How much does Beam cost compared with Wispr Flow?

Beam is $5.99 a month or $59.99 a year and covers two Macs. Wispr Flow is $15 a month, or $12 a month billed annually, per user. Both offer 2,000 free words a week on desktop. Prices checked September 2026.

When is Wispr Flow the better choice?

If you work across Windows, iPhone or Android, if you dictate in many languages, if your company already deploys it with single sign on, or if your procurement requires a SOC 2 report rather than an architectural argument. Beam is macOS only and holds no certifications.

Beam

Beam vs Wispr Flow

Q: Is there a Wispr Flow alternative that runs on device?

Yes. Beam transcribes speech and cleans it up entirely on your own Mac, with no account and no API key. Wispr Flow's security and compliance FAQ states that transcription always happens in the cloud, and that its zero retention privacy mode is not the default.

Compared September 7, 2026. Figures taken from Wispr Flow's own pricing page and help center, linked at the bottom.

One difference outweighs every other line in the table, and it is not a matter of opinion. It is written in Wispr Flow's own documentation.

Wispr Flow transcribes your speech in the cloud. Beam transcribes it on your Mac, and nothing leaves the device.

Those are their words, not ours. Wispr Flow's security and compliance FAQ states that transcription "always happens in the cloud," on models running on remote servers. Their zero-retention privacy mode exists, and the same page says it is not the default: every user has to find it and switch it on.

Beam has no default to get wrong. Your speech becomes text on your own Apple silicon. The cleanup pass that fixes grammar and punctuation is a language model that also runs on your Mac. Beam makes no API call to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or any other cloud AI provider, because it contains no code that could make one. Unplug the network and it keeps working.

Beam is free for fourteen days, no card, no account. Download it now and run the test at the foot of this page while you read.

The comparison, line by line

	Beam	Wispr Flow
Where your voice is transcribed	On your Mac	On remote servers
Cleanup and formatting	A language model on your Mac	In the cloud
Works with no internet	Yes, entirely	No
Account required	None	Yes
Price	$5.99 a month, $59.99 a year	$15 a month, $12 a month billed annually
Free tier	2,000 words a week	2,000 words a week on desktop
Platforms	macOS	macOS, Windows, iOS, Android
Languages	English, with more engines for other languages	100 and more
Compliance certificates	None. Your words never reach a server of ours to audit	SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, HIPAA
Macs per license	Two	Per user

Beam runs on Apple silicon Macs and leads with English, with Whisper engines for other languages. It does not run on Windows or phones, where Wispr Flow lists four platforms and more than a hundred languages.

Reasons to choose Beam

Your words are not yours to send

Lawyers, clinicians, therapists, accountants, journalists protecting a source, anyone under an NDA. Wispr offers a privacy mode with zero retention, but their help center is clear that it is not the default and each user has to enable it. Beam has no setting to get wrong, because there is no server to retain anything.

You want to verify rather than trust

Run a packet capture while you dictate. Pull the network cable and keep working. Both tests are on the trust page and take about ten minutes together. The claim is falsifiable, which is the point.

No account, so nothing to provision

Beam has no user accounts. There is no seat to buy, no admin to ask and no single sign-on to wire up. Install it at lunch, hold a key, and finished text lands wherever the cursor is, in every app on the Mac. If your security team wants to look first, the trust page was written for them and checks out in about ten minutes.

Under half the price

$5.99 a month against $15. $59.99 a year against $144. Two Macs on one license, and Meetings and Notes included.

About the certificates

Wispr Flow holds SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and HIPAA. Beam holds none, and no page of ours will ever imply otherwise.

Those certificates answer one question: how carefully does this vendor guard the customer data on its servers. Your speech sits on Wispr Flow's servers, by their own documentation, so the question applies to them. It never reaches ours, so no audit of our systems could tell you anything about it. What we hold is an email address and a license key, listed in full on the trust page.

A report about a server is a promise. An architecture you can test with a packet capture is not.

Do not take our word for it

Install Beam and disprove us. It takes ten minutes.

codesign -dv --verbose=4 /Applications/Beam.app
spctl -a -vvv /Applications/Beam.app

The Team Identifier must read 6P8A7DR398 and Gatekeeper must report the app as notarized by Apple. Then open Little Snitch or run tcpdump, dictate for several minutes, and watch nothing carrying your voice leave the machine. Then switch the network off and dictate again. No cloud service can offer you that test, whatever its policy says.

That is the whole case. Both steps on your Mac, no account, under half the price, and a claim you can disprove in ten minutes if it is wrong.

Fourteen days of everything, free. Every engine, Meetings and Notes, no ceiling, no card, no account.

Download Beam

Apple silicon, macOS 14 or later. One click downloads the disk image; nothing to fill in. After the trial: 2,000 words a week free for good, or $5.99 a month. 30 day refund, renewals included.

All Mac dictation apps compared · Also compared: Beam vs Superwhisper · Beam vs Apple Dictation

Wispr Flow prices and free-tier limits read from wisprflow.ai/pricing on 2026-09-07. The statement that transcription always happens in the cloud, and that zero-retention privacy mode is not the default, is from Wispr Flow's own security and compliance FAQ. Prices change; check theirs before deciding. If anything here becomes inaccurate, write to [email protected] and we will correct it.