Curlo vs Live Captions by Subanana

Curlo and Live Captions by Subanana are both audio & voice tracked by AIDiveForge. Below is a side-by-side comparison of pricing, capabilities, platforms, and ownership — sourced from each tool's live website and verified before publishing.

Curlo

Curlo is a macOS audio search and organization tool that lets sound designers and editors query their local libraries the way they'd describe a sound to a colleague. The core workflow is semantic search: you describe what you need, and Curlo surfaces matching files from your collection. Processing runs locally, which means your proprietary sound library never leaves the machine. The local API extends this into DAW and production pipelines, so search can live inside the tools you already use. The ceiling appears around complex cross-library deduplication and anything requiring Windows or cloud-sync workflows — those teams look elsewhere.

Live Captions by Subanana

The tool covers four distinct workflows under one interface: video subtitling with glossary enforcement, verbatim transcription with word-level speaker separation, meeting capture without requiring a bot to join the call, and live captioning for in-room or public-display audiences across 95+ languages. Dual ASR engines run per language pair with millisecond timecodes, and custom glossaries correct terminology before translation — each substitution logged. Export options include SRT, VTT, FCPXML, XLSX, Markdown, and burned-in video up to 4K. The free tier caps projects at 15 minutes, which surfaces the wall fast for anyone processing long-form content. No API is available, so teams that need to wire this into an existing pipeline hit a dead end and look elsewhere.

Attribute	Curlo	Live Captions by Subanana
Pricing	Paid	Paid
Price	$39.9/year or $99 one-time	—
Free trial	No	No
Open source	No	No
Has API	Yes	No
Self-hosted option	Yes	No
Platforms	macOS	Web, Chrome extension
Pros	Semantic description-based search, so you find a 'wet gravel footstep' by describing it rather than scanning hundreds of ambiguously named files — the forty-minute browse becomes a query. On-device processing with no audio data sent to external servers, which means studios with proprietary or NDA-covered assets can use it without a legal review of data handling policies. UCS-standard metadata writing that embeds classification directly into files, so your organization survives a migration away from Curlo rather than dying in a proprietary database. Local API on paid tiers, so audio search can be triggered from inside a DAW or a production script instead of requiring a context switch to a separate app. Free tier handles libraries up to 5,000 files, which means a solo editor or junior sound designer can validate the workflow before committing to a paid tier.	Dual ASR engines run per language pair with millisecond timecodes and silence recovery, so the exported file stays frame-accurate even when audio quality dips between speakers. Glossary enforcement corrects domain-specific terms before translation and logs every substitution, which means brand names, product terms, and specialized vocabulary survive the language switch without a manual review pass. Word-level speaker diarization splits overlapping voices at word boundaries and carries named roster labels through every export format, so a two-hour interview with four speakers arrives as a quotable, attributed transcript rather than an undifferentiated wall of text. Export covers SRT, VTT, FCPXML, XLSX, Markdown, and burned-in video up to 4K, which means the same processed file hands off to a video editor, a data analyst, and a publishing workflow without conversion steps. A no-bot browser extension captures meetings without joining as a participant, so teams whose platforms block third-party bots can still get a transcript without requesting IT exceptions.
Cons	The tool is macOS-only — a Windows-based post-production team cannot use it at all, and that is a hard stop that sends them to browser-based or cross-platform audio search alternatives regardless of how well the search quality performs. Metadata writing and the local API are paid-only features, which means the free tier is a search-only evaluation tool — teams that discover they need to push metadata back to files or integrate with a DAW hit a paywall before they can run a real production workflow test. Semantic search quality is bounded by the metadata and audio content Curlo can analyze in your existing files; libraries with years of inconsistent naming and stripped metadata will return noisy results until a manual cleanup pass is done — that remediation work falls entirely on the user. There is no shared or cloud-synced library mode described in the vendor documentation, so a team of three editors who need to search the same asset library from different machines cannot use Curlo as a shared source of truth — they either duplicate the library on each machine or switch to a team-oriented DAM solution.	The free tier caps each project at 15 minutes, so a 90-minute interview or a two-hour event recording hits the wall on the first upload — teams processing long-form content regularly are immediately into paid territory and need to budget accordingly before starting. No API is available, which means every file requires a manual upload through the web interface. Teams that generate transcription jobs programmatically — automated ingest pipelines, post-production workflows triggered by a CI step — cannot integrate this tool and move to a competitor that exposes an endpoint. Live captioning and meeting transcription depend on a stable connection to the Subanana service with no self-hosted option, so organizations under strict data-residency requirements or operating in environments where outbound connections to third-party SaaS are restricted cannot deploy this tool.

Bottom line

Only Curlo exposes a public API. Choose based on which difference matters most for your workflow.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between Curlo and Live Captions by Subanana?

Curlo is Paid, while Live Captions by Subanana is Paid. Compare pricing, free trial, API, platforms, and pros/cons in the table above on AIDiveForge.

Is Curlo better than Live Captions by Subanana?

It depends on your workflow. Use the side-by-side attributes (pricing, open source, API, self-hosted, platforms) to decide. AIDiveForge does not rank a universal winner — we publish verified facts so you can choose.