All four tools turn speech into subtitles, but they sell that work in different units — minutes, credits, editor seats, minute bundles — and they differ on the things that decide whether a subtitle job is actually finished: downloadable SRT/VTT files, burned-in captions, translated subtitles, and a human option when accuracy matters.
Basic, billed annually. Monthly billing is $17/mo. Minutes are an annual pool.
Pay As You Go: $12 for 60 credits, no expiry. Subtitle subscriptions from $39/mo.
Creator, billed monthly. Annual billing is roughly $10–12/seat/mo — see the pricing note below.
Entry plan with 120 minutes/month, per published pricing summaries. 7-day free trial.
| Happy Scribe | Maestra | VEED | Subly | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | Creators, educators and teams who need subtitle files — and a human option for important work | Teams translating subtitles into many languages | Creators who edit video and want captions burned in, in the same tool | Marketing and business teams that want subtitles without learning an editor |
| How you pay | Minutes, in an annual pool; top-ups $0.20/min | Credits; translated subtitles consume credits faster | Per editor seat; subtitles not metered by the minute on paid plans | Minute bundles per month |
| Free option | 10-minute trial on uploaded files | Free trial / no-signup preview; no free plan | Free plan: 10 min of auto subtitles/month, watermarked exports | 7-day free trial |
| Paid plans from | Basic $8.50/mo billed annually ($17 monthly) — 1,440 AI minutes/year | Pay As You Go $12 / 60 credits; subtitle plans from Basic $39/mo (360 min) | Creator $25/seat/mo monthly (about $10–12/seat/mo billed annually) | From $19/mo (120 min) per published pricing summaries |
| Subtitle languages | 150+ for AI transcription and subtitles | 125+ | 100+ for auto subtitles (tool pages vary); translation listed as 50+ on the pricing page | 73 |
| Subtitle files | SRT on entry plans; VTT, STL, XML, FCPXML and 15+ formats on Pro and up | SRT, VTT, STL, CAP, TXT | SRT, VTT, TXT download on Pro and up only | Subtitle export and burned-in video; SRT upload supported — confirm the full format list on the pricing page |
| Burned-in captions | Yes — MP4 export with subtitles | Yes — MP4 with embedded subtitles | Yes — a core strength, with caption styling | Yes — open captions / burned-in export |
| Human subtitling | Yes — from $2.00/min (transcription, English) and $2.25/min (captions, English); priced per language | Not offered in the public information we could find | No | No |
| Trade-off to know | Top-up minutes ($0.20) cost several times the in-plan rate, and VTT needs Pro | Pricing is split across product tabs, and translation consumes credits at double rate on Pay As You Go | Priced per seat, file downloads wait until Pro, and translation has its own separate allowance | Published minute allowances for higher tiers are hard to verify — check the official pricing page before relying on them |
Prices are USD, before tax, as published by the vendors in November 2026. VEED's annual per-seat prices vary between sources (roughly $10–12 for Creator, $19–22 for Pro), and its own pages give different language counts for translation (50+ on the pricing page, higher on some tool pages) — we use the pricing-page figures. Happy Scribe's stated language count for AI translation also varies between its own pages, so we only state the 150+ figure for transcription and subtitles. Plans change — always confirm the current price, minute allowance and export rights on the vendor's site before you buy.
Monthly prices hide the real comparison, because each vendor meters the work differently. Take a concrete job — ten 30-minute videos a month, 300 minutes of same-language subtitles — and run it through the published prices (annual billing where a tool offers it):
| Tool & plan | The maths | What the 300-minute job costs |
|---|---|---|
| Happy Scribe Pro (annual) | $19/mo ÷ 600 min/month average ≈ $0.03/min inside the plan | $19 — the job uses half the monthly average allowance |
| Happy Scribe Basic (annual) | $8.50/mo covers ~120 min/month; extra minutes are $0.20 each | About $44.50 if you top up the missing 180 minutes — the top-up rate, not the plan rate, decides the bill |
| Maestra subtitle Basic | $39/mo ÷ 360 min ≈ $0.11/min | $39 — the job fits, with 60 minutes to spare |
| Maestra Pay As You Go | $12 ÷ 60 credits = $0.20/min | $60 for 300 minutes — sensible for one-off jobs, expensive as a routine |
| VEED Creator (annual) | About $10–12 per seat; auto subtitles effectively unlimited (50 hrs/month fair use) | About $10–12 per editor — the per-minute cost keeps falling as you caption more, but you cannot download subtitle files on this tier |
| VEED Pro (annual) | About $19–22 per seat | About $19–22 per editor, and this is the tier that adds SRT/VTT download and translation |
| Subly entry plan | $19/mo ÷ 120 min ≈ $0.16/min inside the plan | The entry bundle does not cover 300 minutes — a higher tier is required, so verify its minute allowance on the official pricing page |
Adding a translated version changes the ranking. On Maestra's Pay As You Go, 60 credits buy 60 minutes of same-language subtitles but only 30 minutes of translated subtitles — translation consumes credits at double rate, so a "300 minutes + one translation" job can need roughly 900 credits' worth of allowance. Happy Scribe draws translation from the same minute pool. VEED's subtitles are unmetered, but translation sits in a separate, much smaller allowance — check that allowance, not the subtitle headline, if translation is your main job.
And human subtitling is a different price world. Happy Scribe's published human rates start at $2.25/min for English captions, so the same 300 minutes would cost about $675 with a human — roughly 35 times the AI plan above — and rates vary substantially by language. That gap is the real decision: AI draft plus your own checking, AI plus a human pass on important videos, or human from the start.
Happy Scribe is a transcription and subtitling platform rather than a video editor. AI subtitles cover 150+ languages, and the workflow is built around producing a file: SRT is available from the entry plans, while Pro ($19/mo billed annually, $29/mo monthly) unlocks 15+ export formats including VTT, STL, XML and FCPXML, plus MP4 export with subtitles burned in. Minutes come as an annual pool — Basic ($8.50/mo billed annually) includes 1,440 minutes a year, Pro 7,200, Business ($59/mo billed annually) 72,000 — with top-ups at $0.20/min. It also publishes SDH-style subtitling support (speaker identification and non-speech cues), which matters for accessibility work. Uniquely here, it sells a human-made service alongside the AI: published rates start at $2.00/min for English transcription and $2.25/min for English captions, priced per language, with the vendor claiming 99% accuracy for the human service — a vendor claim about the human tier, not a measurement of the AI output.
Maestra combines transcription, subtitling, voiceover and live captions, with subtitles and subtitle translation in 125+ languages. You can start without a subscription: Pay As You Go is $12 for 60 credits with no expiry — 60 minutes of same-language subtitles, or 30 minutes of translated subtitles. Subtitle subscriptions run from Basic ($39/mo, 360 minutes) through Premium ($79/mo, 900 minutes) to Business ($159/mo, 1,800 minutes), which adds DeepL translation and a glossary for consistent terminology; Premium adds an alternative AI translation engine. Exports include SRT, VTT, STL and CAP, or an MP4 with subtitles embedded. One warning from the pricing page itself: Maestra splits pricing across separate product tabs (transcription, subtitles, voiceover, real-time), each with its own allowances, so confirm you are reading the subtitle tab before comparing numbers.
VEED is a browser video editor first, and its subtitle tool lives inside that editor: auto-generate subtitles, style them, and export the video with captions burned in. The free plan includes 10 minutes of auto subtitles a month with watermarked exports. On paid plans, auto subtitles are effectively unlimited under a 50-hour-a-month fair-use cap, which makes VEED the natural pick for high-volume, same-language captioning — the cost is the seat, not the minute. Two gates matter: downloading subtitle files (SRT, VTT, TXT) starts on Pro (about $19–22/seat/mo billed annually; $45/seat/mo monthly), and subtitle translation into 50+ languages (per the pricing page) also starts at Pro, metered separately from the unlimited subtitles. Creator ($25/seat/mo monthly, about $10–12 billed annually) is fine if burned-in captions in the editor are all you need.
Subly is the narrowest tool here, on purpose: upload a video (or bring an existing SRT), auto-generate subtitles in 73 languages, fix wording and timing in a dedicated subtitle editor, style the captions, translate with one click, and export — including burned-in (open) captions for platforms that do not accept subtitle files. A practical workflow feature is project duplication: copy a finished project, switch the subtitle language, adjust cultural references, and export a localised version. Published pricing summaries put the entry plan at $19/mo for 120 minutes, with a 7-day free trial; higher tiers add minutes and team features. Be aware that the exact minute allowances of the higher tiers were the hardest figures in this comparison to verify from public sources, so treat the official pricing page as the deciding check before you commit to a volume.
A subtitle file (SRT/VTT) for YouTube, an LMS or a client? Happy Scribe or Maestra, and check the plan gate — VEED only sells file downloads from Pro. Burned-in captions for social feeds? Any of the four works, and VEED's editor is the most direct route.
Add up your real monthly video minutes, then double-count any minutes you will also translate. Compare that number against the allowance — not the headline monthly price. The worked example above shows a $19 plan beating a $39 plan, and an $8.50 plan losing, on the same job.
Every tool has one: Happy Scribe's $0.20 top-ups, Maestra's double-rate translation credits, VEED's per-seat pricing and separate translation allowance, Subly's bundle limits. The second meter is where overage bills come from.
None of these vendors publishes a directly comparable accuracy figure we could verify, and this guide does not test accuracy for you. Use Happy Scribe's 10-minute trial, Maestra's no-signup preview, VEED's free plan and Subly's 7-day trial with your hardest real clip — names, accents, background music — and count the corrections yourself.
Subtitles are a text file (typically SRT or VTT) delivered alongside the video — the player can switch them on, off or between languages, and platforms like YouTube and most LMSs accept them directly. Closed captions are the accessibility form of that file, including speaker labels and non-speech cues such as [music]. Burned-in (open) captions are rendered into the video image itself: they always show, including on social platforms that strip subtitle files, but they cannot be switched off, searched or reused in another language.
There is no verified, comparable figure we can give you. The vendors in this comparison do not publish a standard word-error-rate for their AI subtitling on their pricing or product pages that we could check, and the percentages quoted in third-party articles rarely state test conditions. The one firm published figure here is for a human service: Happy Scribe claims 99% for its human-made tier, which is a different product from its AI output. Treat any AI subtitle as a draft: run your own hardest clip through the free tiers and count the fixes.
When an error is expensive: published course material, compliance or accessibility commitments, broadcast and client deliverables. Happy Scribe's published human captions start at $2.25/min in English (rates vary by language), against roughly $0.03/min for AI inside its Pro plan — so a common pattern is AI for everything, plus a human pass on the videos that carry legal, educational or reputational weight.
On the published prices, VEED — because paid plans do not meter subtitle minutes (50 hrs/month fair use), so the cost is just the seat. If you need the subtitle files themselves, Happy Scribe Pro's in-plan rate (about $0.03/min on annual billing) is the cheapest file-producing route in our 300-minute worked example.
Because this guide is compiled from the vendors' published specifications and pricing, not from testing we have not done. Where a judgment appears — for example, that a top-up rate decides a bill — it is arithmetic on the published prices, shown next to it so you can check it yourself.