Onit is free, local, and good at what it does — pure Mac dictation with no subscription. ThoughtMic costs $8/mo (or $99 once) because it writes titled, tagged, linked Markdown into your Obsidian or Logseq vault. Different products. The honest question is whether vault depth is worth paying for.
No FUD. No "free won't last" speculation. We respect Onit's play.
Pick Onit if…
You dictate into Slack, Mail, Notion, your IDE, and you want a no-subscription, 100%-local Whisper experience. You're not running an Obsidian or Logseq vault — or you are, but you're happy treating dictation as plain text input. If that's you, Onit is the right pick. Genuinely. Skip ThoughtMic.
Pick ThoughtMic if…
You live in Obsidian, Logseq, Foam, or a plain Markdown folder, and you want spoken thoughts to land as titled, auto-tagged, backlinked notes — plus a Friday review surface that actually clears your #inbox and a local MCP server your AI tools can query. You're paying for vault depth, not for dictation.
| Onit | ThoughtMic | |
|---|---|---|
| Platform | macOS | macOS (iOS 6–8 weeks after launch) |
| Pricing | Free forever (first 5,000 signups) | $8/mo · $72/yr · $99 lifetime (200-slot cap) |
| Free tier | Full app, no usage cap | Free forever up to 2,000 words/week |
| Transcription engine | Whisper (local) | Whisper Large V3 Turbo (local, Metal-accelerated) |
| Privacy | 100% local · no cloud calls | Local-only voice + vault · ZDR cloud rephrase opt-in (text-only) |
| System-wide capture | ✓ Text at cursor anywhere | ✓ Text at cursor anywhere |
| Smart formatting | ✓ Local rewrite of dictated text | ✓ 9 writing modes |
| Vault writing | — None | ✓ Native, vault-agnostic Markdown |
| Auto-titles | — None | ✓ Generated from content |
| Auto-tags & backlinks | — None | ✓ Suggested from your existing vault |
| Friday review surface | — None | ✓ Keyboard-driven two-pane review for #inbox notes |
| MCP / queryable from AI tools | — None | ✓ Local MCP — query your vault from Claude Desktop or Cursor |
| Best for | Anyone who wants free, local dictation without committing to a vault workflow | Obsidian / Logseq / Markdown-vault users who want voice as input |
Onit gave away a great product for free, and that's a meaningful gift to anyone who needs Mac dictation. Here's an honest take on what each tool does well — so you pick the one that fits your workflow, not the one with the louder marketing.
[[wikilinks]] resolved against notes you already have. Your knowledge graph grows itself from voice input — no post-processing.#inbox notes. Hit ⌥⇧ R, walk through everything captured, hit one of four keys. Five minutes clears the inbox.Onit is free. ThoughtMic isn't. That's the right comparison only if you're comparing two dictation apps.
But they're not the same product. Onit's job ends when text appears at your cursor. ThoughtMic adds a second job: that same voice capture also writes a structured note into your knowledge vault — with a generated title, suggested tags pulled from your existing tag taxonomy, and backlinks resolved against notes you already have. If you don't have a vault, ThoughtMic's second job is invisible — and the fair conclusion is "Onit is enough."
If you've read this far, you've already noticed: Onit is free, ThoughtMic is $8/mo (or $99 once for the lifetime tier). That gap is real. We're not going to argue around it. The right way to evaluate is: what would the $8/mo (or one-time $99) buy you that "free local Whisper" doesn't? Read the table, read the "where ThoughtMic wins" column, and ask honestly whether those features change your workflow. If the answer is no, take Onit's free tier — it's a good deal.
If you live in Obsidian or Logseq, you've already invested in a tag system, folder hierarchy, and a personal lexicon of [[wikilinks]]. A pure dictation app — even a free, polished one — treats every dictation as a fresh string of text dropped at the cursor. ThoughtMic treats every dictation as a candidate note in your vault, structured the way you've already structured the rest of it. That's not a small detail; that's the entire pitch. If you don't have a vault, it doesn't apply to you.
Capturing thoughts is the easy part. The reason most voice-note workflows fall apart is the Collector's Fallacy — you accumulate hundreds of #inbox entries you never re-read. ThoughtMic ships a dedicated weekly review surface: hit ⌥⇧ R, walk through every captured note, hit one of four keys (Discard / Keep / Promote / Archive). Most weeks, five minutes clears the inbox. Onit doesn't have a review surface because Onit's job ends at the cursor — once your text is dropped, it's the destination app's problem.
ThoughtMic ships a local Model Context Protocol server. Your vault becomes queryable from Claude Desktop, Cursor, and any other MCP-compatible AI tool — without leaving your machine, without uploading anything. Your voice notes from last Tuesday become context for an AI conversation today. No free dictation app we know of offers this, because it requires the second job (writing structured notes into a vault) to even make sense.
Both apps run Whisper locally. Transcription quality is essentially identical — they share the same underlying model architecture. Latency varies by model size and hardware; ThoughtMic ships Whisper Large V3 Turbo with Metal acceleration, end-to-end in the 700–1500ms range on M-series Macs. If you want sub-300ms streaming, the only path right now is cloud-based dictation — and you'd be giving up the local-first guarantee both ThoughtMic and Onit hold to.
"Onit is great if pure dictation is what you want, and you want it free. ThoughtMic is a narrower, deeper tool: you pay because it writes directly into your Obsidian or Logseq vault. If you don't use a Markdown vault, Onit is probably the right pick."
You're not paying for dictation — you're paying for what happens after. ThoughtMic writes spoken thoughts as titled, auto-tagged, backlinked Markdown notes into your Obsidian or Logseq vault, plus a Friday review surface and a local MCP server that makes your vault queryable from Claude Desktop or Cursor.
If you don't keep a vault, none of that is worth $8/mo. If you do, it's the difference between a transcript and a note that fits your knowledge graph. We'd rather lose you to Onit than oversell.
Onit advertises free forever for the first 5,000 signups. We take that at face value — it's a legitimate launch strategy and a meaningful gift to early users.
We won't speculate on what happens after that cohort fills, or whether they introduce paid tiers later. Plenty of well-run companies offer permanent free tiers. If free-forever access matters to you and you can grab one of those slots, that's a real win regardless of which app you ultimately use.
Onit writes text at your cursor — including into Obsidian's editor, like any other dictation app. What it doesn't do: create a properly named note file, suggest tags from your existing tag taxonomy, resolve [[wikilinks]] against notes you already have, or give you a review surface to triage your #inbox later.
Those are the jobs ThoughtMic exists to do. If you mostly dictate into one daily note and never look back, Onit covers it. If your vault has structure you want voice input to respect, it doesn't.
Yes. They use different keyboard shortcuts and don't conflict. A common setup is Onit for free-form dictation into Slack, Mail, your IDE, and any other app outside your vault — and ThoughtMic specifically when you want a captured thought to land as a structured note in Obsidian. Different jobs, no overlap.
ThoughtMic is free forever up to 2,000 words/week — roughly 15–25 minutes of speech, which covers light-to-moderate voice journaling, capturing meeting notes, or daily-note dictation. You get the full vault-native pipeline, auto-tags, auto-titles, and the Friday review surface inside that cap.
If you're dictating long-form drafts, transcribing meetings, or capturing many hours per week, you'll hit the cap and want the $8/mo plan or the $99 lifetime tier (200 slots, first 50 at $49).
We won't speculate on Onit's roadmap. Pricing changes happen across the industry, but Onit is shipping today and that's what matters for your decision today. If you grab a free-forever slot and it's honored, that's pure upside.
The right way to think about ThoughtMic isn't "what if Onit eventually charges" — it's "is the vault-native output, review, and MCP worth $8/mo (or $99 once) to me right now." If yes, pay. If no, take Onit's free tier with our blessing.
We'll email you the day ThoughtMic is ready — with your download link and, for the first 50 signups, a $49 lifetime Founder's Deal code.
We'll email you at launch. No newsletter. Unsubscribe any time.
Works with Obsidian · Logseq · Foam · VS Code · any .md folder
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