“A voice assistant for my Mac” describes three different kinds of software that are easy to confuse and priced completely differently. This page splits them by the one question that actually separates them — can it click things? — then compares what is worth comparing inside each group.
Disclosure. Reflick is made by the company that runs this site, and it is in the third group below. Every price here was read off the vendor's own page on the date in the header, and one of them is marked unverified rather than guessed at.
The three groups
| Group | What it does | Can it click? | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dictation | Turns speech into text in whatever field has focus | No | Apple Dictation, Superwhisper, Wispr Flow |
| Command and control | Operates the interface, one named command at a time | Yes | Apple Voice Control, Talon |
| Voice agents | Takes a goal, works out the steps, carries them out | Yes | heyclicky, Fazm, Reflick |
Most people arriving at this question want group one and do not know it. Try the free built-in option before paying for anything — it is covered in dictation on a Mac.
Start with what Apple already gives you, free
Two features ship with macOS, cost nothing, and are better than their reputation.
- Dictation (System Settings › Keyboard). Press fn twice in any text field. On Apple silicon many languages run on-device, so it works offline and nothing leaves the machine. No cap of any kind.
- Voice Control (System Settings › Accessibility). Say a button's name to click it, or “show numbers” to get a number on every clickable thing. Offline, precise, Apple-supported. If you need hands-free operation for accessibility reasons, this is the tool and nothing below replaces it.
Where they stop. Dictation transcribes literally — it cannot act on “reply that Tuesday works”, it will type those words. Voice Control needs every command to be one you can name, so a ten-step job is ten remembered commands in the right order. Neither can answer a question about what is on screen.
The dictation apps
These run a better speech model and then clean the transcript up with a language model, so you talk normally and get punctuated prose. Worth money if you write by voice all day.
| Tool | Free tier | Paid | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apple Dictation | Unlimited | — | On-device on Apple silicon. Already installed. |
| Wispr Flow | 2,000 words / week | $15/mo, $12 annual | Growth tier $23/$18 adds admin controls and SSO. |
| Superwhisper | Yes, + 3,000 trial words | see their site | Mac, Windows, iOS, Android. Their price renders in the browser and we could not read it reliably, so it is not quoted here. |
| Reflick | Unlimited, every tier | never metered | Dictation and talking are not what Reflick charges for. |
The column that matters for a heavy user is the free one. A 2,000-word weekly cap is roughly four emails a day.
The agents — and the part everyone gets wrong
An agent takes the goal instead of the command. You say what you want to end up with, it reads the screen, decides the steps and carries them out by moving the pointer and pressing keys — the same inputs a person produces, so it needs no cooperation from the app.
The thing to compare here is not features, it is what you are charged per unit of work, because the expensive part is the model call and every vendor meters it differently.
| Tool | Free tier | Paid | Per agent run |
|---|---|---|---|
| heyclicky Free | 25 talk + 25 agent / mo | $0 | — |
| heyclicky Pro | — | $20 / mo | 150 runs → ~$0.133 |
| heyclicky Max | — | $100 / mo | 1,000 runs → ~$0.10 |
| Fazm | Open source, free | subscription offered | — |
| Reflick Free | 30 agent runs / mo | €0 | — |
| Reflick Plus | — | €15 / mo | 200 runs → €0.075 |
| Reflick Studio | — | €49 / mo | 900 runs → €0.054 |
Talking is the other half of the bill. heyclicky's free tier gives 25 talk messages a month and its paid tiers make talking unlimited. Reflick makes talking unlimited on every tier including the free one, and meters only a task it performs for you, at one run per task however many steps it takes. Which matters more depends entirely on whether you mostly ask or mostly delegate.
What each is honestly better at
- heyclicky is the most established of the three, reports 25,000+ users, and has more integrations and more app-specific skills than Reflick does. If breadth of third-party connections is what you need, that is the honest answer. macOS Sonoma 14.2 or higher.
- Fazm is MIT-licensed and open source, drives the native Accessibility API rather than screenshots, and costs nothing to run yourself. If you want to read the code that is taking your pointer, this is the only one of the three you can.
- Reflick is cheaper per agent run on every tier, has the larger free tier, and answers most requests without calling a model at all — see below.
Where Reflick fits
Our product, so read this as the interested party talking. Three things distinguish it, and all three are checkable.
- It tries the free answer first. 112 native tools answer on the Mac itself with no model call and no charge — reading the control under your pointer from the Accessibility tree, reading device state, firing a keyboard shortcut it already knows, scripting Mail, Notes, Calendar, Files and the clipboard directly. The homepage publishes the whole list, grouped, so you can count it.
- Three permissions and no more. Accessibility, Screen Recording, Microphone. Full Disk Access is never requested, and there are zero OAuth connections and zero account tokens — it reaches your apps by asking macOS, not by holding a cloud token that can read your account from anywhere.
- Estimated coordinates may draw, never click. A traced line twenty points off is still readable; a click twenty points off is the wrong button. Escape stops a run, and it is a key rather than an on-screen button because an agent driving your Mac must not be able to click its own stop control.
Reflick 1.0 was released on 21 September 2026. Download it for Mac — about 7.4 MB, macOS 14.2 or later, Apple silicon and Intel. Free to start.
How to choose, in one table
| If you want | Use |
|---|---|
| Words typed into a field, free | Apple Dictation |
| Hands-free control for accessibility | Apple Voice Control |
| Polished prose dictated all day | Wispr Flow or Superwhisper |
| Answers about what is on your screen | An agent — nothing built in does this |
| The most third-party integrations | heyclicky |
| Source code you can read and run free | Fazm |
| Cheapest per task, unlimited talking | Reflick |
More detail in controlling your Mac by voice, dictation on a Mac, and the questions page.