We compared nine transcription tools by one of the most important differences between their free plans: how much you can actually transcribe before you have to pay. TurboScribe has the largest free allowance, at three transcripts a day. Whisper is the only option here that stays free at any volume, because it is open source and runs on your own machine. MeetGeek has the most complete free plan, covering meetings and uploaded files in the same allowance.
"Free" covers three very different deals here. Some tools give you a permanent plan with a monthly cap. Some give you a trial measured in minutes, which runs out once and does not renew. One is open source and stays free because you install and run it yourself. This guide says which is which, and quotes the exact limit for each.
If you are looking specifically for a tool that joins your calls and writes the notes, our guide to free AI meeting note takers covers that job. This page is about turning audio into text, whether the audio is a meeting, an interview, a lecture or a file that has been sitting in your downloads folder.
The 9 Best Free Transcription Software Tools in 2026
MeetGeek is one of the tools in this comparison. Every figure was verified against each vendor’s own pricing, help and documentation pages on September 9, 2026, and the tools are ranked on the criteria explained under the table.
| Tool | What you get for free | Hardest free limit | Languages | Cheapest paid plan |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MeetGeek | Permanent plan, 3 hrs a month, meetings and uploads | 2 hrs per recording, no export | 100+ | $15.99/user/mo, or $9.99/user/mo billed annually |
| TurboScribe | Permanent plan, 3 transcripts a day | 30 min per file | Not published | $120/yr billed annually |
| Whisper | Open source, unlimited, runs on your own machine | Your hardware, and no interface | Not published as a count | Free at any volume |
| Otter | Permanent plan, 300 min a month | 3 file imports for the life of the account | 6 | $16.99/user/mo, or $8.33/user/mo billed annually |
| Notta | Permanent plan, 120 min a month, 50 uploads | 3 min per conversation | Not published as a count | $8.17/mo billed annually |
| Happy Scribe | 10 min of AI transcription, plus unlimited 45-minute meeting recordings | 10 AI minutes, once | 150+ | $17/mo, or $8.50/mo billed annually |
| Rev | Permanent plan, 45 min a month | English only on free | English on free, 37+ on Pro | $25.49/seat/mo billed annually |
| Transkriptor | Trial only, 90 min | No permanent free plan | 100+ | $19.99/mo, or $8.33/mo billed annually |
| Sonix | Trial only, 30 min | No permanent free plan | 54+ | $10/hr, pay as you go |
Table last updated: September 9, 2026.
Some of the best-known names here have surprisingly limited free tiers. Otter allows three file imports for the life of the account and Rev allows 45 minutes a month, while TurboScribe and Whisper, neither of them a household name, are the two that will transcribe the most for you at no cost.
1. MeetGeek: Best All-Round Free Plan
MeetGeek transcribes the calls on your calendar and the audio or video files you upload, and both come out of the same allowance. On the free Basic plan that is 3 hours a month, in 100+ languages, with automatic language detection.
Transcripts have speaker labels and interactive timestamps, so clicking a line jumps the recording to that moment, and search takes you to where a term was said rather than to the file that contains it. The free plan also includes unlimited AI summaries broken into topics, action items, decisions and next steps, AI chat across your past meetings, and meeting analytics. For a call, MeetGeek’s help centre says the recording, transcript and summary arrive within 5 to 10 minutes of the meeting ending, depending on length. Uploads take a little longer: an mp4, mp3 or wav file came back in roughly 10 to 15 minutes in our hands-on testing.
For live calls it can automatically record and transcribe meetings on Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet, with a bot in the call or bot-free through the browser recorder. The mobile app records in-person conversations, which most tools on this list do not do at all.
On the free plan you get 3 hours of transcription a month, with a 2-hour maximum on any single recording, 3 months of transcript storage and 1 month of audio storage. Transcript export and outbound integrations start on the paid Pro plan, so on free you can read and search your transcripts but not send them to other tools.
Pro is $15.99 per user a month, or $9.99 per user a month billed annually, with 20 hours a month and $0.50 per extra hour. Business is $27 per user a month, or $17 per user a month billed annually, with unlimited transcription, a 3-hour maximum per meeting and video storage. Each pair is the same plan on two billing terms.
MeetGeek transcribes your meetings and your files, free
Join 50,000+ teams recording and transcribing in 100+ languages, on calls and on uploaded files.
Best for: teams that need one tool for both live meetings and file uploads, in a language other than English.
What you give up: volume. Three hours a month is enough for a few meetings, but not for teams that want to transcribe their full calendar.
2. TurboScribe: Most Generous Free File Transcription
TurboScribe is the best free option here if you mainly need to upload files and get text back. The free plan gives you 3 transcripts a day, each up to 30 minutes long. That is more free transcription than any monthly plan in this comparison offers.
The main limitation is the 30-minute cap on each file. A 45-minute interview will not fit unless you split it first, and unused transcripts do not carry over to the next day, so the free plan suits short files: voice notes, podcast segments, lecture recordings.
Paid is a single plan, $120 billed yearly, which lifts the cap to unlimited transcripts, files up to 10 hours or 5 GB, batches of 50 files at once, translation into 134+ languages and unlimited storage.
Best for: a steady flow of short files, at no cost.
What you give up: anything over 30 minutes, and any meeting capture at all.
3. Whisper: Free at Any Volume, If You Run It Yourself
Whisper is OpenAI’s open source speech recognition model, and both the code and the model weights are released under the MIT licence. There is no allowance, no per-minute rate and no account. You install it and run it on your own machine, and for a researcher or a journalist with a large archive to get through, nothing else here competes on cost.
What it costs you is setup time and hardware. Installation is a pip install plus ffmpeg, and the model comes in sizes that trade accuracy for speed and memory. The tiny and base models need about 1 GB of VRAM and run roughly 7 to 10 times faster than real time. Small needs about 2 GB, medium about 5 GB, and the large model needs about 10 GB of VRAM and runs at roughly real time. A turbo model sits at about 6 GB and runs around 8 times faster than large.
There is no interface, no speaker labels out of the box, no sharing and no summaries. Whisper is a model, not a finished product, and several of the tools higher up this list are built on similar technology with an interface and a workflow added on top.
Best for: large archives, sensitive audio that should not leave your machine, and anyone comfortable at a command line.
What you give up: everything that is not the transcript. No speaker labels, no sharing, no summaries, no support.
4. Otter: Best Free Live Transcription in English
Otter’s strength is live transcription: the text appears while the conversation is happening rather than after it. The free Basic plan includes 300 transcription minutes a month with a 30-minute limit per conversation, recording across Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet, and a history capped at your 25 most recent conversations.
For file transcription, the limit that matters most is easy to miss. Otter free allows 3 audio or video file imports for the lifetime of the account, not per month. After the third upload, importing a file becomes a paid feature. If you have a folder of recordings to get through, you will reach that limit almost immediately.
Otter also transcribes only 6 languages, English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese and Chinese, and that applies to every plan rather than just the free one.
Pro is $16.99 per user a month, or $8.33 per user a month billed annually, and lifts imports to 10 a month with 1,200 recording minutes. Business is $30 per user a month, or $19.99 per user a month billed annually, with unlimited imports. If you are weighing the two, we break it down in the MeetGeek and Otter comparison.
Best for: English meetings where you want to read along live.
What you give up: file transcription after the third upload, and every language outside those six.
5. Notta: Free Multilingual Transcription, in Very Short Pieces
Notta transcribes uploads and live calls, identifies speakers and covers a wide language range. The main problem with the free plan is the 3-minute limit per conversation.
The free plan gives you 120 transcription minutes a month and 50 file uploads a month, but each conversation is capped at 3 minutes, which is short enough that most meetings, interviews and lectures will not fit. AI summaries are limited to 10 a month, and transcript export is reserved for paid plans, so the text stays inside Notta.
The paid plans remove that limit. Pro is $8.17 a month billed annually, at $97.99 for the year, for 1,800 minutes a month, up to 5 hours per recording, 100 uploads and transcript export. Business is $16.67 a month billed annually, at $199.99 for the year, for unlimited transcription and 200 uploads.
Best for: short multilingual clips and voice notes.
What you give up: any single recording over three minutes, and the ability to export what you transcribed.
6. Happy Scribe: Best Free Exports for Subtitles
Happy Scribe is more useful if you need subtitles or meeting recordings than if you need a lot of free AI transcription. AI transcription on the free plan is a 10-minute trial, the smallest allowance in this comparison. Meeting recording is not capped: the free plan records an unlimited number of meetings at up to 45 minutes each, with speaker detection, a limited history and basic TXT and SRT exports. Getting a usable subtitle file without paying is unusual on a free tier.
Happy Scribe publishes 150+ languages for AI transcription and subtitles, and 80+ for AI translation, on every plan including the free one.
Basic is $17 a month, or $8.50 a month billed annually, for 120 AI minutes a month and 90-minute recordings. Pro is $29 a month, or $19 a month billed annually, for 600 AI minutes and 3 seats. Extra minutes on any paid plan are $0.20 each.
Best for: captions and subtitle files, and recording meetings without paying.
What you give up: AI transcription volume. Ten minutes runs out on your first real file.
7. Rev: Human Transcription, Now Aimed at Legal Work
Rev’s AI side is quick. In our hands-on testing a 6-minute file came back in around 5 minutes, with interactive timestamps, speaker labels and inline editing you reach by clicking the line you want to change. Rev is also the one tool here that will put a person on your audio: its human transcription service is quoted at 99%+ accuracy with turnaround in 12 hours or less. That service is paid on every plan, and it is English only.
Rev now clearly markets the product toward legal and investigative teams. Its pricing page is headed Pricing Plans For Legal And Investigative Work, the product is presented as an Investigative Intelligence Platform, and the paid tiers include case file analysis, a Clio integration, CJIS compliance and seat limits sized for firms. It still works as a general transcription tool, but the product and the pricing are now built around that audience.
The free plan gives you 45 AI transcription minutes a month, in English only, analysis of up to 5 files at a time, the AI Notetaker for Google Meet, Teams and Zoom, and the mobile app. Essentials is $25.49 per seat a month billed annually, at $305.90 for the year, for 5,000 minutes in English and Spanish only and up to 3 seats. The 37+ language support belongs to Pro, at $47.99 per seat a month billed annually, not to the paid tiers generally. Minutes are pooled across seats at account level.
Best for: English audio where a human transcriptionist is worth paying for, especially in legal work.
What you give up: volume on free. Forty five minutes a month will not cover a one-hour call, and free is English only.
8. Transkriptor: No Free Plan, Wide Language Coverage
Transkriptor transcribes uploads, YouTube links, cloud files and live recordings, supports 100+ languages, identifies multiple speakers and timestamps everything. Connect a calendar and it will join and transcribe calls on Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet. In our hands-on testing the transcripts came back accurate, with multiple speakers correctly separated, and processing was quick.
There is no permanent free plan. Transkriptor offers a free trial capped at 90 minutes, which is generous for a trial, but it does not renew. Lite is $9.99 a month for 300 minutes. Pro is $19.99 a month, or $8.33 a month billed annually at $99.99 for the year, for 2,400 minutes a month with translation, downloads and AI note-taking. Team is $30 per seat a month, or $20 per seat a month billed annually at $240 for the year, for 3,000 minutes per seat with workspaces and call analysis.
Best for: multilingual file transcription once you are ready to pay.
What you give up: a permanent free tier. Once the 90 minutes are gone, there is no free option left.
9. Sonix: No Free Plan, Built for Publishing Transcripts
Sonix is an audio-to-text tool aimed at people who publish what they transcribe. It generates an embeddable, brandable transcript player for a web page, which nothing else in this comparison does, and exports to PDF, Word and plain text. It supports 54+ languages for transcription and 55+ for translation, and handles YouTube links. In our hands-on testing transcripts were accurate and came back in 10 to 20 minutes.
There is no free plan, only a 30-minute free trial, and Sonix restructured its pricing since the last version of this guide. It is now pay as you go at $10 an hour with no monthly fee, or a subscription: Core at $25 a month or $275 a year for 5 hours, Advanced at $50 a month or $550 a year for 20 hours, and Pro at $80 a month or $880 a year for 40 hours. Extra hours on a subscription are $10 each and extra seats are $25 a month. The older $22 per user plan with a $5 hourly rate no longer exists.
Best for: publishing transcripts on a website, and occasional work where a subscription makes no sense.
What you give up: any free tier at all, and collaboration below the subscription plans.
How Much You Can Actually Transcribe for Free
The number of free minutes only tells part of the story. Three hours a month works well if most of your recordings are short, and becomes restrictive quickly if you regularly record hour-long meetings, interviews or workshops.
MeetGeek data from 1 million meetings, recorded by teams in more than 100 countries, shows how different those lengths can be. 59.7% of workshops lasted at least an hour, compared with 5.3% of daily standups.
That makes the maximum length of a single recording as important as the monthly allowance. Otter gives you 300 minutes a month but limits each conversation to 30 minutes, so an hour-long recording will not fit no matter how much of the monthly total is left. Notta gives you 120 minutes, but each conversation can only be 3 minutes long.
The table below shows how many 15-, 30-, 60- and 120-minute recordings each free plan can handle once both limits are counted.
| Free plan | 15-minute recordings | 30-minute recordings | 60-minute recordings | 2-hour recordings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Whisper | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| TurboScribe | 3 a day | 3 a day | None, over the 30-minute file cap | None, over the 30-minute file cap |
| Otter | 20 a month | 10 a month | None, over the 30-minute per-conversation cap | None, over the 30-minute per-conversation cap |
| MeetGeek | 12 a month | 6 a month | 3 a month | 1 a month |
| Rev | 3 a month | 1 a month | None, over the 45-minute monthly total | None, over the 45-minute monthly total |
| Notta | None, over the 3-minute per-conversation cap | None, over the 3-minute per-conversation cap | None, over the 3-minute per-conversation cap | None, over the 3-minute per-conversation cap |
| Happy Scribe | None, over the 10-minute AI trial | None, over the 10-minute AI trial | None, over the 10-minute AI trial | None, over the 10-minute AI trial |
Table last updated: September 9, 2026. Transkriptor and Sonix are not shown because their free offers are one-off trials of 90 and 30 minutes, not monthly allowances.
For short recordings, Otter and TurboScribe give you the most. At an hour, only MeetGeek and Whisper have a free option at all. For a two-hour recording, MeetGeek’s free plan can handle one per month, which also reaches its maximum recording length.
Paid plans mostly remove this problem. MeetGeek Pro raises the monthly total to 20 hours and Business removes it, TurboScribe’s paid plan allows unlimited transcripts with files up to 10 hours, and Sonix charges by the hour with no monthly plan at all.
Free Plan, Free Trial, or Run It Yourself
Three different things get called free on a pricing page.
- A permanent free plan resets every month and does not expire. MeetGeek, TurboScribe, Otter, Notta and Rev each offer one, at very different sizes;
- A free trial is a fixed quantity that runs out once. Transkriptor gives you 90 minutes and Sonix gives you 30, and neither renews. Happy Scribe is a mix: its meeting recording is free and unlimited, but its AI transcription is a one-off 10-minute trial;
- Open source is free at any volume because you are running it yourself. Whisper is the option here, and the cost is your time and your hardware rather than a subscription.
Before choosing a free plan, check which limit you are most likely to hit first.
How We Tested
Four of the nine tools here were used hands-on, uploading real audio and video files and running live calls through them: MeetGeek, Rev, Transkriptor and Sonix. That work was done in December 2025, when this guide first went up, and the processing times in those sections come from it. The other five, Otter, Notta, Whisper, TurboScribe and Happy Scribe, are assessed on what each vendor publishes about its own plans. Every plan, price, cap and language count on this page, for all nine, was re-verified against the vendor’s own pricing, help and documentation pages on September 9, 2026.
We then compared five things.
- Accuracy. A transcript you have to fix line by line is not saving you time, so this carries the most weight. None of the vendors here documents a different, lower quality model for its free plan, so the differences we saw were between tools rather than between tiers;
- Language support. English is widely supported across the tools in this comparison. The differences are much larger when you need Portuguese, Japanese or Arabic, where the range runs from 6 languages to 150+;
- What the free tier really allows. Not just the headline minutes, but the maximum length of each recording, the number of uploads, whether export is included and how long transcripts are kept;
- Collaboration. Whether a transcript can be shared, commented on and searched by a team, or only read by the person who made it;
- Pricing clarity. Whether the price on the page is the price you pay. Most vendors here show an annual rate as a monthly figure, which makes a like-for-like comparison harder than it should be. We have quoted both terms wherever they differ.
When Free Is Not Enough
Most free plans become limiting for one of three reasons: the monthly allowance, the maximum recording length, or restrictions such as transcript export. The cheapest paid plans rank very differently from the free ones.
Pay as you go suits irregular work, and Sonix at $10 an hour is the only true pay-per-use option here. For steady volume at the lowest price, TurboScribe at $120 a year for unlimited transcripts is hard to beat on cost. For multilingual file work, Transkriptor’s Pro at $8.33 a month billed annually buys 40 hours. For teams that need to send transcripts into other tools, MeetGeek Pro at $9.99 per user a month billed annually adds transcript export, AI meeting minutes and outbound integrations with 10,000+ connected apps.
Compare monthly against monthly and annual against annual when you do this. On this page alone, most vendors quote an annual rate as a monthly figure.
Start with the free plan
3 hours of transcription a month, in 100+ languages, across meetings and file uploads.
Key Takeaways
- The best free transcription software overall is MeetGeek, because one 3-hour monthly allowance covers both live meetings and uploaded files in 100+ languages, with summaries and search included on the free plan;
- TurboScribe has the largest free file allowance in practice, at 3 transcripts a day, provided every file is under 30 minutes;
- Whisper is the only option here that is free at any volume, and the only one that keeps the audio on your own machine, at the cost of having no interface;
- The monthly allowance is often not the limit you reach first. Otter’s 3 lifetime file imports and Notta’s 3-minute per-conversation cap end the free tier long before the minutes run out;
- For a recording of an hour or more, only MeetGeek and Whisper have a free option at all;
- Transkriptor and Sonix have no free plan, only 90-minute and 30-minute trials, so treat both as paid tools;
- Most vendors on this page display an annual rate as a monthly price, so compare the same billing term on both sides.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Is the Best Free Transcription Software?
MeetGeek, for most people, because its free plan transcribes both live meetings and uploaded audio or video files in 100+ languages within the same 3-hour monthly allowance, and includes summaries, search and speaker labels rather than reserving them for paid tiers. If you only transcribe short files, TurboScribe’s 3 transcripts a day is a larger free allowance. If you need unlimited volume and can run software yourself, Whisper is free at any scale.
Is There Any Truly Unlimited Free Transcription?
Only open source. Whisper is released under the MIT licence and runs on your own machine with no cap, no account and no per-minute cost. Every hosted tool in this comparison caps its free tier somewhere, whether in monthly minutes, recording length, number of uploads or export.
Can I Transcribe an Audio File for Free Without Installing Anything?
Yes, on several tools, but the caps differ enormously. TurboScribe allows 3 files a day up to 30 minutes each, MeetGeek includes uploads in its 3-hour monthly allowance, and Notta allows 50 uploads a month but caps each at 3 minutes. Otter is more restrictive than it looks: its free plan allows only 3 file imports for the lifetime of the account.
Can ChatGPT Do Transcription?
ChatGPT has a record mode that transcribes and summarizes audio. OpenAI documents it as available on the macOS desktop app for Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu workspaces, capped at 4 hours per session, with the notes saved into your chat history. That is a live recording feature: OpenAI’s record mode documentation does not describe uploading an existing audio or video file for transcription. We tested what actually works in can ChatGPT transcribe audio. You can also connect MeetGeek’s ChatGPT integration to pull transcripts, summaries and action items from your call history into a chat.
Which Free Transcription Tools Support Languages Other Than English?
Happy Scribe publishes 150+ languages for AI transcription on every plan including the free one. MeetGeek and Transkriptor both cover 100+, and Sonix 54+. Otter is the narrowest at 6 languages, and that applies to its paid plans too rather than being a free tier restriction. Rev’s free plan is English only, and its 37+ language support starts on the Pro plan.
How Accurate Is Free Transcription Compared to Paid?
None of the vendors here documents a separate, lower quality model for its free plan, so the transcript itself is not what changes when you stop paying. What changes is everything around it: how much you can transcribe, how long each recording can be, whether you can export the result and how long it is stored. The exception is human transcription, which Rev quotes at 99%+ accuracy and never offers free.
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