An honest, detailed comparison. TabType's goal is Cotypist-grade quality as a free, open-source, on-device app. This page is kept truthful — including where others still lead.
Cotypist is the closest product and our reference point. It is closed-source and freemium; TabType is open-source (MIT) and free with no account.
| Capability | TabType | Cotypist |
|---|---|---|
| On-device local LLM | ✅ Qwen3-4B (MLX) | ✅ |
| Apple Intelligence engine | ✅ (macOS 26) | ✅ |
| Ghost-text, word-by-word accept | ✅ | ✅ |
| Type-through (updates as you type) | ✅ | ✅ |
| Word alternatives | ✅ ⌃⌥Space | ✅ |
| Screen context (OCR) | ✅ | ✅ |
| Accessibility-tree transcript for chat apps | ✅ | ✅ |
| Your recent messages / previous writing as context | ✅ | ✅ |
| Personal phrase memory & few-shot | ✅ | ✅ |
| Speculative "parked" generation + KV cache | ✅ | ✅ |
| Text mirroring (pixel-perfect ghost) | ✅ | ✅ |
| Per-app & per-domain policies | ✅ | ✅ |
| Emoji / macros / autocorrect | ✅ (+ Indian languages) | partial |
| Notarized, App Store-smooth install | ❌ (alpha, unnotarized) | ✅ |
| Breadth of tested apps & polish | ✅ mature | |
| In-app auto-update | ❌ (manual for now) | ✅ |
Where Cotypist still leads: it's notarized (no Gatekeeper dance), more polished, tested across more apps, and has auto-update. TabType is an alpha closing that gap in the open.
- Sombra — llama.cpp + macOS dictionary completions. Great lightweight approach; TabType adds richer context (AX transcripts, recent messages), speculative parking, and mirror rendering.
- KeyType — explores constrained/grammar decoding. Impressive technique; TabType prioritizes context quality and per-app UX parity instead.
- cotabby — focused-window OCR context. TabType extends this with accessibility-tree extraction (cleaner than OCR) and per-app extraction policies.
- Copilot & code assistants — optimized for code in editors, often cloud-backed. TabType is for prose, everywhere, fully private, and deliberately stays out of the main code editor.
- macOS inline predictive text — single-word, OS-limited. TabType predicts multi-word continuations with real context.
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