AssemblyAI vs Deepgram

Two fact sheets from our own research, side by side — pricing, platforms, API access and status re-checked by us rather than quoted from the vendors.

The short answer

Free plan: Only Deepgram (AssemblyAI has paid plans only)
Public API: Both have one
Higher Trust score: Deepgram — 94 vs 88 for AssemblyAI
Best fit: AssemblyAI: Developers embedding transcription into call, meeting or media products · Deepgram: Engineering teams building real-time transcription or voice agents who want published per-minute rates
Status: Both up at our last check (Sep 6, 2026)

From our own records as of each tool's last check. Anything we have not confirmed is left out rather than guessed. How we verify

AssemblyAISpeech-to-text API priced by the hour of audio

DeepgramLow-latency speech recognition and voice agent API

Side by side

Fact	AssemblyAI	Deepgram
Category	Speech-to-Text & Transcription	Speech-to-Text & Transcription
Pricing model	Paid	Freemium
Starts at	—	$0.0043/min
Public API	Yes	Yes
Trust score	88 / 100	94 / 100
Platforms	API	API
Company	AssemblyAI, Inc.	Deepgram, Inc.
Launched	2017	2015
Last verified	Sep 6, 2026	Sep 6, 2026

What our research says

AssemblyAI

The transcription API to reach for when accuracy and per-hour pricing matter more than a user interface, but the headline rate is a base rate and every label you actually want adds to it.

Pros

$50 of credits at signup with no card required
Per-hour rates are published plainly and undercut most incumbents
Add-ons cover diarisation, redaction, summarisation and medical vocabulary
Voice Agent API is one flat $0.075/min covering model and speech too

Cons

No product surface at all — everything is code
Add-ons stack, so the real rate usually lands well above $0.15/hr
Streaming diarisation costs six times the async equivalent
No volume discounts published on the pricing page

Deepgram

Deepgram is the pick when you are building the pipeline yourself and the per-minute number matters: streaming Nova-3 at under half a cent a minute, published rates for every model and mode, and a $200 credit that does not expire make it easy to size a bill before signing anything. It is an API, not a product — there is no transcription app to hand to a non-developer, and the voice agent tier is priced per connected minute, so idle sessions cost money.

Pros

Rates are public down to a fraction of a cent, per model and per mode
$200 starting credit with no card and no expiry is enough to benchmark seriously
Streaming and batch share one API, and the Voice Agent API saves wiring STT, LLM and TTS together
Founded 2015 and Series C funded, with self-hosted deployment on enterprise terms

Cons

Streaming rates are marked as limited-time promotional, so the published number may rise
Voice Agent minutes are billed on WebSocket connection time, including silence
Growth pricing starts at a $4,000 annual prepay, with nothing between pay-as-you-go and that

Which one fits

Choose AssemblyAI if you need

Developers embedding transcription into call, meeting or media products
Teams needing speaker labels, redaction and summaries from one vendor
Voice-agent builders who want recognition, reasoning and speech on a single bill

Choose Deepgram if you need

Engineering teams building real-time transcription or voice agents who want published per-minute rates
Contact-centre and meeting products with enough audio volume for the Growth discount to justify a prepaid year
Developers who want speech-to-text, text-to-speech and an agent runtime from one vendor and one key