# Cartesia Ink vs Gladia Speech-to-Text API + MCP (slim)

> Gladia Speech-to-Text scores 69.5 (B) 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-gladia-stt.md (~2,750 tokens) · this version ~730 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/cartesia-ink-stt-vs-gladia-stt.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/cartesia-ink-stt-vs-gladia-stt
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · Updated: 2026-10-09

Gladia Speech-to-Text API + MCP scores 69.5 (B) on agent readiness against Cartesia Ink's 67.9 (B), and leads in 4 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
- Gladia Speech-to-Text API + MCP: B 69.5, rank #180 of 950 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/gladia-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 60; Maintenance & community, 85 against 80.
- Gladia Speech-to-Text API + MCP, good for Multilingual meetings and calls where translation, summaries and NER are wanted in one price, and for teams who want an MCP server. Ahead on Schema & documentation, 95 against 89; Security & auth, 70 against 52; Payments & pricing, 40 against 35. Also Runs on your own machine; Free to start without a card.

| Category | Cartesia Ink | Gladia Speech-to-Text API + MCP |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 73 | 60 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 89 | 95 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 74 | 75 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 52 | 70 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 35 | 40 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 85 | 80 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 67 | 64 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Cartesia Ink | Gladia Speech-to-Text API + MCP |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Vendor | Cartesia | Gladia |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://api.cartesia.ai` | `https://api.gladia.io/v2` |
| Transports | HTTP, websocket, Streamable HTTP | HTTP, stdio |
| Licence | Proprietary hosted service under the Cartesia Terms of Service. The Python and JavaScript SDKs are Apache-2.0 | MIT (SDKs and MCP server) |
| Tools exposed | none | 8 |
| Last release | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-24 |
| Terms last updated | 2024-06-14 | no date given |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2024-06-14 | no date given |
| Customer content may train models | yes, with an opt-out | not found in the text |
| Terms restrict automated access | yes | not found in the text |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | yes | not found in the text |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | yes | not found in the text |
| Popularity | 134 stars | 4 stars, 4.8k npm/wk, 126k PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | none | 3/5 (2) |