Both run Whisper on your own Mac and neither uploads a thing. MacWhisper is built to produce transcripts; suubbs is built to put words on a picture at the right millisecond.
Both run Whisper on your Mac and neither uploads your audio. What they do afterwards is completely different.
MacWhisper is a transcription workbench. It is mature, it handles batches, it does dictation into other applications, it supports the full range of Whisper models and it has years of refinement behind it. If what you want is the text — interviews, notes, meetings, a podcast archive — it is an excellent tool and this page is not going to argue otherwise.
suubbs is a subtitle studio. It cares about where each word lands to the millisecond, how the caption looks on the picture, and whether the styled export renders identically when ffmpeg burns it in. If what you want is captions on a video, that is a different set of problems.
MacWhisper wins more rows than we do. It is also roughly fifteen times the price.
| MacWhisper | suubbs | |
|---|---|---|
| Runs locally | Yes | Yes |
| Price | Free tier; about €59 once for Pro | $3.99 once |
| Built for | Transcription and dictation | Subtitles and captions |
| Word-level timing | Timestamps, not caption-grade word alignment | About 3 ms, snapped to the audio |
| Caption styling | No styling studio | Font, colour, position, word highlighting |
| Styled export (.ass) | No | Yes, matching the preview |
| Languages | Very broad — the full Whisper set | Sixteen |
| Dictation into other apps | Yes | No |
| Batch transcription | Yes | One file at a time |
| Free browser version | No | Yes, no account |
…you mainly need transcripts rather than captions, you transcribe in batches, you want dictation into other apps, or you work in a language outside our sixteen. Its language coverage and its batch handling are genuinely better than ours, and a free tier means you can find out without spending anything.
Buy suubbs if the output is going on a video: word-level timing, caption styling and an ASS export that matches its preview are the things it is built for, and it is $3.99.
Checked in August 2026. Competitors change their pricing and their feature sets, and we are not always the first to notice. If something here is out of date, tell us at hello@suubbs.com and we will fix it — an inaccurate comparison is not worth a sale.