Vibe
Fully offline desktop transcription for recordings, with an unusually long export list.
98
sovereigntyVibe is a small MIT-licensed desktop app that transcribes audio and video files on your own machine — no account, no cloud, no per-minute billing. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux with GPU acceleration on Nvidia, AMD and Intel hardware, batches whole folders, and writes out SRT, VTT, TXT, HTML, PDF, JSON or DOCX. It is the right tool if what you actually need is transcripts of interviews, lectures or recorded calls rather than a live meeting assistant.
OPEN SOURCEMITSELF-HOSTLOCAL-FIRST
LicenseMIT
PricingFree and open source. No accounts, no paid tier and no per-minute charge — you provide the computer. The project accepts donations on its site.
Open sourceYes
Self-hostableYes
Local-first dataYes
What it does well
- +Completely offline: nothing is uploaded, which removes the data question rather than answering it
- +Windows, macOS and Linux, with Vulkan or CoreML acceleration across Nvidia, AMD and Intel GPUs
- +Batch transcription of multiple files, and it can pull audio from sites such as YouTube and Vimeo
- +Exports SRT, VTT, TXT, HTML, PDF, JSON and DOCX, so a transcript is never trapped in the app
- +Maintained and current — v3.2.2 released 2026-09-05
Where it falls short
- −Not a meeting assistant: it works on recordings, so there is no calendar, no live call capture and no action-item output
- −The feature list does not include AI summaries or speaker diarization, which is a real part of what Otter produces
- −Effectively a single-maintainer project — healthy today, but that is the risk you are accepting
- −You still have to get the audio: capturing a Zoom or Teams call is a separate step you arrange yourself
- −Accuracy and speed follow your hardware and the model you pick, as with every local Whisper setup
Vibe as an alternative to
Where Vibe shows up in our comparisons, and how it ranked.
Vibe head-to-head
Straight comparisons against the tools people weigh it against.