Just Use Meetily — Private AI Meeting Notes, No Cloud

Every meeting notetaker you’ve tried does the same thing: it joins your Zoom call as a bot, records your client’s voice, and ships that audio to a server you’ll never see. For most people that’s fine. If you run a solo practice in law, finance, consulting, or anything therapy-adjacent, it is not fine. Meetily is the only mainstream AI notetaker that transcribes entirely on your machine. Nothing leaves your device. Just use Meetily.

Why Meetily

The pitch is simple: Meetily captures system audio directly — the same way your screen recorder would — and runs transcription locally using Whisper.cpp. No bot joins the call. Participants on Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, or Slack Huddles see no “Meetily Notetaker” in the attendee list, because there isn’t one. The audio is processed on your CPU or GPU and never transmitted anywhere.

Because Meetily processes audio entirely on your device and doesn’t send recordings to external servers, it helps you keep client audio off third-party infrastructure — a strong privacy posture that supports GDPR and HIPAA requirements when paired with your own policies and controls. You are not trusting Meetily the company to handle your data properly. There is no data for them to handle.

The Community Edition is genuinely free with no strings attached:

• Unlimited transcription sessions, no recording caps
• Local Whisper models (tiny through large-v3) with NVIDIA Parakeet support for GPU acceleration
• 99+ language support, works fully offline
• Export to basic formats out of the box

The MIT license means you can audit the code, fork it, or self-host it. The Zackriya-Solutions/meetily repo has 31,600+ GitHub stars and was last committed in September 2026 — this is an active project, not an abandoned side experiment.

Where the Community Edition stops short: no speaker diarization, no automatic meeting detection, and no advanced export templates. If you need to distinguish between your voice and your client’s in the transcript, or you want to auto-generate PDFs for your records, you need Pro.

Pro is $10/user/month billed annually ($120/year) through December 31, 2026 — after that the price rises to $25/month. That early-bird window is real and worth acting on. At $120/year, Pro costs less than a single month of most competing tools. What you get: speaker diarization, automatic meeting detection, advanced export (PDF, DOCX, Markdown), and enhanced AI summary models.

For summaries, Meetily gives you full control over routing. The default is a local Ollama model — no API key, no external calls. If you want better summaries, you can wire in Claude, Groq, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint using your own API key. Your data routes through whichever provider you choose, not through Meetily’s infrastructure.

The honest limitation: Meetily has no calendar integrations. It will not auto-pull your meeting schedule or push notes to Notion or HubSpot. If your workflow depends on post-call CRM sync, you will need to export manually. For most solopreneurs handling sensitive calls, that is a fine trade-off — the privacy guarantee is worth the manual step.

Why Not Granola

Granola deserves serious consideration. Like Meetily, it captures via system audio rather than joining as a bot, so clients never see an attendee appear. Transcription happens on-device on macOS and Windows, and Granola does not store your meeting audio after processing. The product is polished, the note-taking UX is genuinely good, and it has expanded from macOS-only to include Windows and mobile.

Here is where it falls short for the privacy-first solopreneur:

• The free Basic plan caps your meeting history at 25 notes. That is not unlimited — it is an evaluation tier. If you hold 5 client calls a week, you hit the limit in a month.
• Moving beyond the cap costs $14/user/month on the Business plan.
• Granola is closed-source. You cannot audit how it handles transcription, what telemetry it collects, or what a future policy change looks like. You are trusting a company.
• At $14/month versus Meetily Pro’s $10/month (through year-end), Granola costs 40% more for less verifiable privacy.

Pick Granola if you care more about UX polish than auditability and are comfortable paying $14/month for a closed-source tool you trust. It is a good product. It is not the right product when client confidentiality is the hard requirement.

Why Not the Rest

Fireflies.ai — Fireflies is an excellent notetaker if privacy is not your constraint. It transcribes accurately, syncs to CRMs, and costs $10/user/month on the Pro plan. The problem is architectural: every recording goes to Fireflies’ servers. That is the product. There is no local-processing mode, no self-hosting option, no way to keep client audio off their infrastructure. For a solopreneur booking calls with SaaS vendors or internal teams, Fireflies is fine. For anyone handling confidential client conversations, it is the wrong tool by design.

Otter.ai — Otter faces a live federal class action — In re Otter.AI Privacy Litigation — alleging its transcription tool operates as a wiretap under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the California Invasion of Privacy Act, and the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act. A court ruled in August 2026 that Otter failed to dismiss the core privacy claims. No ruling has declared Otter illegal, and the case is ongoing. But if you are a solopreneur managing confidential client relationships, you do not want your notetaker’s legal posture to be “the lawsuit hasn’t resolved yet.” Otter also costs $16.99/month on monthly billing ($8.33/month annual) — not cheap for a cloud tool with active litigation overhead.

Fathom — Fathom had the most generous free tier in the category until Superhuman acquired it on September 14, 2026. The announcement says “same app, same login, same product experience” — but Superhuman has shared no roadmap, no pricing commitments, and no timeline for integration. Free-tier continuity is not guaranteed. Cloud-hosted audio, acquisition uncertainty, and no self-hosting option make this the wrong bet for a solopreneur who needs a stable, private notetaker. Export your data now if you use it.

When to Revisit

Meetily is the right pick today. If your practice grows to a team of five and you need CRM-synced notes, centralized meeting history, and admin controls, look at the Meetily Enterprise tier — custom pricing, self-hosted with compliance SLAs — or evaluate whether Granola Business at $14/user/month makes sense for the team. The moment you add staff who need shared access to meeting notes, the friction of Meetily’s manual export workflow will increase. Plan for that transition before it becomes a problem.

If you need zero setup and zero maintenance, and you are confident your jurisdiction does not require on-device processing, Fireflies Pro at $10/month is the alternative to benchmark against. But that is a different problem statement than the one this article answers.