, and that is verified on every release — not promised in a policy.	Your audio travels to their servers, encrypted on the way. You choose whether transcripts and audio are stored there.
Price	Free.	Free for 2,000 words a week on desktop; Pro from $12 a month.
Languages	Eight: English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and Polish — each one tested end to end before it was listed. More are coming.	More than 100 languages, detected automatically, and it picks the language for you. If you need one Dictave does not have yet, this row decides it.
Where it runs	macOS.	Mac, Windows, iPhone and Android.
Cleaning up what you said	Tidies away the ums and ahs, hears punctuation, and rewrites on request — with a preview before anything changes. All of it happens on your Mac.	Automatic edits, tone matching and formatting, done on their servers.
Your own words and names	A dictionary you control, kept on your Mac. The app adapts to how you speak without anything leaving the machine.	A personal dictionary that fills itself in automatically, or by hand.
Your history	Encrypted on your Mac. Delete it any time; keep it only as long as you choose.	Optional storage on their servers, with controls for retention and for whether your data trains their models.
How privacy is kept	By construction. There is nothing in the app that could phone home, so there is nothing you have to take on trust.	By policy and audit — enterprise certifications, encryption in transit and at rest.

Where Wispr Flow is simply ahead

If you need a language Dictave does not cover yet — Hindi, Chinese, Japanese and most of the world's others — or want Windows or your phone today, or team accounts and enterprise paperwork, Wispr Flow is the stronger pick right now, no asterisk. It also detects the language for you, where Dictave asks you to choose one. What it cannot offer, at any price, is a version of itself where your voice stays on your machine: their design sends speech to their servers, and their engineering is built around doing that responsibly.

Dictave starts from the opposite end. Your voice never leaves your Mac, not as a setting but as the way the thing is built — and the features grow from there. Pick by the row that matters most to you.

Written from the two products’ public pages on 24 August 2026, and kept in step with what Dictave itself ships — for Wispr Flow, the homepage, pricing and privacy policy at wisprflow.ai; for Dictave, this site. Details change and theirs is a fast-moving product: check their pages for the current picture. Wispr Flow is a product of Wispr AI, which is not affiliated with Dictave and has not reviewed this page.

Try Dictave — the download is the whole product.