Best Private Keyboard for Android: HeliBoard vs FUTO

Both of these keyboards run fully on your phone and neither wants your keystrokes, so the choice is not really about privacy. It comes down to two things almost nobody tells you up front: the licensing model, and whether you need offline voice typing. HeliBoard is genuinely open source but has no voice input of its own and no swipe typing until you add a Google library by hand. FUTO Keyboard bundles excellent on-device dictation and works out of the box, but it is source-available, not open source, and its own team stopped calling it open source in 2024. Two more things settle the close calls: how much horsepower your phone has, and whether you type in more than one language.

HeliBoard is the real open-source option. It is licensed under the GNU GPL v3.0 and is a maintained fork of OpenBoard, which itself descends from the AOSP keyboard. Development on OpenBoard stopped in December 2022, and HeliBoard has effectively become its living successor, under active development with regular releases. If your reason for leaving a mainstream keyboard is auditability and license purity, this is the one that passes the test: it requests no internet permission at all, which means it is structurally incapable of sending your typing anywhere, even in principle.

FUTO Keyboard is a different animal. The code is viewable and you can modify it, but it ships under the FUTO Source First License, which carries use restrictions and does not meet the standard open-source definition. This matters because FUTO originally marketed the app as open source, drew community pushback in June 2024, and then publicly dropped the term and rebranded the license as Source First. If someone told you FUTO is open source, that is the correction to file away. For an individual it is free and fully functional, and the source is inspectable, but it is source-available, not free software in the strict sense.

This is the other real decider, and it is the one people get wrong. FUTO Keyboard has offline voice input built directly in, using a Whisper-based model that downloads once and then runs entirely on your device with no audio leaving the phone. For everyday English dictation, reviewers rate it close to cloud services, which is genuinely uncommon for on-device speech. If you talk to your phone more than you type, and you refuse to send your voice to Google, FUTO is the obvious pick.

HeliBoard, by contrast, has no voice typing at all. The standard workaround is to install FUTO's separate Voice Input app and wire it in as your dictation method. So the honest framing is that the offline voice technology is FUTO's either way; the only question is whether you want it integrated in one app or pieced together across two. Note that the FUTO Voice Input app carries the same Source First license, so a HeliBoard plus FUTO Voice Input setup is mostly, but not fully, open source. A strict purist will still balk. Wiring that hybrid together has two traps worth knowing in advance: the FUTO Voice Input app often does not prompt for microphone permission on its own, so you grant it by hand in Android settings, and you usually have to turn off Google Voice Typing or the two dictation methods fight over the mic.

FUTO feels more finished on day one. You get a familiar layout, a number row, and arrow-key navigation on by default, and it does not feel like settling for less the way privacy keyboards often do. Its weak spots are swipe and autocorrect. The swipe typing is still alpha and stumbles on long words and repeated letters, and autocorrect makes some odd calls, including a recurring habit of pushing words into ALL CAPS. Prediction does improve after a few days of learning your patterns, but it will not match a commercial keyboard's contextual guesses. One practical cost of that on-device intelligence: FUTO's voice and prediction models are large and lean harder on RAM and CPU, so on a budget or older phone the lighter HeliBoard simply runs smoother.

HeliBoard is lighter, more stable for plain typing, and deeply customizable to the point of overwhelm. The seasoned advice is to leave the defaults alone and only change what actually bothers you. It is also the better multilingual typist: hold the spacebar to switch languages, and give each one its own layout and downloadable dictionary, though both keyboards are weak on Chinese, Japanese, and handwriting input. Its big caveat is glide typing: HeliBoard ships without a swipe library because, per its own README, no compatible open-source one exists. To get swipe you must manually side-load a proprietary closed-source Google library, picking the build that matches your phone's CPU architecture and loading it through Advanced settings. Once loaded it is excellent, but the irony is hard to miss: the best swipe experience on the purist keyboard comes from a Google blob you add yourself. If you are still deciding whether to leave Google's keyboard at all, our Gboard vs HeliBoard comparison walks through that trade first.

Neither app is friction-free, and the surprises tend to hit at install time. HeliBoard is not on the Google Play Store; you get it from F-Droid, IzzyOnDroid, or a GitHub APK. Searching the Play Store for it would only turn up imposters. Two smaller HeliBoard costs follow from living outside the Play Store: a raw GitHub APK will not tell you when an update lands, so install from F-Droid or IzzyOnDroid and enable auto-update if you want security fixes to arrive on their own, and autocorrect stays weak until you download a dictionary for each language you type in. FUTO is on the Play Store, F-Droid, and as a direct APK, which alone makes it far easier for a non-technical person to reach. FUTO is free to use, but unpaid installs get payment nags; removing them is a one-time contribution handled through FUTO's own portal or a separate companion app, and it unlocks nothing extra. Treat that payment as support, not a paywall, and do not expect the exact figure to be stable across regions and stores.

There is also a setup tax that no cloud keyboard charges. Neither app syncs your learned words, personal dictionary, or clipboard, which is the deliberate privacy trade, so moving to a new phone means rebuilding your setup by hand. FUTO's voice model downloads on first use, so offline needs one online step, and its accuracy outside high-resource languages like English drops off sharply. One more caution for Samsung owners: a first-hand report describes the HeliBoard plus Google swipe library plus FUTO voice stack hard-locking a One UI phone badly enough to need a factory reset. That is a single account, not a controlled finding, but it is worth backing up before you commit on a Samsung device.

Reduce it to two questions. If you need built-in offline dictation, pick FUTO Keyboard; HeliBoard alone simply cannot do voice, so a voice-first user who installs only HeliBoard has chosen wrong. If you require true open source, default F-Droid sourcing, or a keyboard that provably cannot phone home, pick HeliBoard; FUTO's Source First license and separate repo disqualify it for that person no matter how good the voice is.

For an undecided, generally privacy-minded person, try FUTO Keyboard first, unless your phone is old or short on memory, where HeliBoard's lighter footprint is the safer bet. FUTO is the lower-friction all-in-one: working swipe, autocorrect, and offline voice in a single Play Store install with nothing to extract. Fall back to HeliBoard if the source-available license is a dealbreaker, if you swipe constantly and are willing to load the Google library to get the best gesture typing, or if you just want a clean AOSP-style surface around a voice app you already run. And if you value the FOSS license but will not give up dictation, the pragmatic answer is the hybrid: HeliBoard as your daily keyboard with FUTO Voice Input plugged in. For the wider field of options beyond these two, see our guide to the best Android keyboards.