Quill Meetings has picked up attention for a good reason: it is one of a small number of AI notetakers that keeps audio on your machine rather than treating the cloud as the default. If you have landed here, you are probably either evaluating it, or you have used it and hit a specific limit.

This page is a comparison of seven tools worth looking at in 2026, including where Quill itself is the right answer. We have tried to be specific about what each one actually does rather than restating feature lists, and to be clear where our own product fits and where it does not.

What Quill Meetings does well

Worth stating plainly, because a comparison that opens by rubbishing the incumbent is not useful.

Quill transcribes meetings and produces minutes, to-do lists and weekly summaries. It stores audio files locally, which puts it in the smaller privacy-conscious camp. It supports speaker labels, lets you ask questions of your notes, and handles 25+ languages. There are some genuinely unusual touches — auto-screenshots during calls, role-specific note templates, and the ability to generate written content from meeting notes. There is a free tier, with Pro, Pro Plus and Enterprise above it.

If your requirement is "capture meetings well, keep the audio local, work in a language other than English", Quill is a reasonable place to stop reading.

People usually start looking elsewhere for one of four reasons: they want output that lands in a project tracker rather than a to-do list; they want transcription itself to run on-device rather than just storage being local; they need a specific platform or integration; or they want something with a larger support and integration ecosystem behind it.

How to actually compare these tools

Before the list, four questions separate this category far better than feature tables do.

Does a bot join the call? Some tools dial into your meeting as a visible participant. Others capture on your machine. This changes how meetings feel and whether clients ask questions.

Where is the audio processed? Separate from the above, and frequently conflated with it. A tool can capture locally and still upload audio to a cloud transcription provider. Our guide to on-device meeting transcription explains the distinction and the exact question to ask a vendor.

What comes out at the end? A transcript, a note, a to-do list, or issues in your tracker. This is the single biggest practical difference between these products and the one most comparison pages skip.

Who is it built for? Sales teams, engineering teams and solo consultants need different things, and almost every tool here has a clear centre of gravity.

1. Lunar — for teams whose meetings should produce tickets

We build Lunar, so treat this section with appropriate suspicion and check the claims.

Lunar is a macOS desktop app (Windows is coming) that captures your microphone and system audio directly. Nothing joins the call as a participant on Zoom, Google Meet or Teams. Transcription can run fully on-device, and sessions stay on your machine until you sign in — at which point they sync so the team can read them.

The part that makes it different from everything else on this list: action items become Jira issues in the right project. You bind a folder to a Jira project once, with a default issue type and assignee, and after each call the action items arrive as proposed issues for you to review and click. The mechanics are covered in turning meeting action items into Jira issues.

During the call you can ask questions privately against the live transcript — what did they just say, what have I agreed to, did anyone mention the migration.

Choose it if: your team runs on Jira and your real problem is that decisions never reach the backlog.

Do not choose it if: you are on Windows today, or your work does not live in Jira — in which case the strongest argument for Lunar does not apply to you, and you should weigh the others on their merits.

Price: free during beta, including transcription, summaries and Jira issue creation.

2. Granola — for the best bot-free notes

Granola is the tool that made bot-free capture mainstream, and it is very good at what it does. Its model — you type sparse notes during the call, it fills them out afterwards — produces documents that read like a thoughtful colleague wrote them. The Mac app is polished and it does not keep a recording.

The caveat is the one people miss: Granola captures locally but passes audio to a cloud transcription provider, transcripts are held on US-hosted infrastructure, and on non-Enterprise plans your data is used to improve its models unless you opt out. It also cannot sign BAAs, which rules it out for some regulated work.

Choose it if: the notes themselves are the deliverable and you want the best-written ones.

Do not choose it if: your NDA or procurement process asks where audio is processed. More detail in our Granola alternatives roundup.

3. Otter.ai — for live collaborative notes

Otter has been in this market longer than almost anyone. The live transcript that everyone on a call can watch and annotate together is genuinely useful in interviews, workshops and lectures, and no bot-free tool replicates it — because watching a shared transcript in real time is something a participant can do and a background app cannot. Search across years of meetings is excellent and the integrations are mature.

The trade is the bot. It appears in the participant list, and your audio lives in Otter's cloud by design.

Choose it if: meetings are internal and collaborative, and a visible notetaker is not a problem.

Do not choose it if: you run client calls where a third party in the room needs explaining. See Otter.ai alternatives.

4. Fireflies.ai — for CRM and workflow automation

Fireflies is the most automation-oriented tool here. It identifies action items and pushes them into other systems, including a Jira integration, and its CRM sync is the reason many sales teams pick it.

It is bot-based and cloud-processed. Worth being precise about the Jira comparison, since it is the closest overlap with Lunar: Fireflies will create issues from detected action items, but capture happens via a bot in the call and audio is processed in its cloud. If your objection to other tools is the bot or the data path, that objection applies here too.

Choose it if: you want the broadest integration surface and the bot is not an issue.

Do not choose it if: bot-free capture is why you started looking. See Fireflies alternatives.

5. Fathom — for the easiest free start

Fathom is the simplest tool on this list to get running, with a genuinely generous free tier and a strong reputation among Zoom-centric teams. It records without a bot in some configurations and asks very little setup of you.

Recordings are stored in its cloud, which is what makes the searchable archive work — a reasonable trade, but a trade.

Choose it if: you want something working in five minutes without a credit card.

Do not choose it if: cloud storage of recordings is the thing you are trying to avoid.

6. Jamie — for bot-free capture from an EU company

Jamie is bot-free and built by a European company, which matters if your data policy has opinions about where processing happens and who can compel disclosure. It is a close analogue to Quill in shape: capture the meeting, produce a good summary, stay out of the participant list.

Like Quill and Granola, the output is a document rather than work items in a tracker.

Choose it if: EU data residency matters and notes are the deliverable.

Do not choose it if: you need the meeting to produce tickets.

7. Meetily — for maximum local control

Meetily is the strictest privacy option here: open source, transcription running 100% locally, summaries via your own API key, no bot, and it works offline. If your requirement is that audio never leaves the machine under any circumstances and you are willing to accept rough edges, it is hard to argue with.

The costs are the usual open-source ones: less polish, fewer integrations, and somebody on your team owning it.

Choose it if: you are in healthcare, legal or finance and "it runs entirely on my hardware" is a hard requirement.

Do not choose it if: you want something that works out of the box and integrates with your stack.

Quick comparison

Check current details with each vendor before you commit — this category changes fast, and pricing and processing arrangements change with it.

Frequently asked questions

What is the closest alternative to Quill Meetings?

On shape — bot-free, desktop, privacy-minded, note output — Granola and Jamie are the closest. If you want the same privacy posture but output that lands in a tracker rather than a to-do list, Lunar is the closer match.

Which of these keeps audio entirely on my machine?

Meetily transcribes fully locally by default. Lunar can, if you choose on-device transcription. Most others capture locally at best and process in the cloud — the distinction is explained in on-device meeting transcription.

Which one creates Jira issues?

Lunar creates issues natively in a bound project after your review. Fireflies has a Jira integration driven by a bot-based cloud workflow. The others export notes at best.

Do any of these work without a Mac?

Otter, Fireflies and Fathom are platform-agnostic. Quill, Granola and Lunar are macOS-first today — Lunar has Windows on the roadmap.

Is a free tier enough?

For an individual taking notes, often yes. Free tiers usually cap meeting minutes, retention or integrations, and integrations are where the time actually gets saved, so teams tend to hit the ceiling faster than individuals do.

How to decide

Strip it back to one question: when the meeting ends, what should exist?

If the answer is a good document, pick on note quality and privacy posture — Quill, Granola or Jamie. If the answer is a searchable archive everyone can annotate, Otter. If the answer is updated systems, Fireflies or Lunar, and then decide whether a bot in the call is acceptable. If the answer is "nothing may leave this machine", Meetily.

Most teams pick on features and discover a year later that the output shape was the thing that mattered.