Handy vs Holdkey: free open-source dictation versus a product
Handy is a free, open-source, offline dictation app with 30,000+ GitHub stars. We like it. Holdkey is what you buy when you dictate two hundred times a day and the seconds add up.
Last checked September 2026. Facts about other products come from their public pages and reviews; tell us if something changed.
| Holdkey | Handy | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Local free; $10/mo Founder Pro | Free, MIT licence |
| Latency after release | Tens of milliseconds; segments transcribed while you hold the key | 2–5 seconds reported by reviewers (whole recording transcribed after release) |
| Terminal / Claude Code | First-class: verified paste in Windows Terminal and Claude Code | Paste into Claude Code's terminal reported not to work; Shift+Insert workaround |
| Cleanup | Clean mode with meaning guards (negations, pronouns, numbers must survive) | Optional post-processing; known to be hijacked by the transcript itself |
| Vocabulary | Dictionary terms bias recognition itself, not just find-and-replace | No dictionary |
| Setup | Installer plus one-time model download | Installer plus model download |
If you only dictate occasionally
Use Handy. It is free and offline, and Holdkey's Raw mode is the same idea. We are not going to pretend otherwise.
If you dictate all day
The difference is dependable insertion, cleanup with meaning guards, and a Smart path for the words the local model misses. The $10 subscription has to earn its place through fewer corrections.
Try Holdkey
Local is free with no account. Hold a key, talk, release. Upgrade to Smart when accuracy matters most.
Get Holdkey for Windows