# Cartesia Ink vs Deepgram Speech-to-Text (Nova-3, Flux) (slim)

> Deepgram Speech-to-Text scores 70.3 (BB) to Cartesia Ink's 67.9 (B) for speech-to-text. Prices, MCP, x402, uptime and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/cartesia-ink-stt-vs-deepgram-stt.md (~2,800 tokens) · this version ~730 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/cartesia-ink-stt-vs-deepgram-stt.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/cartesia-ink-stt-vs-deepgram-stt
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · Updated: 2026-10-09

Deepgram Speech-to-Text (Nova-3, Flux) scores 70.3 (BB) on agent readiness against Cartesia Ink's 67.9 (B), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Cartesia Ink leads on reliability and maintenance & community. Both do speech-to-text.

- Cartesia Ink: B 67.9, rank #238 of 950 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/cartesia-ink-stt.min.md
- Deepgram Speech-to-Text (Nova-3, Flux): BB 70.3, rank #157 of 950 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/deepgram-stt.min.md
- Cartesia Ink, good for Suited to voice agents that need turn detection and transcription from one model in English, French, Hindi, Japanese or Spanish, and to teams already using Cartesia text-to-speech. Ahead on Reliability, 73 against 65; Maintenance & community, 85 against 80.
- Deepgram Speech-to-Text (Nova-3, Flux), good for Live voice agents that want turn detection in the STT model, and for cheap English batch. Ahead on Schema & documentation, 95 against 89; Security & auth, 65 against 52; Payments & pricing, 40 against 35; Transparency & trust, 72 against 67. Also Agent-ready, a grade of BB or better; Runs on your own machine; Free to start without a card.

| Category | Cartesia Ink | Deepgram Speech-to-Text (Nova-3, Flux) |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 73 | 65 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 89 | 95 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 74 | 75 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 52 | 65 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 35 | 40 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 85 | 80 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 67 | 72 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Cartesia Ink | Deepgram Speech-to-Text (Nova-3, Flux) |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Vendor | Cartesia | Deepgram |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://api.cartesia.ai` | `https://api.deepgram.com/v1` |
| Transports | HTTP, websocket, Streamable HTTP | HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio, SSE (legacy) |
| Pricing | Freemium | Pay per use |
| Licence | Proprietary hosted service under the Cartesia Terms of Service. The Python and JavaScript SDKs are Apache-2.0 | MIT (SDKs) |
| Last release | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-29 |
| Terms last updated | 2024-06-14 | 2026-08-06 |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2024-06-14 | 2021-10-26 |
| Terms restrict automated access | yes | not found in the text |
| Terms or service can change without notice | not found in the text | yes |
| Popularity | 134 stars | 468 stars, 1.1M npm/wk, 805k PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | none | 3.5/5 (2) |