What is the difference between Dragon Home and Dragon Professional?

The only difference the sources confirm is availability. Dragon Home was the consumer edition, and it is no longer for sale. A reseller notice says Dragon Home is no longer available ¹, and another reseller says Nuance and Microsoft did not create a Home version 16 ². Nuance's US store menu lists neither Home nor Premium ³. Dragon Professional is the edition you can still buy, as a desktop license for Windows ⁴, and Nuance describes its licensing and management tools for organizations.

Nuance's sources do not give a feature-by-feature comparison of Home and Professional. We could not open one, so this page does not list features for Home. If a listing or a sales page claims that Home has a feature Professional lacks, treat the claim as unverified until you see it in Nuance's own documentation.

Home was the consumer line, and it was sold below Premium

Nuance sold Dragon in more than one consumer version at the same time. In the UK at the 2014 launch, it sold Dragon 13 Premium for £139.99, and the Home version for £79.99, which was due in August ⁵. That is the only Home price we could confirm from a source, and it is a UK price from 2014.

Nuance withdrew Dragon Premium 13 from the market effective September 1, 2018 ⁶. Neither Home nor Premium appears in Nuance's current store menu ³, so the consumer line has no current product to buy.

Professional is built for organizations, and its licensing shows it

The Professional line is the one Nuance still describes for businesses. Nuance says volume licensing and the Nuance Management Center let an organization deploy, manage and share custom words, commands and auto-texts across its users ⁷. Where a Dragon edition has Nuance Management Center mode enabled, the user needs a login and an internet connection to the management server, and an administrator provides the account and license ⁸.

These are the features that matter for a company or a practice. They are not what a home user with one PC needs. For a single user, the one-user license is the simplest purchase, and its price is covered on the cost page. A one-user license was listed at $685.99 by CDW ⁴.

Where the sources stop

We looked for three things and could not confirm any of them: a Nuance page that lists Home and Professional features side by side, a Nuance announcement that ends Home sales, and a Nuance page that describes Home 16. The end of Home sales rests on a reseller notice, not on a Nuance page. The absence of a Home 16 rests on the same reseller. Both are secondary sources, and we say so rather than presenting them as Nuance's own statements.

What to do if you are choosing today

1. Buy the Professional edition, not Home. For Windows, the desktop product is Dragon Professional version 16.
2. Treat any Home or Premium listing as a discontinued product, whatever its price. Nuance's store menu does not list either one ³.
3. Check the version and the license count. Read the operating system list in Nuance's release notes against your PC before you buy. A listing for a different license count is a different purchase.
4. Compare with the built-in tools first if your need is light. Is Dragon NaturallySpeaking free? explains the free options.

Yap, which we make, is an on-device dictation app for Mac and Windows. It is not a version of Dragon, and its prices are on our pricing page.

For the release history, read our guide to Dragon versions, editions and price. For the cloud subscription, see whether Dragon has a subscription. For the product in general, read our overview of Dragon NaturallySpeaking. For the category, see dictation software.