FUTO Keyboard vs Lexo
These two are closer to each other than to anything else on Android. Both keep your typing on the phone, both do offline voice, both charge one time instead of renting you the software. The differences are real, though, and two of them will decide it for most people: FUTO publishes its source and ships swipe typing, and Lexo runs an actual language model for suggestions.
I make Lexo, so read the part about where it loses most carefully. Thirty days free, then $9.99 once. Get it on Google Play
The short answer
- You want to read the code, or you swipe instead of tapping: FUTO Keyboard.
- You want suggestions from a language model and dictation that comes out as finished sentences, in one app: Lexo.
- You are on a de-Googled ROM: FUTO. Lexo cannot install there today.
What they agree on
FUTO's site (keyboard.futo.tech, read 2026-07-26) leads with "100% Offline, 100% Private," links its source on GitLab, and sells a license as "a one-time payment" with "No recurring subscriptions." The app itself is free on Play and F-Droid. Their separate voice input app is "designed to work entirely on-device with no data stored," and one license covers both.
Lexo's version of the same position: five permissions, nothing you type or say leaves the phone, $9.99 once with a 30-day trial, no subscription and no ads. Both of us think a keyboard should not need a server, and both of us think you should not rent one.
If you are choosing between these two, you have already made the decision that matters. Neither one is going to sell your typing.
Where FUTO wins
- You can read the source. It is on GitLab. Lexo is closed source. My privacy claim rests on a five-permission manifest and a packet capture; theirs rests on the code being right there. That is a stronger kind of claim and I am not going to argue otherwise.
- Swipe typing. FUTO advertises swipe input as FUTO Swipe. Lexo's glide is written and merged but is not in the Play build, so if swipe is how you type, this is not close today.
- It runs on de-Googled phones. FUTO is on F-Droid. Play Integrity currently blocks installing Lexo on GrapheneOS and LineageOS, and the unlock needs Play services.
- It is a smaller commitment. Lexo downloads about 1.2 GB of models on first run. That is a lot to ask before you know whether you like it.
One caution that cuts in FUTO's favor rather than against it: I have not audited their license terms, and source published on GitLab is not automatically an OSI-approved open source license. If that distinction matters to you, read the license instead of taking a comparison table's word for it.
Where Lexo wins
- The suggestions come from a language model. Lexo ranks candidates with Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct, quantized to q8_0, running through llama.cpp on the CPU inside the keyboard process. That is a different class of prediction from a dictionary and an n-gram table, and it is the reason for the download size.
- Dictation and typing are one app. FUTO's voice input is a separate install. Lexo's dictation is an NVIDIA Parakeet transducer, int8 ONNX through sherpa-onnx, in the keyboard itself.
- Dictation comes out cleaned up. Fillers, casing and punctuation are fixed by a small ELECTRA-based tagger plus a deterministic rule pass. It is not a generative rewrite, so it will not restructure your sentence, but you stop having to go back and fix "um" and missing periods.
- Six languages for typing and prediction: English, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, German and French. English is meaningfully the strongest.
How to actually decide
Ask which of these two sentences is more true of you. "I want to be able to check the claim myself" points at FUTO. "I want the phone to finish my sentences and clean up my dictation" points at Lexo. Both answers are reasonable, and if the first one is yours, install FUTO and do not feel bad about it.
If you want to check either claim rather than believe it: turn the network off and type. Anything that still works was running on your phone. Then point PCAPdroid or NetGuard at the keyboard and watch. For Lexo, expect the one-time model download, then nothing while you type or dictate, plus a Crashlytics heartbeat until you switch crash reporting off at Settings, Advanced, Other. If you see anything else, I want to hear about it.
Lexo is the keyboard this is about. Thirty days free, then $9.99 once, no subscription and no ads. Get it on Google Play
More: six Android keyboards on what each actually sends, running a 0.5B language model inside a keyboard, what offline dictation actually means, and is Lexo safe.