6 Best tl;dv Alternatives in 2026

Short answer - which one should you switch to?

• Want your meetings off someone else's server entirely: Humla. Free, open source, runs on your Mac, records audio and nothing else.
• Want a clean bot-free notepad and don't mind the cloud: Granola.
• Want to keep the video, for free: Fathom - the closest thing to tl;dv's library, with a bigger free tier.
• Want the like-for-like cloud notetaker: Otter.
• Want more measurement, not less: Read.ai.
• Need Windows and want it local: Meetily.

Bias, up front: I make Humla, it's ranked first below, and I'm going to argue for it. Every competitor price and feature here was read off the vendor's own site in October 2026, and where one of them does something mine doesn't (there's a big one coming), I've said so.

The bot isn't the reason any more

The classic "tl;dv alternative" search starts with the bot. That's out of date. tl;dv's desktop app page describes an app that "records directly from your system audio, with no meeting bot required", with downloads for Apple Silicon Macs, Intel Macs and Windows. Their homepage has a little "NO BOT REQUIRED" badge on it, in caps, which as a person who also capitalises for emphasis I fully respect.

They also make a pointed argument on that page: that Google Meet now flags third-party notetaker bots as a "potential risk" and denies them entry by default. That's tl;dv's description of Google's behaviour, not something I've tested, but if it's even half true, it goes a long way to explaining why so many of these tools now ship a desktop app.

So if the bot was your only problem, install the desktop app and stay.

What the desktop app doesn't change is where the recording goes. Same page: recordings are "stored in your personal library", available "the moment the call ends". That library is tl;dv's cloud. Bot or no bot, the tape ends up on their shelf.

What tl;dv actually is

Here's the thing I think most comparison lists skip. tl;dv isn't a notetaker that happens to keep the recording. It's a recording library that happens to take notes.

Read the desktop page again and count how much of it is about video. Timestamps you can drop in "in real-time or in retrospect" so stakeholders can "skim-watch longer calls". A clip editor, because "why send the full recording, when you only need to share a 2-minute moment?" - and a line, which I genuinely enjoyed, about how it "makes you the Spielberg of meetings". Shareable libraries of recordings for whole teams. One-click video downloads. Then on the homepage: sales coaching built on AI-picked clips from real customer calls, so new hires can learn from "best-in-class sales moments".

Let's call it the Archivist. The Archivist films everything, labels the reels, and hands your sales manager a highlight tape of your objection handling on Monday morning. For a sales or customer success team, that's real value, and nothing else on this list does it as well. (Fathom comes closest. More on that below.)

For everyone else, the Archivist is a slightly strange roommate. You wanted somebody to write down what was decided, and instead you got somebody who keeps every frame of every call, forever, in a library other people can browse.

So which half were you using - the tape, or the notes? Hold that thought. It decides the whole list.

Why people look for a tl;dv alternative

• The free plan is generous with tape and stingy with notes. Free gets you unlimited video recordings and unlimited transcription in 30+ languages, which is honestly a lot. But AI features come with a limit: "10x meetings with AI notes included" and ten Ask AI queries. The pricing page doesn't say per month, so I won't either. Either way, the recording is free and the summary is the meter.
• It's all cloud. The desktop app records locally and stores in tl;dv's library. I couldn't find a local-only mode anywhere.
• It's per seat. Pro is $29/seat/month ($18 billed annually), Business $39 ($29 annually), Enterprise custom. (The page has shown me prices in euros from another network, same numbers, so check what currency you're being quoted.)
• You don't want video of your calls at all. Some people simply don't want a film of every client meeting sitting somewhere. Fair enough.

Two things in tl;dv's favour, and I want to be fair about both. Their homepage says recordings and transcripts are yours and they'll "never, ever use them to train AI". And they say data is hosted and stored in the EU. As someone who had to dig through three providers' retention docs to write about this stuff, a plain statement like that on a homepage is worth more than most privacy pages manage.

How they compare

Prices are monthly-billed list prices read from each vendor's pricing page on 20 October 2026, except Meetily Pro, which is quoted billed annually. Annual billing is cheaper almost everywhere, and Otter was running a discount when I looked. They drift - check before you commit.

1. Humla - the notes, without the tape

Humla is the answer if your objection to tl;dv is some mix of "why is this on someone else's server" and "why is there a film of this". You take freeform notes, the app records your microphone and your Mac's system audio as two separate streams, and when you're done it writes a summary from both. Nothing joins the call, and nothing uploads anywhere unless you tell it to.

Transcription runs on your Mac with Whisper, or through your own OpenAI, Deepgram or Groq key if you'd rather. Speaker labels are worked out on-device, for free. Summaries come from a local model through Ollama or your own key, and you can chat with your whole meeting history afterwards, with citations back to the notes the answer came from.

Now the big concession. Humla doesn't record video. At all. There's no clip editor, no highlight reel, no "share the two minutes where the client said yes". If your team runs on tape, Humla can't replace the Archivist, and I'd be lying if I pretended an audio transcript was the same thing as watching the client's face when you said the price.

It's free and MIT-licensed, and it's Mac-only - Apple Silicon, specifically. If your team needs a shared library, there's optional sync at $5/user/month, or self-host the sync server and pay nothing.

Choose it when: you wanted the notes and never watched the tape. Tradeoff: no video, Mac only, and you set up a model or a key before the first summary.

2. Granola - the notepad, no film crew

Granola is a bot-free AI notepad: it captures device audio and enhances what you typed. No video, no clips, no library of reels. It's the clean opposite of the Archivist.

The catch: it's cloud-only and closed-source. The free plan keeps 30 days of meeting history; Business is $14/user/month and Enterprise $35.

Choose it when: you want a polished no-bot notepad and the cloud doesn't bother you. Tradeoff: your notes live on their servers, and the free plan forgets after a month. I wrote a longer Granola review if you're on the fence.

3. Fathom - if you want to keep the video

This is the one I'd send tl;dv's sales teams to, and it's not mine. Fathom records video, does clips and playlists, and its free plan is genuinely unlimited: "Unlimited recordings + transcriptions", with instant AI call summaries. That's a bigger free tier than tl;dv's ten meetings of AI notes, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

You get a choice of bot or bot-free capture, but bot-free is marked as a beta feature on Mac. Paid plans: Premium $20/month ($16 annually), Team $19/user ($15), Business $34/user ($25), with a two-user minimum on the team plans.

Choose it when: you liked the Archivist and just want it cheaper. Tradeoff: still a cloud video library, and bot-free is beta. Full Humla vs Fathom.

4. Otter.ai - the like-for-like notetaker

If what you used tl;dv for was transcripts, search and integrations rather than video, Otter is the nearest swap. It records without a bot through its desktop app, and has iOS and Android apps plus a new MCP server.

Pro is $16.99/user/month and Business $30, both discounted on the page when I checked. The free tier is 300 transcription minutes a month and three file imports for the lifetime of the account.

Choose it when: you want a mature cloud notetaker with no video library to manage. Tradeoff: cloud-only, closed-source, and the free minutes run out on a busy week. Full Humla vs Otter, and there's a longer Otter review too.

5. Read.ai - if you want more measurement, not less

Some people leave tl;dv because they want more of the coaching side. Read.ai is that tool. It measures meetings - engagement, sentiment, talk time, a coaching report with metrics I once described as the Scorekeeper - and on Enterprise plans you get video playback and video highlights too. It also has a bot-free desktop app for Mac and Windows now.

Free is five meeting transcripts a month; Pro is $19.75/user/month ($15 annually), Enterprise $29.75, Enterprise+ $39.75.

Choose it when: you want analytics on every meeting, not just notes. Tradeoff: it's measuring the other people in the call too, and the recap goes out to the room by default. Full Humla vs Read.ai.

6. Meetily - open source, and on Windows

Meetily is the other local, open-source tool here, and the one to pick if you're on Windows, because tl;dv's desktop app is and Humla isn't. The Community edition is free and MIT-licensed, with on-device transcription and local AI or your own key for summaries. Speaker identification is a Pro feature at $10/user/month billed annually.

Choose it when: you need Windows, or you want a local tool with a bigger open-source community than mine. Tradeoff: who-said-what costs money, and no video either. Full Humla vs Meetily.

So, tape or notes?

Back to the question from the top.

If you used the tape - the clips, the highlight reels, the library your sales manager browses on Monday - then honestly, the Archivist was doing its job. Stay on tl;dv, or move to Fathom if the free tier matters more to you than the coaching features. Nothing local does video libraries, mine included.

If you used the notes, here's the uncomfortable bit: you've been keeping a film of every meeting you've had, on someone else's shelf, to get a summary you could have had without it. In that case go local - Humla on a Mac, Meetily on Windows - or go Granola if you want the clean notepad and don't mind the cloud.

And if you're staying: open your tl;dv library and have a look at how many recordings are in there. Then think about how many of them you've ever pressed play on. (My guess is the number is small and a bit embarrassing, and that's sort of the whole post.)

Still comparing? There's a no-bot roundup, a Mac-local roundup, the full Humla vs tl;dv page, and the Read.ai alternatives post if tl;dv's coaching side was the part you liked.

Download Humla for macOS - free, open source, no bot, and no camera.