Cleanvoice vs REAPER Comparison 2026
Cleanvoice takes a finished recording and automatically strips the ums, mouth sounds and dead air, billed by the hour at $11 a month for ten hours. REAPER is a full digital audio workstation bought once for $60, with no track limit and a licence that keeps working through years of updates, but it will not remove a filler word on its own. One replaces the editing pass; the other is the workstation you would do that editing pass inside.
At a glance
- Cleanvoice starts cheaper, at $11.
- Neither has a free tier.
Side by side
Cleanvoice | REAPER | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price (they differ) | From $11 | From $60 |
| Pricing model (they differ) | Free trial, then paid | One-time purchase |
| Free tier | No | No |
| Billing (they differ) | Monthly or annual | One-time purchase |
| Free trial | Not stated | 60 days |
| API | Yes |
Cleanvoice
Filler words and mouth sounds removed
Cleanvoice takes a finished recording and strips out the parts nobody wants to hear: filler words, mouth sounds, breaths and dead air. It handles video podcasts as well as audio and hands back a timeline export you can drop into whatever you edit in. Billing counts hours of audio processed rather than seats, so an occasional show is cheap to run. Credits bought outright stay valid for two years.
Our note
Buying by the hour rather than by the seat is the right shape for a fortnightly show, and it is why this beats a general editor's subscription for that use. Descript is the better buy if you want to edit the words as well as clean them.
REAPER
A full audio workstation for sixty dollars
REAPER is a professional digital audio workstation that costs less than two months of most subscriptions and never expires. It records, edits and mixes as many tracks as the machine can hold, runs the plugin formats everybody else runs, and the whole install is small enough to keep on a memory stick. The interface is famously plain and famously configurable, which means a first session is harder and the tenth is faster. The licence is priced by how you use it rather than by what you get.
Why people weigh these two
- REAPER instead of Cleanvoice
- REAPER is the manual option: a full audio workstation for a one-time $60, so you cut the filler and noise yourself instead of paying for automated processing.
- Cleanvoice instead of REAPER
- Cleanvoice does one automated cleanup pass for filler words and mouth sounds, instead of the full manual record-edit-mix workflow REAPER is built around.
Which one should you pick
Buy Cleanvoice if editing time is the actual bottleneck and you want the ums, breaths and silence gone without touching a waveform. It is $11 a month for ten hours with no free tier, and the result exports as a timeline for whichever editor you already use, REAPER included.
Buy REAPER if you want to own the whole audio chain: recording, mixing and routing, with unlimited tracks for a single $60 payment that covers years of updates. It asks for a week of learning the interface in exchange, and it will not strip a filler word by itself. Plenty of podcasters end up running both: Cleanvoice for the automatic cleanup pass, REAPER for everything after it.
Common questions
- Can I use Cleanvoice and REAPER together?
- Yes, and the two are built to fit that way. Cleanvoice exports a cleaned timeline you can open in any editor, and REAPER is a full workstation that will import it for the mixing and routing Cleanvoice does not attempt.
- Does REAPER remove filler words automatically?
- No. REAPER is a manual workstation, so removing ums and dead air means doing it by hand or adding a plugin. Cleanvoice does that specific job automatically, billed by the hour of audio processed.
- Which one costs less?
- It depends on the time horizon. REAPER is a single $60 payment that covers years of free updates. Cleanvoice is $11 a month for ten hours, so a year of regular use costs more than REAPER's one-off licence, though the two are not doing the same job.
- Is there a free trial for either?
- REAPER offers a genuinely unrestricted 60-day evaluation. Cleanvoice states its trial requires no card but does not publish a length.
Ratings are the average of reviews readers left. The facts are stated by each tool’s own listing and are not verified by CloutStack. How we make money.