Skip to content
Agents tracked: 378 Downloads (7d): 242M down 5.8% GitHub stars: 8.3M VS Code installs: 151M Releases (7d): 389 Agent status: 1 with issues Updated Oct 10, 2026

faster-whisper by SYSTRAN (open source)

Whisper reimplemented on CTranslate2: faster and lighter on memory, with 8-bit quantization (per the project).

Speech-to-text and transcription Open source

Price
Free (open source)
you pay only for the compute it runs on
Free tier
Yes
Free (open source, MIT)
SDK downloads
—
PyPI faster-whisper
Status
—
no public status page

Pricing

Free tierFree (open source, MIT)
Cheapest paid plan—
Usage price—
Good to knowSelf-hosted: no per-minute fee, you pay for compute. Speed claims are the project's own.

Open source: free to run on your own hardware; you pay only for the compute. Checked

Use it from an agent

MCP serverNone found
PyPIpip install faster-whisper

Alternatives to faster-whisper

All speech-to-text and transcription

APIFreePrice SDK downloads / wkGitHub starsMCP
ElevenLabs
Text-to-speech, speech-to-text (Scribe), voice cloning and conversational voice-agent APIs.
Free plan: 10,000 TTS characters/month (v4) Free plan · paid from $6/mo 3.2M 3,135 MCP
Deepgram
Real-time and batch speech-to-text, text-to-speech and voice-agent APIs.
$200 credit, no credit card Free plan
then Nova-3 streaming $0.0048/min (promo; regular $0.0077);...
1.7M 469 MCP
AssemblyAI
Speech-to-text API (batch and streaming) with diarization, speech understanding and voice agents.
Up to 185 hours pre-recorded and 333 hours... Free plan
then Universal-2 $0.15/hour; Universal-3.5 Pro $0.21/hour;...
1.3M 213 MCP
Cartesia
Low-latency text-to-speech (Sonic), speech-to-text (Ink) and managed voice agents.
20K credits/month + $1 prepaid for agents Free plan · paid from $5/mo 286K 134 MCP
Gladia
Multilingual speech-to-text API with real-time and async transcription.
50€ in free credits (one-time, ~80+ hours... Free plan
then Async at $0.61/hr, Real-time at $0.75/hr (Starter);...
— —
Groq Speech-to-Text (Whisper)
Hosted Whisper Large V3 and V3 Turbo transcription and translation, billed per hour of audio.
Free tier with rate limits (25 MB files) Free plan
then Whisper Large V3 Turbo $0.04/hour; Whisper Large V3...
— —
Is faster-whisper right for you? Ask AgentGid →