Weeve vs Meetily: two local notetakers compared

Most comparisons in this category are easy to write. One tool sends your meeting to a server and the other does not, and the argument writes itself.

This is not one of those. Meetily is genuinely, completely local. It records, transcribes and summarises on your own machine, its core is open source under an MIT licence, and you can read it. On the question that usually decides these comparisons, Meetily and Weeve give the same answer.

So the honest version of this page is not about privacy. Both tools keep your meetings on your machine. It is about who each one is built for, and the difference is real enough that most people will know within a paragraph which side they are on.

The short answer

Choose Meetily if you want control and you are comfortable earning it. It is free, open source, runs on Windows as well as macOS, and lets you swap the transcription model and point summaries at whatever you like, including a local model. If you want to inspect the code or self-host the whole thing, Meetily is the only tool in this comparison that lets you.

Choose Weeve if you want the same privacy guarantee without configuring anything. You install a Mac app, press record, and get a summary. There is no runtime to install, no model to choose, and nothing to configure before your first meeting.

The trade is control against setup. Both answers are legitimate.

Where Meetily is genuinely better

It is worth being specific about this rather than waving at it, because on several points Meetily wins outright.

It is open source, and that is not a marketing line. The code is MIT licensed and public. If you work somewhere that requires a security review before software touches a client conversation, you can hand your engineers the repository instead of a trust page. No vendor claim about local processing is as strong as being able to read the code, and Weeve cannot offer that.

It runs on Windows. Weeve does not. If your practice is half Mac and half Windows, this comparison is already over and Meetily is the answer. There is no version of the Weeve argument that survives a colleague on a ThinkPad.

The free tier is genuinely unlimited. Meetily's community edition is free and open source with no meeting cap. Weeve's free Starter plan stops at 10 recordings a month and 2 projects. For a heavy user who will not pay, Meetily is simply the better deal.

You choose the models. Whisper or Parakeet for transcription, and Whisper runs from tiny through large-v3, so you can trade accuracy against speed on your own hardware. Summaries are pluggable through a provider picker: a built-in local model that onboarding downloads for you, Ollama if you already run it, or your own Claude, OpenAI, Groq or OpenRouter key. That flexibility is the product's whole design philosophy.

That last point deserves a note, because it is the one place people misread Meetily. Pointing summaries at an API key is a choice you make, not a default you have to catch. Run it with Ollama and the entire pipeline is local. Meetily's local-first claim is real, and anyone who tells you otherwise has not read the setup.

Where Weeve is different

Not better at everything. Different, in a specific direction.

There is nothing to set up. To be fair to Meetily, its installer is not demanding either: macOS 11 or Windows 10, 8GB of RAM and 10GB of storage, and it installs FFmpeg for you. Native installers exist for macOS and Windows. The terminal only appears if you want Linux, or you want to modify the app.

Weeve has no equivalent step. You download a Mac app, sign in, grant it audio permission, and record. Weeve fetches its local model on first run and then never needs the network for a transcript. For someone whose job is law, therapy or consulting rather than software, that difference is not cosmetic. It decides whether the tool gets used in a fortnight's time or abandoned after the first failed install.

The choices are already made. Weeve picks the transcription model and runs summaries on a local model on your device. You cannot swap it. That is a limitation if you want control, and the point if you do not. An opinionated tool is faster to trust precisely because there is no configuration in which you can accidentally send a client conversation somewhere you did not intend.

It is a Mac app rather than a cross-platform app. Speaker identification, projects, file import and export are built for one platform rather than three, which is a narrower promise and a more finished one.

What the first ten minutes look like

The setup argument is the whole basis of this comparison, so it is worth being concrete instead of hand-waving at it.

Meetily, the installer path. Download the macOS .dmg or the Windows executable and run it. For most people this works, and the local pipeline is ready without touching a terminal. This is the path the project recommends and it is genuinely straightforward.

Meetily, the from-source path. Building for Linux means working from the open-source repository, and that is where Meetily lists Node.js 18 or later, Python 3.10 or later and a Rust toolchain. This path is for people who want to modify the app, and it is a wall if you have not done it before.

Worth being precise, because it is easy to get this wrong in Meetily's disfavour: changing the Whisper model size and choosing where summaries run are both done in Settings, not in a terminal. Neither requires the from-source toolchain.

Weeve. Download the Mac app, sign in with your email, grant microphone and system audio permission, press record. Weeve fetches its local model on first run, so there is no model to choose and no runtime to install. Meetily's community edition asks for no account at all, which is a genuine point in its favour.

The gap only matters at the edges, which is exactly where tools get abandoned. If Meetily's installer works first time and the default model suits you, the two experiences are similar. If it does not, one path leads to a terminal and the other does not, and which of those you find acceptable is mostly a fact about your job rather than about the software.

What open source actually buys you

This is Meetily's strongest card and it is worth explaining rather than just listing.

A closed-source app that says it processes locally is asking for trust. You can verify it circumstantially, by watching network traffic or by pulling the plug and seeing whether it still works, but you cannot read the thing and know. An MIT-licensed codebase removes that gap. Your own engineers can confirm the claim, and so can a security reviewer who has never heard of the vendor.

For a regulated organisation this is not a nice-to-have. Plenty of security processes will accept "we read the source" where they would not accept "the vendor's website says so", particularly for a small vendor without SOC 2 or ISO 27001 behind it. Neither Weeve nor Meetily is certified, so for anyone whose review depends on evidence rather than a badge, Meetily is straightforwardly the easier approval.

The counter-argument is narrower than it sounds. Open source means the code is auditable, not that anyone has audited it, and running from source shifts responsibility for updates and patching onto you. Both are fine trades if you have the capacity. Neither is free.

What you get for paying

Both tools have a paid tier and they buy different things.

Meetily's community edition is free, open source and uncapped. Its Pro tier is $10 per user a month billed annually, which is $120 a year. Weeve's free Starter plan caps you at 10 recordings a month and 2 projects, and Pro is €12,99 a month excluding VAT for unlimited recordings and projects.

So the free comparison favours Meetily clearly, and the paid comparison is close enough that it should not decide anything. If you are choosing on price alone, the answer is Meetily's community edition, and no further reading is required.

The philosophical difference, stated plainly

Meetily hands you the parts. Weeve hands you the result.

Meetily's design says: the user should be able to see, change and own everything, and configuration is a fair price for that. It is a good position and it is why the project exists.

Weeve's design says: most people in a confidential profession do not want to make these decisions, and every decision you hand them is another chance to get it wrong. The privacy guarantee should hold without the user having to configure it correctly.

Neither of those is the correct answer in general. They are correct for different people.

Who should pick which

Meetily is the better choice if you:

• Use Windows, or work with people who do

• Want to read or audit the code, or self-host

• Want to choose your own transcription and summarisation models

• Are comfortable in a terminal when something needs fixing

• Need unlimited meetings without paying

Weeve is the better choice if you:

• Are on a Mac and want it to work in the next ten minutes

• Would rather not decide which transcription model to run

• Want speaker identification, projects and export in the free tier rather than behind a paid one

• Are recommending a tool to colleagues who will not read setup instructions

• Value an opinionated Mac app over a configurable one

What neither of them does

On the plans most people will use, both tools keep your meetings on your machine, and that has the same cost for both. There is no shared cloud workspace where a colleague can open a transcript from their own laptop, and no web app you can check from a phone. Nothing syncs, because syncing would mean uploading, and uploading is the thing you chose these tools to avoid.

One exception, and it belongs to Meetily: its Enterprise tier adds a central server that syncs transcripts across a team's devices, self-hosted on your own infrastructure. That is sharing without handing the data to a vendor, and Weeve has no equivalent.

If you need a searchable team archive that several people can reach from their own machines, neither of these is built for that today. That is a real trade, and it is worth making deliberately rather than discovering it a month in.

Both also ask you to handle consent yourself. On-device processing changes where the recording lives, not whether you need permission to make it. There is a fuller breakdown in the guide on whether it is legal to record a meeting.

FAQ

Is Meetily really fully local?

Yes. Transcription and recording run on your device, and summaries run locally too if you use a local model through Ollama. If you configure it with a Claude or Groq API key instead, summaries go to that provider, but that is your choice rather than the default behaviour. The project is open source, so the claim is verifiable rather than promised.

Is Weeve open source?

No. That is a genuine advantage for Meetily. Weeve's local-processing claim rests on the app's behaviour and its documentation rather than on published source code.

Does either one put a bot in the call?

Neither does. Both capture audio from the machine itself, so no extra participant appears in Zoom, Teams or Google Meet. This is one of the few things they do identically.

Which is more accurate?

Weeve transcribes with Parakeet, an open on-device model that auto-detects the spoken language, and picks the size to suit your hardware. Meetily lets you choose, including Whisper from tiny to large-v3 and Parakeet, which it recommends on machines with less memory. Accuracy depends mostly on the model that ends up running and on your audio. Test both on your own recording rather than trusting anyone's accuracy claim, including ours.

Can I run Meetily on Linux?

Yes, by building from source through the open-source repository. There is no prebuilt Linux installer. Weeve does not run on Linux at all.

Is Weeve worth paying for when Meetily's community edition is free?

Only if the setup and the opinionated defaults are worth something to you. If you enjoy configuring your tools, they are not, and Meetily is free. If your time is expensive and your patience for terminals is short, that is what you are buying.

The best local notetaker is the one you will still be using next month.

If that sounds like the version with fewer decisions in it, Weeve's Starter plan is free and runs entirely on your Mac. Try it on a real meeting and see which side of this comparison you are actually on. If you would rather not install anything yet, the browser transcriber runs one file in the tab on any operating system.