Handy is free, open-source and runs entirely on your machine. If that's your hard requirement, Handy may genuinely be your tool — we'd rather say so than pretend otherwise. The real question is what you're dictating into, and what happens after the words land.
| Handy | Prodius | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free, open source (MIT) | Free tier (2,000 words/week) · Pro €15/month unlimited |
| Works offline / on-device | Yes | No — cloud-based by design |
| System-wide dictation | Yes | Yes |
| Windows, macOS, Linux | Yes | Yes Linux: full support on X11; Wayland in progress |
| AI cleanup (punctuation, self-corrections, context-aware formatting) | No — raw transcription | Yes LLM cleanup, aware of the app you're dictating into |
| Personal dictionary for your repo & project names | No | Yes |
| Lock dictation to a chosen window | No | Yes green target border, cross-window routing |
| Agents can reach you (bidirectional MCP bridge) | No | Yes popup + voice answer routes back to the session |
| EU data residency option | n/a — local | Yes Practice plan, with DPA |
| Support | Community | Founder support |
Handy details from its public GitHub repository, last checked July 2026. Spotted an error? Tell us — we'll correct it.
This is a real trade-off and we won't argue it away. Handy keeps your audio on your machine — full stop. That's a property Prodius doesn't have: we're cloud-based, because frontier transcription and LLM cleanup beat what most laptops can run locally, and because agent escalations need a service that's always on. What we do instead: Prodius stores nothing (audio and text are processed in memory, never written to our servers), providers process under no-training API terms, and the Practice plan pins all processing to EU infrastructure under a DPA. Details in our privacy policy and subprocessor list.
If the privacy purist in you wins that argument: use Handy, sincerely. If what you actually want is dictation that produces clean, correctly-spelled text in the right window — and agents that can find you — try the free tier and compare the output on your own prompts.
Start with 14 days of Pro — unlimited dictation, no card. After that: 2,000 dictated words a week, free, no end date. Dictate the same paragraph into both and look at what comes out.
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