Live Captions by Subanana vs Willow Voice

Live Captions by Subanana and Willow Voice 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.

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.

Willow Voice

Willow is a dictation layer that sits above every text field on Mac, Windows, and iPhone — cursor in the field, hotkey held, and transcribed text appears on release with punctuation and formatting already applied. The vendor states 100,000+ professionals use it across Slack, Gmail, Notion, Cursor, and iMessage without switching apps or copying output. The model handles filler words and natural speech patterns so you do not have to pre-format your thoughts. The ceiling appears on complex structured documents where formatting intent — headers, lists, code blocks — requires cleanup that the tool does not automate. Teams with specialized terminology report the shared dictionary feature closes most of that gap, but edge cases stay manual.

Attribute	Live Captions by Subanana	Willow Voice
Pricing	Paid	Paid
Price	—	$15/mo Individual Pro
Free trial	No	No
Open source	No	No
Has API	No	No
Self-hosted option	No	No
Platforms	Web, Chrome extension	Mac, Windows, iOS, Android (coming soon)
Pros	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.	Works inside any text field across Slack, Gmail, Notion, Cursor, and iMessage without switching apps, so the dictation loop adds no friction to whatever tool the team already lives in. Automatic punctuation and filler-word removal on release, which means you speak in natural sentences and avoid the cleanup pass that makes raw transcription slower than typing. Shared team dictionary for custom vocabulary and domain terms, so healthcare, legal, or product teams stop manually correcting the same misrecognized terms on every document. Cross-platform coverage across Mac, Windows, and iPhone, so the workflow does not fragment when the same professional moves between devices across a workday. Vendor states 4x faster writing and roughly five recovered hours per week, so the productivity case for adoption is concrete enough to run a team pilot against a before/after comparison.
Cons	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.	Structured document formatting — nested headers, bullet hierarchies, code blocks — requires manual cleanup after dictation because hold-and-speak cannot reliably interpret document structure from natural speech; teams producing formal deliverables keep a formatting pass in the workflow. No API and no self-hosted option, which means any team that needs to embed dictation inside a custom application, run processing on-premises for compliance, or pipe transcription into their own data pipeline hits a dead end and moves to a provider with an API surface, such as Deepgram or AssemblyAI. Free tier limits are not detailed in the scraped content, but paid-only features exist — teams that adopt Willow at scale and then hit a usage wall mid-sprint face either an unplanned budget conversation or a workflow disruption while they upgrade.

Bottom line

Live Captions by Subanana and Willow Voice are closely matched on pricing model, openness, and API availability — pick by feature set and platform support in the table above.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between Live Captions by Subanana and Willow Voice?

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

Is Live Captions by Subanana better than Willow Voice?

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.