# Amazon Transcribe vs Gladia Speech-to-Text API + MCP

> Amazon Transcribe has a score of 73.6 (BB) against Gladia Speech-to-Text API + MCP's 69.7 (B). Both do speech stt. The largest gap is maintenance & community, 45 points. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

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- Updated: 2026-10-05

Amazon Transcribe has a score of 73.6 (BB) against Gladia Speech-to-Text API + MCP's 69.7 (B). Both do speech stt. The largest gap is maintenance & community, 45 points.

- Amazon Transcribe: grade BB, 73.6/100, rank #57 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/amazon-transcribe.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/amazon-transcribe.json
- Gladia Speech-to-Text API + MCP: grade B, 69.7/100, rank #108 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/gladia-stt.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/gladia-stt.json

## Which one, for what

Pick Amazon Transcribe for reliability (+35), agent ergonomics (+5), security & auth (+10), transparency & trust (+19).

Pick Gladia Speech-to-Text API + MCP for schema & documentation (+5), payments & pricing (+20), maintenance & community (+45).

## Score by category

| Category | Weight | Amazon Transcribe | Gladia Speech-to-Text API + MCP | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 95 | 60 | Amazon Transcribe +35 |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 90 | 95 | Gladia Speech-to-Text API + MCP +5 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 80 | 75 | Amazon Transcribe +5 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 80 | 70 | Amazon Transcribe +10 |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 20 | 40 | Gladia Speech-to-Text API + MCP +20 |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 35 | 80 | Gladia Speech-to-Text API + MCP +45 |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 85 | 66 | Amazon Transcribe +19 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| **Total** | | **73.6 · BB** | **69.7 · B** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | Amazon Transcribe | Gladia Speech-to-Text API + MCP |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | Model API | Model API |
| Vendor | Amazon Web Services | Gladia |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://transcribe.us-east-1.amazonaws.com` | `https://api.gladia.io/v2` |
| Transports | HTTP | HTTP, stdio |
| Auth | API key | API key |
| Pricing | Pay per use | Freemium |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Apache-2.0 (SDKs) | MIT (SDKs and MCP server) |
| Tools exposed | none | 8 |
| Context cost (tools/list) | n/a | n/a |
| p95 latency | not measured yet | not measured yet |
| Availability (30d) | not measured yet | not measured yet |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | yes | yes |
| MCP registry | not listed | not listed |
| Last release | 2026-09-29 | 2026-09-24 |
| Popularity | 185 stars, 506k npm/wk, 201k PyPI/wk | 4 stars, 4.8k npm/wk, 126k PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | 4/5 (2) | 3/5 (2) |

## Verdicts

**Amazon Transcribe.** $0.006 a minute batch and $0.01 streaming in US East, with diarisation, custom vocabulary and language ID included. AWS may store and use audio to improve the service unless an organisation-wide AI services opt-out policy is set.

**Gladia Speech-to-Text API + MCP.** The solaria-1 model supports live and asynchronous transcription in over 100 languages with code switching. Starter pricing is $0.61 an hour for asynchronous transcription and $0.75 for real-time audio.

## Before you call either

### Amazon Transcribe

1. Give every job a unique `TranscriptionJobName`. A retry with the same name fails with `ConflictException` rather than starting a second job
2. Batch is a job. Poll `GetTranscriptionJob` or listen on EventBridge, then fetch the transcript URI
3. Set `OutputBucketName`, because job records are deleted after 90 days
4. Back off on `LimitExceededException`. It arrives as a 400, not a 429
5. Set the organisation's AI services opt-out policy before sending customer audio

### Gladia Speech-to-Text API + MCP

1. Don't resubmit a pre-recorded job after a 200 or a `transcription.created` webhook. It's already queued
2. Pick `solaria-3` only for async EN, FR, DE, ES or IT audio. Anything live or multilingual needs `solaria-1`
3. A 429 means the concurrency limit, 3 async and 1 live on the free plan. Wait for a running job to finish
4. Upgrade off the free plan before sending sensitive audio
5. Split files over 135 minutes or 1,000 MB

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