# Best free sherpa-onnx alternatives

9 free alternatives to sherpa-onnx and 0 more. sherpa-onnx is free.

## Alternatives

- [NVIDIA Parakeet](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/nvidia-parakeet) — Free — Tops the Hugging Face Open ASR Leaderboard with 6.05% average WER at 0.6B params
- [NVIDIA Canary-Qwen 2.5B](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/nvidia-canary-qwen-2-5b) — Free — Speech-recognition plus LLM hybrid model that transcribes and can summarize or answer questions about audio
- [Deepgram](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/deepgram) — Freemium — Fast, accurate speech-to-text API
- [AssemblyAI](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/assemblyai) — Freemium — Speech-to-text with audio intelligence
- [Mistral Voxtral](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/mistral-voxtral) — Freemium — Apache 2.0 open-weight models (24B and 3B) downloadable from Hugging Face
- [Speechmatics](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/speechmatics) — Freemium — Free starting credit with no card required, 56+ language support
- [Soniox](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/soniox) — Freemium — Real-time speech-to-text priced well under typical competitor rates
- [ElevenLabs Scribe](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/elevenlabs-scribe) — Freemium — Scribe v2 Realtime transcribes in under 150ms latency
- [OpenAI Whisper](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/openai-whisper) — Free — Open-source speech-to-text, run locally free

## FAQ

### What is the best free alternative to sherpa-onnx?

NVIDIA Parakeet is the closest free alternative to sherpa-onnx: same Speech & Transcription Engines sub-category, and it is free. Tops the Hugging Face Open ASR Leaderboard with 6.05% average WER at 0.6B params

### Are there free sherpa-onnx alternatives?

Yes — 9 of the 9 alternatives listed here are free or freemium: NVIDIA Parakeet, NVIDIA Canary-Qwen 2.5B, Deepgram, AssemblyAI, Mistral Voxtral. None of them are paid-only.

### Is sherpa-onnx free?

sherpa-onnx is free. There is no paid plan attached to it in the catalog.

### How were these sherpa-onnx 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.

## Related

- [sherpa-onnx](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/sherpa-onnx)
- [Speech & Transcription Engines](https://aitools.flocci.in/category/ai-models-local-execution/speech-transcription-engines)
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Source: Flocci AI Tools — https://aitools.flocci.in/alternatives/sherpa-onnx

Facts last verified: October 2026