The Best Local AI Meeting Notetakers for Mac (2026)

Full disclosure before anything else: I make Humla, so treat me as biased and weigh this accordingly. I've tried to be fair — Meetily and anarlog are good, and I say where they're the better pick.

"Local" here means a specific thing: transcription and summaries can run on your own device, so the audio never has to be uploaded to a vendor's cloud. That rules most of the well-known notetakers out (more on that below), and it's exactly the corner these three occupy.

#The short answer

• Pick Humla if you want on-device speaker labels today, a signed Mac app, and a genuinely free MIT app (optional team sync is $5/user/month, or self-host it free).
• Pick Meetily if you need Windows too (it's cross-platform) or want its large, established community and NVIDIA Parakeet transcription.
• Pick anarlog if you want a plugin ecosystem and your notes as plain Markdown files on disk, and you're happy on macOS.

#How they compare

Facts checked against each project's site and GitHub repo, July 2026 — they move fast, so verify before you commit.

#1. Humla — best for shipped speaker labels and an actually-free Mac app

Humla records your microphone and the call's system audio through macOS itself — no bot joins the call — and keeps the two as separate streams, so "you said vs. they said" stays clean. Transcription and summaries can run entirely on-device with Whisper on Apple Silicon, or you can bring your own OpenAI, Deepgram, or Groq key. It runs offline speaker diarization and labels each voice with a colour-coded pill, and it ships a Norwegian-tuned model for NB meetings.

Choose it when: you want who-said-what today, on-device processing, and a fully MIT app with no paid gate on the client.

Tradeoffs, honestly: it's macOS 13+ (Apple Silicon) only, there's no mobile app, and there are no CRM/Slack integrations. The community is younger and smaller than Meetily's.

#2. Meetily — best for cross-platform and a big community

Meetily is a fellow free, open-source, bot-free notetaker with local Whisper (or NVIDIA Parakeet) transcription. Its real edge over a Mac-only app is that it runs on Windows as well (Linux builds from source), and it has one of the largest communities in open-source meeting notes — tens of thousands of GitHub stars and an active contributor base. You can point its summaries at Ollama, Claude, Groq, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint.

Choose it when: you need Windows, want the biggest community, or want Parakeet transcription and the ability to re-transcribe imported audio.

Tradeoffs, honestly: speaker diarization shipped in Pro, not in the free Community edition; and it's open-core — speaker identification, custom templates, advanced exports and higher-accuracy models sit behind Pro at $10/user/month. See the full Humla vs Meetily breakdown.

#3. anarlog (formerly Hyprnote) — best for a plugin ecosystem and Markdown-on-disk

anarlog is the open-source, MIT, macOS-only successor to Hyprnote (the fastrepl team renamed it in 2026). It's local-first and bot-free, does on-device transcription, has diarization, and stores every meeting as a plain Markdown file you can sync with Dropbox, git, or Obsidian. It also ships a plugin/extension system and supports a broad list of LLM providers for summaries.

Choose it when: you want a plugin ecosystem, prefer your notes as portable Markdown files, and want a large community (it's YC-backed with several thousand GitHub stars).

Tradeoffs, honestly: it's macOS only with no mobile app (same as Humla), and the branding is mid-transition, so expect the name and site to keep shifting for a while.

#What about Granola, Otter, Fathom, Fireflies?

They're good products, but they're not local. Granola is bot-free but cloud-only; Otter and Fireflies put a bot in the call and store meetings on their servers; Fathom's bot-free mode still uploads to its US cloud. If your reason for reading this is "I don't want my meetings on someone else's server," none of them qualify — that's the whole point of the three above. If you're weighing one of them specifically, I keep honest side-by-sides at /vs/granola, /vs/otter, /vs/fireflies, and /vs/fathom.

#How to choose in one minute

1. Need Windows? Meetily.
2. Want who-said-what labels today? Humla or anarlog (Meetily hasn't shipped it).
3. Live in Markdown/Obsidian? anarlog's files-on-disk model fits neatly (Humla stores notes in local SQLite with export).
4. Want the leanest "just works," fully-free Mac app with speaker labels? Humla.

#Try Humla

Download Humla for macOS — free, open source, no sign-up. If you want to see on-device transcription before installing anything, there's a browser demo on the local page that runs the model in your tab and never uploads your audio.