Tools
OpenAI Whisper vs Saaras
OpenAI Whisper or Saaras? Their plans monthly and yearly, the capabilities their makers state, security and latest updates, side by side — read from the makers' own pages.
In short
- Both: Speech to text, Many languages
- Only OpenAI Whisper states: Dubbing
- Only Saaras states: API
OpenAI Whisper
OpenAI Whisper is an open-source speech recognition system for transcription, translation, and language identification.
Plans
Free
Free
- Unlimited public/private repositories
- Dependabot security and version updates
- 2,000 CI/CD minutes/month
- 500MB of Packages storage
- Issues & Projects
- Community support
Team
- $4 per user/month
- Access to GitHub Codespaces
- Repository rules
- Multiple reviewers in pull requests
- Draft pull requests
- Code owners
- Required reviewers
Enterprise
- Starting at $21 per user/month
- Data residency
- Enterprise Managed Users
- User provisioning through SCIM
- Enterprise Account to centrally manage multiple organizations
- Environment protection rules
- Repository rules
Prices checked 2026-09-26 on the maker’s page.
Capabilities
- Speech to text — “The following command will transcribe speech in audio files, using the turbo model:” source
- Dubbing — “To translate speech into English, use:” source
- Many languages — “Whisper is a general-purpose speech recognition model.” source
Saaras
Saaras is Sarvam AI's speech-to-text model for transcribing, translating, and processing speech in Indian languages.
Plans
Starter (Pay as you go)
- ₹3.00 per 1,000 characters (Text to speech, Real-time)
- ₹3.00 per 1,000 characters (Text to speech, Streaming)
- ₹30.00 per hour (Speech to text, Real-time)
- ₹30.00 per hour (Speech to text, Streaming)
- ₹30.00 per hour (Speech to text, Batch)
- ₹45.00 per hour (Speech to text, Batch with diarization)
- ₹128.10 per 1M tokens (GLM 5.2, input)
- ₹23.79 per 1M tokens (GLM 5.2, cached input)
- ₹402.60 per 1M tokens (GLM 5.2, output)
- ₹36.60 per 1M tokens (Gemma-4 31B, input)
- ₹13.73 per 1M tokens (Gemma-4 31B, cached input)
- ₹91.50 per 1M tokens (Gemma-4 31B, output)
- ₹29.28 per 1M tokens (Sarvam 105B, input)
- ₹10.98 per 1M tokens (Sarvam 105B, cached input)
- ₹73.20 per 1M tokens (Sarvam 105B, output)
- ₹29.28 per 1M tokens (Sarvam 105B Chat, input)
- ₹10.98 per 1M tokens (Sarvam 105B Chat, cached input)
- ₹73.20 per 1M tokens (Sarvam 105B Chat, output)
- ₹29.28 per 1M tokens (Sarvam 105B Conversations, input)
- ₹10.98 per 1M tokens (Sarvam 105B Conversations, cached input)
- ₹73.20 per 1M tokens (Sarvam 105B Conversations, output)
- ₹0.005 per character (Translate & transliterate, Pay as you go)
- ₹0.50 per page (Digitisation API)
- ₹1.00 per page (Extraction API)
- ₹1.67 per second (Dubbing API, Pay as you go)
- ₹0.005 (Translate & transliterate, Starter)
- ₹1.67 (Dubbing API, Starter)
- Start with free credits, then add exactly what you need
- Universal credits across supported APIs
- Credits never expire
- No monthly commitment
Enterprise
Price on request
- Tailored limits, throughput, pricing, and support
- Higher rate limits on every API
- Custom concurrency & throughput
- Volume discounts on credits
- Dedicated support & SLAs
Pro
- ₹0.005 per character (Translate & transliterate, Pro)
- ₹1.67 per second (Dubbing API, Pro)
Growth
- ₹0.0045 per character (Translate & transliterate, Growth)
- ₹1.25 per second (Dubbing API, Growth)
Business
- ₹0.004 per character (Translate & transliterate, Business)
- ₹1.20 per second (Dubbing API, Business)
Prices checked 2026-09-25 on the maker’s page.
Capabilities
- Speech to text — “From the same audio input, it can produce five transcript modes: verbatim, normalized, code-mixed, transliterated, and translated.” source
- Many languages — “Saaras V4 achieved SOTA performance on all 22 Indian languages and reaffirms our commitment to even the most low-resource Indian languages” source
- API — “Integrate Saaras v4 into your application with a simple API key from the Sarvam AI dashboard” source
Security
- SOC 2 Type II — “Complete data residency in India. ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II certified.” source
- SOC 2 — “Complete data residency in India. ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II certified.” source
- ISO 27001 — “We're ISO 27001:2022 certified and hold SOC 2 Type II.” source
- Not trained on your data — “Customer data is never used to train models for other customers” source
Latest updates
- Sarvam Vision 2.1: Pushing the Pareto frontier of document intelligence (2.1)
Sarvam Vision 2.1 adds structured extraction and Indic handwritten recognition.
- Introducing Saaras V4 (V4)
Introduced Saaras V4 for multilingual ASR.
- Everything we announced at Sarvam Epoch
Announced new models, Sarvam Inference, Indus agents, Sarvam Code, and more.