Bunso vs Wispr Flow
Every claim about Wispr Flow below is taken from wisprflow.ai and its own documentation, checked 15 August 2026. Products change; if you are reading this much later, check theirs again.
Wispr Flow transcribes in the cloud and costs a subscription. Bunso transcribes on your Mac and costs once. Most of what follows comes from that one difference — and for a lot of people, Wispr Flow is the better pick.
Where Wispr Flow is the better choice
Stated first, and not as a courtesy. If any of these matter to you, stop reading and go and use it.
- It runs where Bunso does not. Wispr Flow is available on Mac, Windows, iPhone and Android. Bunso is Apple Silicon Mac only, on purpose, with no plans for anything else. If you dictate on a phone or a PC, that decides it.
- It supports 100+ languages. Bunso ships two speech models covering English, European languages, and Filipino code-switching. If you dictate in a language outside that, Bunso may simply not have it.
- It does things Bunso does not do at all, including a meeting notetaker with speaker identification, and calendar and Slack integration.
- It has the compliance paperwork. Their site lists SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and HIPAA. Bunso has none of these, and if your employer requires them, that is the end of the conversation.
- It has teams and enterprise management. Bunso is a single-user app with a two-Mac licence and no admin console.
The one difference everything else follows from
Wispr Flow's privacy policy states plainly that “transcription always happens in the cloud”. Their documentation describes controls over what is kept — a Privacy Mode under which they retain no audio, transcripts or edits — rather than an option to avoid sending audio in the first place.
Bunso is the other shape: speech recognition and the cleanup pass both run on your Mac, and audio is never sent anywhere under any setting. There is one optional exception, off by default, and it is text-only — you can supply your own API key and have the cleanup step run at a provider you choose. The privacy page lists every item that can be transmitted.
Two consequences worth being concrete about:
- Bunso works with no internet at all. On a plane, on a train through tunnels, on bad hotel wifi. A cloud transcriber cannot.
- Wispr Flow improves without you doing anything. A server model gets better between one dictation and the next. A local model is the one on your disk until you update it. That is a real advantage of theirs, and it is the other side of the same coin.
Code-switching, which is the reason this page exists
Wispr Flow supports Tagalog. It is in their language list, and any page telling you otherwise is wrong. If you want a comparison that starts by misrepresenting the other product, this is not it.
The difference their documentation describes is not the language, it is the switching. In their own words, “rapid language switching within a single sentence is not supported”, and Flow “works best when you speak primarily in one language with occasional words from another”.
That is precisely the Taglish case: not English with a Filipino word in it, but a sentence whose grammar is Filipino and whose nouns and verbs are English, switching several times before the full stop. “Na-deploy ko na yung latest build sa staging kanina.”
Bunso is built for that specific shape. What it does to a speech model, and thirty real transcripts.
What we have not done, and will not pretend to have done: we have not run Wispr Flow against our thirty-clip corpus. Our transcripts are published; theirs are not ours to produce. What is above is what their documentation says about the case, next to what ours measurably does. If you are choosing on this, test both on your own sentences — both have a free tier, and an afternoon of your own speech beats anybody's comparison page.
What each one costs
| Wispr Flow | Bunso | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | 2,000 words a week on desktop; 1,000 on iPhone; unlimited on Android | Unlimited dictation, no cap, same models and same accuracy as paid |
| Paid | Pro at $12 per user per month billed annually, or $15 monthly | One-time purchase, updates included, no recurring charge |
| After a year | $144 at the annual rate, and again the year after | Nothing further |
| If you stop paying | Back to the free tier's weekly word cap | Cleanup moves back onto your Mac; dictation is unaffected and saved keywords are never deleted |
The honest framing on price: a subscription buys continuous improvement and a company with staff. A one-time purchase buys a tool that keeps working and cannot raise your rent. Which is better value depends on how long you intend to keep dictating, and neither answer is silly.
So which one
- Wispr Flow if you need Windows, a phone, a language outside Bunso's two models, meeting notes, or compliance paperwork.
- Bunso if your audio must not leave the machine, if you need it to work offline, if you switch languages mid-sentence, or if you would rather pay once.