FreeFlow vs Dragon
The name everyone still searches for. Nuance discontinued it on the Mac in 2018 and never brought it back.
If you came here looking for Dragon on a Mac, the short answer is that it does not exist any more. Nuance discontinued Dragon Professional Individual for Mac on 22 October 2018. Microsoft acquired Nuance in 2022 and has not revived it. The current Dragon Professional line is v16, Windows-only, $699.99.
Old Mac installers still circulate. They have known problems on Ventura and later, they get no security updates, and they are compiled against a macOS that has moved on twice since. That is not a workaround, it is a liability.
So this page is less a comparison than an answer to the question people are actually asking: Dragon set the expectation for what desktop dictation should feel like, and something has to fill the gap it left on the Mac.
What Dragon got right, and what replaced it
Dragon's reputation was built on two things: it ran locally, and it learned your voice and your vocabulary over time. Both mattered enormously for the people who depended on it — clinicians, lawyers, transcriptionists, and anyone for whom typing was painful or impossible.
Local transcription is no longer the hard part. Speech models small enough to run on a laptop are now better than what Dragon shipped, and FreeFlow runs Parakeet and Whisper models on the Neural Engine at roughly a 6.3% word error rate with no training period at all. The personal dictionary covers the vocabulary half — you teach it a term once instead of drilling it.
What FreeFlow does not replace
Being direct about this, because Dragon users are often people with accessibility needs and a vague answer is worse than none: Dragon Professional had deep voice-command control — navigating the OS, editing by voice, custom macros, correcting text by speaking corrections. FreeFlow does not do that. It is dictation, not voice control.
If voice commands are the reason you used Dragon, macOS Voice Control (built into System Settings → Accessibility) is the closer replacement, and it is free. Many people run Voice Control for navigation and a dedicated dictation app for the actual writing.
Price, for what it is worth
Dragon Professional v16 is $699.99 on Windows. FreeFlow is $99 once, covering three Macs, on hardware you already own.
That comparison is a little unfair in both directions — Dragon is an enterprise product with two decades of accessibility engineering behind it, and it does not run on your Mac at any price.
Pick Dragon instead if…
- You are on Windows and need genuine voice control, not just dictation. Dragon Professional v16 is still the most capable product of its kind.
- Your workflow depends on voice macros, voice-driven correction, or specialist medical and legal vocabularies that Dragon ships and general models do not.
- You have an existing Dragon setup on Windows that works. Nothing here is a reason to abandon it.
The verdict
There is no Dragon for Mac to compare against — that is the whole finding. For dictation on a modern Mac, FreeFlow covers the part Dragon was most used for: local processing, your own vocabulary, no subscription. For voice control and hands-free navigation, pair it with macOS Voice Control, which is free and built in. If you need everything Dragon did in one product, that still means Windows.
Questions people actually ask
Can I still buy Dragon for Mac?
No. Nuance discontinued Dragon Professional Individual for Mac on 22 October 2018 and no replacement was released. Only Windows versions are sold today.
Will old Dragon for Mac still run on macOS 26?
Not reliably. Reports of breakage start around Ventura, and the software gets no updates. Running an abandoned installer for something that listens to your microphone is a bad trade.
Does FreeFlow do voice commands like Dragon did?
No. FreeFlow dictates text; it does not control your Mac by voice. macOS Voice Control is the free built-in tool for that, and the two work fine together.