FreeFlow vs Aqua Voice
Cloud-only dictation with strong custom vocabulary. Nothing it does happens on your Mac.
Aqua Voice is fast, accurate, and good at the thing people most often complain about — proper nouns and jargon. Its custom vocabulary handling is genuinely a strength, and it is cheaper than Wispr Flow or Willow at $8/mo billed annually.
It is also entirely cloud. There is no on-device mode, no offline fallback, and no configuration that keeps a sentence on your machine. Every dictation is an upload.
That is a defensible product decision — server-side models can be larger than anything that fits on a laptop — and it is the single axis this comparison turns on.
No local mode at all
Some competitors in this category are hybrid: local when you want it, cloud when you need it. Aqua is not. There is no setting to change, which at least means there is no ambiguity about where your words went.
FreeFlow is the mirror image. Six models, all on-device, no network path for audio. The trade is that FreeFlow cannot offer you a frontier model's cleanup, and Aqua cannot offer you a train tunnel.
Custom vocabulary, both ways
Aqua's vocabulary handling is one of the better implementations around, and if your work is full of names that generic models mangle, that matters more than most feature lists suggest.
FreeFlow's personal dictionary does the same job locally: add the term once, and it stops being something you go back and fix. No account holds the list, and it works with the network off.
$96 a year against $99 once
Aqua's annual plan is the cheapest subscription in this comparison set at $96/yr. FreeFlow is $99 once for three Macs.
The crossover is roughly twelve months, which is the tightest of any page here. Year two is where it stops being close.
Pick Aqua Voice instead if…
- You need Windows as well as macOS.
- You want frontier cloud models doing the transcription and cleanup, and uploading audio is not a concern for your work.
- You have a reliable connection everywhere you write, and offline dictation has never come up.
- You want the lowest monthly price and prefer subscriptions to owning software.
The verdict
Aqua Voice is a good cloud dictation app and its vocabulary handling deserves the praise it gets. But it has no on-device mode of any kind, which rules it out entirely for anyone whose work cannot be uploaded — and makes it useless the moment your connection is. If that is you, FreeFlow's whole architecture is the answer, and the price crosses over in about a year.
Questions people actually ask
Does Aqua Voice have an offline mode?
No. It is cloud-only, with no on-device path.
Which handles technical vocabulary better?
Aqua's custom vocabulary is excellent. FreeFlow's personal dictionary solves the same problem on-device, so the list never leaves your Mac and works offline.
Is FreeFlow cheaper?
After roughly the first year, yes. Aqua is $96/yr, every year. FreeFlow is $99 once for three Macs.