Best-in-class AI noise cancellation that grew into a meeting assistant -- a polished utility app, not a transcription API, with a free tier that's quietly shrunk.
Krisp is best known for AI noise cancellation that strips background sound from any call in real time, and has expanded into an AI meeting assistant with transcription, notes, and summaries. It works as a desktop app that sits between your mic and any conferencing tool, plus an embeddable Voice SDK for developers building voice products. Consumer plans run around $8-15/mo (billed annually); the old perpetual free tier appears to have narrowed to a trial, and Voice SDK pricing is contact-sales. Its noise-cancellation quality is its real moat -- it's a meeting and utility app, not a transcription API like AssemblyAI or Deepgram.
● EDITORIAL VERDICT
Why we scored it
Best-in-class AI noise cancellation that grew into a meeting assistant -- a polished utility app, not a transcription API, with a free tier that's quietly shrunk.
Pros
+Best-in-class real-time AI noise cancellation
+Works with any conferencing app at the mic level
+Added AI meeting notes, transcription, and summaries
+Embeddable Voice SDK for developers
+Bidirectional noise removal (you and the other side)
Cons
−Perpetual free tier appears narrowed to a trial
−Voice SDK pricing is contact-sales only (opaque)
−Not a transcription API -- different use case than STT vendors
−Meeting-AI features trail dedicated notetakers
−Pricing data shifts; needs re-verification
● PRICING
How much does Krisp cost?
Consumer plans ~$8/mo and ~$15/mo (billed annually); free tier now appears limited to a trial rather than perpetual. Embeddable Voice SDK pricing is contact-sales. As of mid-2026 -- re-verify tiers on the live page.
● ALTERNATIVES
Best alternatives to Krisp.
Same AI audio category, ranked by BigBang Score. Click any to compare side-by-side.
Whisper is OpenAI's open-source, MIT-licensed speech-to-text model trained on 680,000 hours of audio -- you can download it and run transcription fully offline and free on your own hardware. It supports ~99 languages plus translation to English and is remarkably robust to accents and noise. If you don't want to run GPUs, OpenAI's hosted transcription API runs Whisper (and newer gpt-4o-transcribe models) at roughly $0.006/min. It has no built-in speaker diarization and the core repo updates infrequently, but the surrounding ecosystem (whisper.cpp, faster-whisper, WhisperX) is enormous.
Cartesia builds real-time-first voice models -- its Sonic TTS and Ink STT rank #1 on Artificial Analysis speech leaderboards for combined quality and speed. Built on state-space (Mamba-style) architectures for ultra-low latency, it's purpose-made for voice agents and powers platforms like Retell. One developer API covers TTS, STT, and voice agents, with a genuinely usable free tier (20K credits/mo) and paid plans from $5/mo, plus cloud, on-prem, and on-device deployment. The main friction is an abstract credit model and promo pricing that muddies the long-term cost.
AssemblyAI is a developer-first speech-to-text platform built for production voice AI, with industry-leading accuracy from its Universal model family. Beyond transcription it offers a Speech Understanding API (summarization, sentiment, PII redaction), a Voice Agent API, and an LLM Gateway (formerly LeMUR) that runs LLMs over transcripts at passthrough pricing. Pricing is transparent pay-as-you-go -- pre-recorded from $0.15/hr, realtime from $0.15/hr -- with an unusually generous free tier (185 hours pre-recorded, 333 hours streaming, no card). It's a builder's tool, not a consumer app, and competes head-to-head with Deepgram.
Industry-leading AI voice platform for text-to-speech, voice cloning, and multilingual dubbing. Produces the most natural-sounding synthetic speech with instant cloning from short samples. Used by podcasters, game devs, and SaaS companies building voice features. Robust API for easy integration.
Deepgram is a developer speech platform best known for fast, cheap, accurate speech-to-text via its Nova model family, plus Aura text-to-speech and a voice-agent API. Pricing is pay-as-you-go per minute (Nova STT from roughly $0.0077/min, with promotional rates lower) and $200 in free credits to start, making it one of the cheapest production STT options. It's optimized for real-time, high-throughput voice applications and competes directly with AssemblyAI. Like AssemblyAI, it's infrastructure for builders, not a consumer-facing tool.
Stable Audio is Stability AI's music and sound-effects generator, and the only major player offering open-weight music models trained on fully licensed data. The hosted app (running Stable Audio 2.5) has tiers from free to $89.99/mo, while the Stable Audio 3.0 Small and Medium models released in May 2026 are open weights on Hugging Face, free for commercial use under $1M revenue. That means you can self-host, own your outputs, and generate variable-length tracks up to six minutes. The hosted free tier is thin (10 generations, 30-second crop, non-commercial), but the open-weight option is genuinely unique.
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