Shorty vs Descript
Descript is a video editor that transcribes. Shorty is a summarizer that also transcribes and captions, with no account needed to summarize.
What Descript is: A text-based audio and video editor: edit a recording by editing its transcript. Everything in the Descript column below was read from www.descript.com on 21 October 2026. A dash (“—”) means we could not verify that detail there — it is not a claim that the feature is missing.
Descript's prices were read from www.descript.com/pricing the same day, in US dollars, and can change at any time.
Side by side
The two differ on 9 of the 10 points we checked, marked below: Primary focus, Sources it summarizes, Transcription, Subtitle / caption generation, Languages stated, Free tier, Paid plans from, Platforms, Public developer API.
| Feature | Shorty | Descript |
|---|---|---|
| Primary focusdiffers | Multi-source summarizer + transcription + file tools | Text-based audio and video editing |
| Sources it summarizesdiffers | YouTube, Spotify, webpages, articles, PDF, Word, audio, text | Your own recordings (show notes and podcast summaries) |
| Transcriptiondiffers | Yes — uploaded audio and video files, and live recording | Yes — recordings and uploads, in 25 languages |
| Subtitle / caption generationdiffers | Yes — SRT, VTT, and captions burned into the video | Yes — captions, translatable into 61 languages |
| File conversion / compression | Yes — audio, video, image and PDF | — |
| Languages stateddiffers | 113, with automatic detection | 25 for transcription, 61 for caption translation |
| Free tierdiffers | Summarize with no account at all; a free account adds a daily cloud-conversion quota | 60 media minutes a month |
| Paid plans fromdiffers | Premium and Pro — live prices on the Shorty pricing page | $16 per person/month billed yearly ($24 monthly) |
| Platformsdiffers | Web, iOS, Android, Windows, Chrome/Edge/Firefox extensions | Desktop app for macOS and Windows |
| Public developer APIdiffers | Yes — REST /v1, a TypeScript SDK, and an OAuth 2.1 MCP server | API and MCP |
Comparing more than one tool? See Shorty next to every AI summarizer we track.