What is the best free alternative to Deepgram?
OpenAI Whisper is the closest free alternative to Deepgram: same Speech & Transcription Engines sub-category, and it is free. Open-source speech-to-text, run locally free
Best free Deepgram alternatives
Looking for a free alternative to Deepgram? Here are 9 speech & transcription engines worth trying — 9 with a free tier. Deepgram itself is free tier + paid.
| Tool | Deepgram (you searched) | OpenAI Whisper | NVIDIA Parakeet | WhisperX |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing | freemium | free | free | free |
| Best for | Fast, accurate speech-to-text API | Open-source speech-to-text, run locally free | Tops the Hugging Face Open ASR Leaderboard with 6.05% average WER at 0.6B params | 70x real-time transcription speed via batched inference on top of Whisper |
| Visit | Open ↗ | Open ↗ | Open ↗ | Open ↗ |
Deepgram alternatives — straight answers
Are there free Deepgram alternatives?
Yes — 9 of the 9 alternatives listed here are free or freemium: OpenAI Whisper, NVIDIA Parakeet, WhisperX, AssemblyAI, Mistral Voxtral. None of them are paid-only.
Is Deepgram free?
Deepgram is free tier + paid. There is a free tier you can work in, with paid plans above it.
How were these Deepgram alternatives chosen?
They are the other tools in Speech & Transcription Engines, then the rest of AI Models & Local Execution, ordered free tiers first and capped at 9. There is no sponsorship and no paid placement in that ordering — only the pricing tier decides.
All Deepgram alternatives
Browse Speech & Transcription Engines →OpenAI Whisper
Speech & Transcription Engines
✦ WhyA Deepgram alternative — Open-source speech-to-text, run locally free.
- Open-source speech-to-text, run locally free
- 99+ languages and translation
- Robust to accents and noise
- Powers countless apps
NVIDIA Parakeet
Speech & Transcription Engines
✦ WhyA Deepgram alternative — Tops the Hugging Face Open ASR Leaderboard with 6.05% average WER at 0.6B params.
- Tops the Hugging Face Open ASR Leaderboard with 6.05% average WER at 0.6B params
- CC-BY-4.0 license, free for commercial and non-commercial use
- RTFx ~3,386 — extremely fast inference relative to accuracy
WhisperX
Speech & Transcription Engines
✦ WhyA Deepgram alternative — 70x real-time transcription speed via batched inference on top of Whisper.
- 70x real-time transcription speed via batched inference on top of Whisper
- Adds wav2vec2 forced alignment for accurate word-level timestamps Whisper lacks natively
- Built-in speaker diarization and VAD preprocessing to cut hallucinations
AssemblyAI
Speech & Transcription Engines
✦ WhyA Deepgram alternative — Speech-to-text with audio intelligence.
- Speech-to-text with audio intelligence
- Summaries, topics and sentiment
- Speaker diarization
- Free tier for developers
Mistral Voxtral
Speech & Transcription Engines
✦ WhyA Deepgram alternative — Apache 2.0 open-weight models (24B and 3B) downloadable from Hugging Face.
- Apache 2.0 open-weight models (24B and 3B) downloadable from Hugging Face
- Built-in Q&A/summarization over audio, not just raw transcription
- Function-calling directly from voice input for agent workflows
Speechmatics
Speech & Transcription Engines
✦ WhyA Deepgram alternative — Free starting credit with no card required, 56+ language support.
- Free starting credit with no card required, 56+ language support
- Model-training discount program cuts costs 33% for data-sharing customers
- On-premises/VPC deployment for privacy-sensitive enterprise use
Soniox
Speech & Transcription Engines
✦ WhyA Deepgram alternative — Real-time speech-to-text priced well under typical competitor rates.
- Real-time speech-to-text priced well under typical competitor rates
- Combines transcription + translation in one streaming API call
- Diarization and speech translation bundled at no extra cost
ElevenLabs Scribe
Speech & Transcription Engines
✦ WhyA Deepgram alternative — Scribe v2 Realtime transcribes in under 150ms latency.
- Scribe v2 Realtime transcribes in under 150ms latency
- Dynamic audio-event tagging (laughter, footsteps) beyond plain words
- Keyterm prompting locks in up to 1,000 specified terms for accuracy
Ollama
Local LLM Runners
✦ WhyA Deepgram alternative — The default way to run LLMs locally.
- The default way to run LLMs locally
- One command to run Llama, Qwen, DeepSeek…
- OpenAI-compatible local API
- Free and open-source