The best tl;dv alternatives in 2026

It depends on what you're leaving. If it's the bot, or the fact that tl;dv's bot-free recording keeps only audio, Koi records the call on your Mac with no bot and can keep a video of the screen, saved on your Mac. If you want another free cloud notetaker for a team, Fathom and MeetGeek are the closest swaps. Jamie and Bluedot skip the bot and keep the cloud.

We make Koi, so read this with that in mind. Koi is Mac only, splits a call into You and Them rather than naming each speaker, and has no CRM sync or team workspace. Everything about the other apps comes from their own sites and help pages, checked October 21, 2026. We didn't run tests or benchmarks.

tl;dv records Google Meet, Zoom and Microsoft Teams calls. By default a bot joins the meeting and records video and audio. Its desktop app, for Macs with Apple silicon or Intel and for Windows, records from your system audio instead, so no bot joins. There's no native phone app yet, its homepage says.

The catch with the desktop route is in tl;dv's help center: bot-free recording captures audio only, your microphone and the other people's sound. No video, no screen share and no chat. Either way, the recording goes to your tl;dv library, where it's transcribed and turned into AI notes in its cloud.

tl;dv transcribes in 30+ languages, says its data is hosted and stored in the EU, and promises never to train AI on your recordings. It logs call notes and outcomes to CRMs, with HubSpot, Salesforce and Salesloft workflows, and connects to thousands of apps through integrations.

The free plan is the main draw, and the main reason people leave. From tl;dv's own list of Free plan limits:

• Full AI notes on your first 10 meetings only. After that, Free writes automatic notes for the first 10 minutes of each meeting. The counts are for life, not per month.
• Recordings are kept for 3 months, and you can download them only in the last 4 weeks before they're deleted.
• Every plan stops a recording at 3 hours.
• Overlapping meetings can't be recorded, and under heavy load a Free meeting may not be recorded at all.

Past Free, Pro is €29 a seat a month, or €18 billed yearly, and Business is €39 a month, or €29 billed yearly, on tl;dv's pricing page. Other reasons come up too: a bot in the participant list on client calls, bot-free recordings with no video, and every call living in someone else's cloud.

With tl;dv's desktop app, from its help center:

1. Install the tl;dv desktop app for Mac or Windows and sign in.
2. On a Mac, give it the audio permissions it asks for.
3. Join your call in Meet, Zoom or Teams and start a bot-free recording.
4. When it ends, the audio lands in your tl;dv library within a few minutes, transcribed, with AI notes.

With Koi:

1. Tap Fn + ⌃ on the call, or click Record on Koi's dock.
2. Pick Online call, then Audio only or Audio and video.
3. The first time, turn Koi on under Screen Recording in System Settings, then quit and reopen Koi.
4. Talk. You and Them are written down on your Mac as you go.
5. Click stop on the dock, or tap Fn + ⌃ again. The call's page opens in Recents, and asks "Summarize this call?"

A few, each with its limit in a different place. Fathom's Free plan lists unlimited recordings and transcriptions. MeetGeek's gives 3 hours of transcription a month, Jamie's 10 AI notes a month up to 30 minutes each, and Bluedot's 5 meetings in total. Meetily's Community edition is free and open source, with no meeting count at all, because it runs on your own computer.

Koi isn't free. Pro starts with a 3-day trial that needs a card, and every plan records calls without a limit after that. If you record a lot of calls and hate counting them, Lifetime, paid once, is the closest thing to never thinking about it again.

tl;dv's desktop app takes the bot out of the call, but the audio still goes to tl;dv to become text. Most apps on this page work the same way. Two different promises are easy to mix up:

• Bot-free is about what the other people see. Nothing joins the participant list.
• Local is about where your call goes. The audio is turned into text on your own computer and isn't uploaded.

Koi and Meetily do both. With Koi, speech becomes text on your Mac, and the audio or video and the transcript are saved on your Mac until you delete them. Koi needs a connection to start a recording, to check you have a plan, and if you say yes to notes, the transcript's words go to its AI. Everything else here transcribes in the cloud. For more apps that keep calls on your computer, see local meeting notes for Mac.

From each app's own site, checked October 21, 2026. “Not listed” means the site doesn't say.

Koi is the better fit when the call should stay on your Mac, you want video without a bot, and you'd rather not count meetings or watch recordings expire. It also does a lot tl;dv doesn't: unlimited dictation in any app, a calendar that offers the dates a call agreed on, and an assistant you can ask about your screen.

• Bot-free with video, saved on your Mac? Koi.
• A free cloud notetaker without lifetime caps? Fathom.
• Sales calls filling in CRM fields? MeetGeek.
• Bot-free, in the EU, on every device? Jamie.
• Open source and local, on Mac or Windows? Meetily.

Whatever you pick, a bot-free recorder doesn't tell the call it's recording, so ask at the start. Our guides to recording a Google Meet call and a Zoom meeting on a Mac cover the setup. More options in the best AI note takers for Mac, or see Koi's plans.