AssemblyAI vs ElevenLabs Scribe

AssemblyAI is freemium — a usable free tier with paid plans above it. ElevenLabs Scribe is freemium — a usable free tier with paid plans above it. Both are listed under Speech & Transcription Engines, so this is a like-for-like comparison. Neither is ranked above the other — Flocci carries no sponsored placement.

AssemblyAI vs ElevenLabs Scribe — straight answers

AssemblyAI vs ElevenLabs Scribe: what is the difference?

AssemblyAI is freemium — a usable free tier with paid plans above it and is listed for speech-to-text with audio intelligence. ElevenLabs Scribe is freemium — a usable free tier with paid plans above it and is listed for scribe v2 Realtime transcribes in under 150ms latency. Both sit in Speech & Transcription Engines.

Is AssemblyAI or ElevenLabs Scribe cheaper to start with?

Neither — AssemblyAI and ElevenLabs Scribe are both freemium, so the choice comes down to capability rather than cost. Both entries list what they uniquely do above.

Which should I choose, AssemblyAI or ElevenLabs Scribe?

Choose AssemblyAI if you need speech-to-text with audio intelligence; choose ElevenLabs Scribe if you need scribe v2 Realtime transcribes in under 150ms latency. Flocci AI Tools does not rank one above the other — it shows both feature sets side by side and lets the requirement decide.

AssemblyAI compared with ElevenLabs Scribe: pricing tier, category, listed capabilities and links.
 AssemblyAIElevenLabs Scribe
Pricing tierFree tier + paid plansFree tier + paid plans
Free to startYesYes
CategoryAI Models & Local ExecutionAI Models & Local Execution
TypeSpeech & Transcription EnginesSpeech & Transcription Engines
Listed capabilities
  • Speech-to-text with audio intelligence
  • Summaries, topics and sentiment
  • Speaker diarization
  • Free tier for developers
  • 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
Tagsspeech, assemblyai, transcription, understanding, api, freeelevenlabs scribe, speech to text, real time transcription, auto captions, speaker diarization, free
Websiteassemblyai.comelevenlabs.io
Full pageAssemblyAI details →ElevenLabs Scribe details →
AlternativesAssemblyAI alternatives →ElevenLabs Scribe alternatives →

NVIDIA Canary-Qwen 2.5B

Speech & Transcription Engines
freeNew
  • Speech-recognition plus LLM hybrid model that transcribes and can summarize or answer questions about audio
  • Topped the Hugging Face Open ASR leaderboard at release (English)
  • CC-BY-4.0 weights

NVIDIA Parakeet

Speech & Transcription Engines
free
  • 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

sherpa-onnx

Speech & Transcription Engines
freeNew
  • Offline speech-to-text, text-to-speech, VAD and speaker diarization without internet
  • Runs on Android, iOS, Raspberry Pi, WebAssembly and desktop with many language bindings
  • Apache-2.0

faster-whisper

Speech & Transcription Engines
freeNew
  • Whisper reimplementation on CTranslate2, up to 4x faster with less memory
  • int8 quantization for GPU and CPU
  • MIT licensed Python library

FunASR

Speech & Transcription Engines
freeNew
  • Open-source speech recognition toolkit with Paraformer and SenseVoice models
  • Streaming ASR, VAD, punctuation and speaker diarization
  • Strong Mandarin and multilingual accuracy
  • Runs on CPU or GPU, MIT-style license

Moonshine

Speech & Transcription Engines
freeNew
  • Small streaming speech-recognition models for phones, browsers and low-power devices
  • Low latency for live voice interfaces
  • Free open-source weights and runtime