SRT vs VTT vs plain text: which export do you need?

Every transcription tool offers the same three downloads and explains none of them. The choice comes down to one question: does anything need to stay in sync with the audio?

Plain text

A .txt file is the whole transcript with no timing. Use it when the transcript itself is the deliverable: meeting notes, quotes for an article, a draft you are going to rewrite anyway. It pastes cleanly into any editor and search works the way you expect.

SRT

SubRip is the format every video platform accepts. Each block carries an index, a start and end time, and a line or two of text. It has no styling at all, which is exactly why it survives everywhere: YouTube, Vimeo, LinkedIn, VLC, Premiere, DaVinci Resolve and most phones read it without complaint.

1
00:00:04,000 --> 00:00:07,400
Thanks for making the time.

2
00:00:07,400 --> 00:00:11,200
I want to start with the part you said was messy.

The comma in the timestamp is not a typo. SRT uses a comma before the milliseconds, and some players reject a full stop.

VTT

WebVTT is SRT with room to grow: cue positioning, styling classes and metadata, and it is the native caption format for HTML video. If the captions are going on your own web page in a <track> element, this is the one. Browsers will not load an SRT file there.

The header line WEBVTT is mandatory, timestamps use a full stop before the milliseconds, and the index numbers are optional.

Publishing to a platform, use SRT. Publishing on your own page, use VTT. Everything else, plain text.

Decision table

Converting between them

SRT and VTT are close enough that conversion is a one-line change in the timestamps and a header. Plain text cannot be turned back into subtitles, because the timing is gone. If you are unsure, download SRT and TXT both: the transcriber makes them from the same run, so it costs nothing.