Teleprompter apps compared: Orate, BIGVU, PromptSmart, Evelize

Most comparison pages in this category are a feature matrix with a hundred rows, a winner decided before the research started, and no indication of where any of it came from. The useful version is smaller and more awkward: a handful of rows that actually change your decision, filled in only where somebody checked.

That is what this is. Where a cell says Not verified, it means we did not test it and are not going to guess — not that the answer is no. There are more of those than we would like, and they are marked rather than quietly filled.

The three categories, before the four apps

The single most expensive mistake in this category is buying across categories: paying suite money for a prompter you use, or buying a prompter and discovering you needed the captions. These four apps are not four versions of one product.

• A production suite is captions, an editor, templates and publishing, with a prompter included. BIGVU is this. The prompter is one feature of many, and the price reflects the rest.
• A voice-tracking prompter follows your actual speech rather than running at a constant speed. PromptSmart Pro is the app people mean when they say this. It is the best idea in the category and it has a specific failure mode during video capture.
• A prompter plus a recorder reads a script and shoots good video, and stops there. Evelize and Orate are both this, which is why the comparison between those two comes down to terms rather than features.

The comparison

Two things in that table are worth pulling out, because they are the rows people discover late.

The export row is the one that ruins afternoons

“Free” in this category has two meanings, and the listing does not distinguish them. Free to use means you can record and keep the result. Free to record means the app will happily film your ten-minute take and then ask for a subscription to let you save it to your gallery. That is a harder limit than a watermark, because a watermarked file is at least a file.

Evelize is the documented case here: recording costs nothing, saving to Photos needs a subscription, and its own reviews carry the obvious complaint — that you cannot really do anything with the app until you pay. We are not asserting that BIGVU or PromptSmart do this, because we did not check. The twenty-second test for it works on any app and is worth running before your first real take rather than after it.

Orate exports unwatermarked on both the free and paid tier. That is a deliberate trade: no watermark also means no free advertising on anybody else’s video, which is a genuine cost to us and the reason most of the category does not do it.

Voice tracking is the feature that does not survive the record button

Speech-following scroll is the most attractive thing anyone has built in this category, and it has a failure mode that feature lists never mention: it frequently stops following you the moment you start recording video. The cause is that the video encoder and the speech recogniser both need the microphone, and an audio input generally goes to one consumer.

This is not a knock on PromptSmart specifically — it is why the combination is rare across the whole category, and it is the reason Orate does not claim voice tracking at all in v1 rather than shipping a version that drops out under load. The mechanism, and a two-minute test you can run on whatever you are using now, are in the write-up on microphone contention.

Head to head

Each of these goes into the specific trade in detail, including the cases where the answer is that you should not switch.

The four things to compare, whichever you pick

If you take nothing else from this page, take the order. These four decide whether an app is usable; everything else is preference.

1. Export terms. Can you get an unwatermarked file out on the free tier? If not, the free tier is a demo rather than a tier, and you will find out at the worst moment.
2. Offline and account requirements. Does it open and work in airplane mode? Anything cloud-backed will fail you somewhere without signal, and confidential scripts on somebody else’s server is a separate question again.
3. Crash safety. If the app dies at minute nine of a ten-minute read, do you have a file? Most apps in this category do not, no listing tells you, and it takes four minutes to find out.
4. Scroll speed control. Fine-grained speed, and ideally a rate appropriate to the language you read in. An English words-per-minute constant applied to Hindi or Tamil runs visibly fast.

What we could not verify, and why we left it blank

The BIGVU and PromptSmart columns have gaps in exactly the rows we care most about — export terms, crash safety, offline behaviour. We could have filled them from marketing copy or from what other comparison pages assert. Both are how this category ends up quoting figures nobody measured, including the stale prices one of these apps still publishes about itself.

So they stay blank, and the tests above are there so you can fill them in for your own case in under ten minutes. If you have measured one of these and we have it wrong, tell us and the table changes.

Where we fit, and where we do not

Orate is a prompter and a recorder, deliberately not a suite. What we do not have: captions, an AI editor, templates, publishing, cloud sync, or voice-tracked scrolling. If you came here needing any of those, we are not the answer, and installing us to find that out would waste your afternoon.

What we do have is the four rows above: unwatermarked export on both tiers, no account and no server, recording that survives being killed mid-take, and pacing that differs per writing system across ten fully translated languages. The paid upgrade is capture quality — 4K, 60fps and HDR — and the free tier records 1080p.