Obsidian vs Transcribe Best
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Obsidian
Organize your thoughts and ideas with a powerful knowledge base that utilizes local Markdown files. This app acts as your personal second brain, accessible on your mobile device for seamless note-taking and idea connection.
- Local Markdown file storage
- Customizable toolbar
- Graph view for connections
- Community plugins
- Themes
- iCloud sync
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Obsidian is a powerful knowledge base that works on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files. It is a second brain, for you, forever. Now available on the go for iOS! Features include: - Customizable toolbar - Pull down quick actions - Graph view - Community plugins - Themes - Sidebar pinning for tablet - iCloud vaults
Transcribe Best
This app offers unlimited, high-quality audio transcription for a single fixed price, with no subscription required. It supports a vast array of languages and can process long or low-quality audio files, even offline. All processing occurs on the device, ensuring user privacy.
- Unlimited transcription
- No subscription needed
- Offline functionality
- 99 supported languages
- Supports 3+ hour files
- Export in VTT and SRT
- Privacy-focused on-device processing
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Unlimited, high-quality, and privacy-first audio transcription. Transcribe as much audio as you want for a single fixed price, no subscription needed. Transcribe Best can process long audio files even when the audio quality is low. You can record audio in the app or import it from the "Files" app. Audio or video files can also be shared from other apps to transcribe them in this app. There are 99 different supported languages. Transcribe meetings, calls, voice memos, lectures, podcasts, or any other audio. All processing is done on the device so audio files and transcription texts never leave your device. Features: - Works offline, without internet - 99 supported languages - Works on 3+ hour files - Import videos to transcribe their audio - Record audio in the app - Record when the app is in the background - No subscription needed - Privacy friendly - Import audio and video from the Files app - Import audio and video from any app that supports sharing - Export as subtitles in VTT and SRT format - Automatically converts most audio and video formats like M4A, FLAC, MP3, MP4, WAV, ACC, MOV, WebM, AVI, FLV, and many more Supported languages: Afrikaans, Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Assamese, Azerbaijani, Bashkir, Basque, Belarusian, Bengali, Bosnian, Breton, Bulgarian, Cantonese, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish, French, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Gujarati, Haitian creole, Hausa, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Javanese, Kannada, Kazakh, Khmer, Korean, Lao, Latin, Latvian, Lingala, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Macedonian, Malagasy, Malay, Malayalam, Maltese, Maori, Marathi, Mongolian, Myanmar, Nepali, Norwegian, Nynorsk, Occitan, Pashto, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian, Shona, Sindhi, Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Spanish, Sundanese, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Tajik, Tamil, Tatar, Telugu, Thai, Tibetan, Turkish, Turkmen, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese, Welsh, Yiddish, and Yoruba.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is price: Obsidian at Free against Transcribe Best's $11.99. Obsidian also leads on ratings volume (2.8K vs 6) and chart position (#127 vs unranked). Transcribe Best's advantage is update cadence (every 5 days vs every 3 weeks) and review sentiment (75% vs 62%). On rating, ads, in-app purchases and device support there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Obsidian is free to download; Transcribe Best costs $11.99 up front. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
On the App Store both sit at effectively the same score — 4.5 for Obsidian against 4.5 for Transcribe Best. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: Obsidian has 2.8K ratings behind it against 6, so its average is the more settled of the two. Written reviews are what separate them: 62% of Obsidian's written reviews are positive against 75% of Transcribe Best's.
Obsidian ships an update every 3 weeks, Transcribe Best every 5 days. Both last shipped on October 24, 2026.
| Parameter | Obsidian | Transcribe Best |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free — better | $11.99 |
| Rating | 4.5 (2.8K ratings) | 4.5 (6 ratings) — better |
| Positive reviews | 61.9% of reviews | 75.0% of reviews — better |
| Number of ratings | 2.8K — better | 6 |
| Update frequency | Every 3 weeks | Every 5 days — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Free — better | Paid |
| Best chart rank | #127 — better | — |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, iPod — better | iPhone, iPod |
| Requires iOS | 15.6 | 13.4 — better |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 40 MB | 44 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Dynalist Inc. | JP Software |
Customer experience
Obsidian
Transcribe Best
Bugs and requests
Obsidian
Reported bugs
3 issues- Sync issues leading to data loss
- Freezing and crashing on mobile devices
- Editing bugs and text input issues
Requested features
5 requests- Improved sorting and organization options
- WYSIWYG editing on mobile
- Better integration with other cloud storage services
- More intuitive onboarding process for new users
- Native mobile widgets and share sheet integration
Transcribe Best
Not enough reviews yet to summarise bugs or requests.
In-app purchases
Obsidian
No in-app purchases
Transcribe Best
No in-app purchases









