Distill vs SonicScribe

Distill turns captioned YouTube videos into written summaries, with interviews, podcasts, and educational long-form video as its focus. Summaries are flowing prose divided into sections, and users can switch among summary, chapter, and transcript views. A player above the summary lets viewers jump to a chapter or moment, and each summary is followed by a short quiz. Distill relies on captions and reports when a video has no subtitles rather than inferring content from its title or description. It supports public captioned YouTube videos, focuses on videos roughly four minutes and longer, and does not support Shorts or very short clips. Users can paste a YouTube link or open one shared from YouTube or Safari. Guest access allows one summary a day for videos up to 30 minutes. An email-verified free account allows three daily summaries for videos up to 60 minutes, plus a saved library, sync, continued watching, and offline reading. Pro is $3.99 a month and includes unlimited summaries, videos up to two hours, 40+ languages, chapters, transcripts, and an outline. Distill is available on iOS.

SonicScribe is a web service that turns audio and video into searchable text, with speaker detection, exports and team workflows. Users can upload listed video and audio formats or provide YouTube, Vimeo, Loom and direct video URLs. Transcription features include per-word timestamps, speaker diarization, confidence scores, translation and automatic formatting. Users can ask questions about a video and receive answers linked to specific timestamps; chapter generation is also listed. Exports include SRT, VTT, DOCX, PDF, JSON and TXT, with direct connections shown for Notion, Docs, Descript and Premiere. The Free plan is free, with three transcripts per day, uploads up to 30 minutes and one file at a time. Unlimited costs $20 a month, billed monthly, and allows uploads up to 10 hours. Teams uses custom pricing based on team size. Enterprise features include API access, webhooks and custom workflows. Uploaded files are automatically deleted after 30 days, configurable, while transcript text remains until deletion or account closure.