Meetily and Granola are both meeting note-taking tools that skip recording video, but they take almost opposite approaches to where the processing happens. Meetily's Community edition is open source and genuinely local-first — Whisper.cpp transcribes on-device, and Ollama can summarize locally too, no account required. Granola's "no bot joins the call" pitch sounds private, but its own documentation confirms live audio is streamed to a third-party cloud transcription provider as the meeting happens.
Granola's strength is polish and integrations: AI summaries and chat are available on every tier, and it connects directly to HubSpot, Notion, Slack, Attio, Affinity, and MCP-based workflows for Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor. Meetily is more utilitarian — Markdown/PDF/DOCX exports, self-hosting, and GDPR/HIPAA/SOC2-readiness for teams that need that, but speaker-separated transcription is a paid Pro feature rather than included standard.
Neither records the underlying video or audio of the call for later playback — both output text: notes, transcripts, and summaries, not a recording you can go back and watch.
