Cutvey Teleprompter vs PromptSmart

Prices and features checked November 2, 2026, on each maker's own page or its US App Store listing.

The short version

PromptSmart made voice scrolling famous. Its VoiceTrack feature listens and moves the script as you talk, starting and stopping with you, and it has the longest record of any voice prompter on the App Store, with 11,983 US ratings for PromptSmart Pro on November 2, 2026. If your whole reason for a prompter is to never touch it, PromptSmart is built around that.

Cutvey Teleprompter is built around the shoot. One $19.99 purchase covers iPhone, iPad, a native Mac app and the Apple Watch remote, with voice follow, mirroring, recording, sessions and every remote included. Voice follow is narrower than VoiceTrack on purpose: you press play, and it trims the speed to your read. In return you get a prompter that several devices can run together, that a producer can edit while you read, and that hands captions and edit markers to the cut.

What each one costs

PromptSmart Pro's listing also describes the Extended subscription at $1.99 a month or $19.99 a year after a trial, which does not match the in-app prices Apple prints beside it. Ask PromptSmart which applies before you buy. PromptSmart+ is a separate subscription that adds Android, a Studio Edition for Windows and Mac, and web editing and control.

Over three years of yearly billing, PromptSmart+ Starter comes to $299.97. Cutvey Teleprompter is still $19.99 then, and the purchase covers every Apple device on the account.

Side by side

Voice follow and VoiceTrack, honestly

This is the question most people bring to this page, so here is how the two differ.

VoiceTrack aims to be hands free from the first word. You start talking, the script moves; you stop, it stops; you wander off for a sentence and it holds your place until you come back. For a solo talk to a phone where nobody else is in the room, that is a real convenience, and nothing in Cutvey Teleprompter does the first part. PromptSmart's listing recommends about 30 minutes of continuous VoiceTrack and scripts up to 5,000 words.

Cutvey's voice follow starts from your speed. Press play (on the screen, the Watch, a pedal or a remote) and the scroll runs at the pace you set. Voice follow listens with Apple's speech recognition on the device, matches your last dozen words to the script, and nudges the speed up or down four times a second so the line you are reading stays on the reading line. Go quiet and the scroll eases down and waits. A cough or an aside leaves it alone. Skip ahead more than about four sentences and you move it yourself, and it picks up from there. It records nothing, it never needs a network, and it is off until you turn it on.

Why build it that way? On a shoot the person reading is rarely the only one who needs the prompter to behave. An operator, a director or a producer wants to know that the scroll will not leap because someone in the room said a word from page three. Starting from a set pace keeps the prompter predictable for them, and voice follow makes it feel like it is listening to you. How voice follow works, in full.

One real job, both ways

A marketing lead records a four-minute product update at her desk. The script is a Word file from legal, she is filming on an iPhone, and the video team wants captions and the cue points for the edit.

With Cutvey Teleprompter. She opens the Word file and the headings keep their bold. She marks each of the five sections as a cue, gives the legal paragraph a slower speed of its own, and turns on Camera: 4K at 30 frames a second, front camera, three lines beside the lens. Voice follow is on. She presses play on her Watch, reads, and stumbles on a product name in section three. Stop on the Watch ends the take and saves it to Photos. She taps the stopped script, fixes the word right there on the prompter at reading size, goes back to the first line and presses play for a clean second take. After it she exports an .srt with the script's own words and a Premiere Pro marker file with one marker per section, both counted from the second take's first frame, since captions and markers describe the take they were read in. The edit starts with the captions and the cuts already placed.

With PromptSmart. She imports the same file, starts talking and VoiceTrack moves with her, so she never presses play at all. When she stumbles she can pause and carry on. She records in Selfie Mode. For captions and markers she would use another tool after the take, since we found neither on PromptSmart's pages.

Both get her a good read. PromptSmart is the easier start; Cutvey Teleprompter gives the edit more to work with and costs less to own.

When to choose PromptSmart

• You want the prompter to start and stop with your voice, with no button at all.
• You present on Windows or Android, or a producer will run the prompter from a web browser somewhere else (PromptSmart+ Team's Control Room).
• Your scripts live in Google Docs or a cloud drive and you want to pull them straight in.
• You want a free app for one script at a time (PromptSmart Lite).

Where Cutvey Teleprompter falls short

• No hands-free start. Voice follow only trims the speed. Someone or something presses play.
• Apple devices only. There is no Android, Windows or web prompter. A browser can drive the prompter from any computer, but it shows controls and clocks, never the script.
• No free version. The app is free to download and locked until you buy it once or sign in with a Cutvey plan that includes it.
• No Google Docs or cloud-drive import. Export to Word first, or open the file from the Files app.
• No reading of scanned PDFs. A PDF that is only pictures has no text to bring in.
• A new app. Version 1.0 has no App Store ratings yet; PromptSmart has years of them.

Questions people ask

Is Cutvey Teleprompter a PromptSmart alternative?

Yes, for anyone on iPhone, iPad and Mac. It costs $19.99 once for every Apple device on the account, where PromptSmart sells an app plus optional subscriptions, and it adds a native Mac app, the Watch remote, sessions between devices and captions for the edit. Choose PromptSmart if you need voice that starts and stops the scroll, or Windows and Android.

Does Cutvey's voice follow work offline?

Yes. Recognition runs on the device with no server to fall back to, so it needs no connection. It works in the script's language wherever Apple ships an on-device model for that language on that device, and is not available in Slovenian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, Bulgarian or Farsi.

Can I move my PromptSmart scripts across?

Export them as Word (.docx), RTF or text and import them. Word keeps its bold and headings; RTF keeps bold, italic, underline, size and alignment.