A Dragon alternative that runs offline

The cost, plainly

	Dragon Medical One	Dragon Professional 16	Recount
Price	$99/user/month	$699.99 once	$29.99 once
Setup fee	$525 per seat	none	none
Year one, one user	~$1,713	$699.99	$29.99
Audio leaves your PC	Yes — processed in the cloud	No	No
Works with no internet	No	Yes	Yes
Business associate agreement	Required	Not required	Not required

Dragon Medical One is commonly quoted at $99 per user per month on a one-year term, with roughly $525 per seat in one-time setup, on non-cancellable terms. Resellers discount to $89 or $79 on longer commitments.

Where Dragon is genuinely better

If your practice runs Epic, Cerner or Meditech and you dictate directly into the chart, buy Dragon. It has deep, supported integrations with 200-plus EHR systems, built over decades. Recount types into whatever window has focus. That is enough for a great many people and nowhere near enough for someone whose workflow lives inside a structured clinical note template.

Dragon also has, and Recount does not:

Custom voice commands — "insert normal cardiac exam" expanding to a paragraph. Recount transcribes speech; it does not run macros.
Years of accent adaptation per user profile.
Enterprise support and deployment tooling with someone to call.
Vocabulary training across a whole organisation.

Those are real advantages and the price partly reflects them. If you need them, no amount of price difference makes this the right call.

Where Recount is better

Your audio never leaves the machine

Dragon Medical One transmits audio to Microsoft Azure for processing. That can be made HIPAA-compliant with a signed business associate agreement, and many practices do exactly that. But it means a vendor in your risk register, an agreement to negotiate and renew, and a dependency on someone else's uptime.

Recount converts speech to text on your own processor. There is no upload path in the software at all. Nothing to sign, nothing to review, nobody else holding recordings of your patients or clients.

It works when the internet does not

A cloud dictation tool is unusable on a plane, in a basement, on a rural jobsite, or during an outage. Recount does not care — it has no server to reach.

It works in remote desktop sessions

Dictation commonly fails inside Citrix, RDP and VMware Horizon because those forward keyboard scan codes to the remote session, and most dictation tools send synthetic Unicode keystrokes that carry no scan code. Recount ships three text-insertion methods, including real scan codes, for exactly this.

You buy it once

No renewal, no seat count, no per-user setup fee, no procurement cycle. A solo practitioner can expense $29.99 without asking anyone.

Who should buy which

Buy Dragon if you dictate inside a major EHR, need voice macros, or work somewhere with a procurement process that will pay for support contracts.

Buy Recount if you are a solo or small practice, you dictate into ordinary documents, email and forms, you would rather not add a cloud vendor to your compliance surface, and $1,713 a year for typing is absurd for your volume.

Try it before you decide

Fourteen days, everything unlocked, no card. If it does not handle your vocabulary or your applications, you will know inside an afternoon — which is the entire point of a trial that withholds nothing.

Download the trial What Recount is

Dragon is a trademark of its owner. This comparison is written by the author of Recount, uses publicly listed pricing, and states where the competing product is better because a comparison that does not is worth nothing to the reader.