The best AI meeting notes app for Mac depends on which of seven things you refuse to give up
Every “best of” list in this category is written by somebody in the category, and they all rank themselves first. So here are seven questions with yes/no answers you can check on a vendor’s own page, and where nine Mac tools land on them.
- Granola does not keep your audio. Its own security page says so: “Granola doesn’t store the audio from meetings - it transcribes in real time on macOS/Windows, or after your meeting using temporarily cached audio on Mobile.”
- Fathom has the strongest free tier — unlimited recordings and transcriptions at $0 — but its pricing page marks bot-free capture as "*Beta feature for Mac” and keeps action items on paid plans.
- Otter’s free plan is metered: “300 monthly transcription minutes”, a 30-minute cap per conversation, and “3 lifetime audio/video file imports”.
- Fireflies is openly a bot, and says so: “Fireflies is always visible in the participant list to ensure compliance.” Its free plan gives the whole team 400 minutes of storage.
- Narada is on the strict end of three axes (no bot, audio kept in your folder, transcription on-device) and loses on five others, including no Windows, no iPhone, no team features and no CRM integrations.
There is no single best one, and any list that hands you a number 1 is describing its author’s product. What decides it is narrower: seven things these tools differ on that you cannot change after you’ve recorded two hundred meetings, and most people only care about two or three of them.
So: the questions first, answered from each vendor’s own pages, then the tools grouped by what you’re trying to protect. Narada is one of the nine and it isn’t at the top of a ranking, because there is no ranking.
The seven questions
- Does something join the call? What the other side sees in the participant list.
- Does the audio survive? Kept as a file, kept in a vendor’s cloud, or discarded after transcription.
- Where does transcription run? Your Mac, or someone’s GPU.
- Do you end up with files you own? A folder you chose, with the audio and the text in it, readable without the app.
- What's the meter? Minutes, meetings, storage, or how far back you can read your own notes.
- Does it work with no network?
- Is it a Mac app? Native, or a web view, or a Chrome extension.
Deliberately not on that list: ease of use, “accuracy”, and anything with the word intuitive in it. Not because they don’t matter — because they can’t be checked, and every listicle in this category rates its own author easiest to use. The seven above are each answerable from a page the vendor published about itself.
Questions 2 and 4 are one-way doors. If your tool discards audio, the call you needed to re-hear is gone, and no upgrade brings it back.
What the vendors' own pages say
All read on 4 August 2026, URLs at the bottom.
| Tool | Joins the call? | Audio kept? | Transcription runs | Free tier’s meter |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Narada | No — taps your Mac’s audio | Yes, .m4a in your folder | On your Mac | No meter on the recorder tier |
| Granola | No | No — “doesn’t store the audio from meetings” | Cloud (Deepgram, Assembly named) | Rolling 30-day note access |
| Fathom | Optional — bot-free is "*Beta feature for Mac” | In Fathom’s cloud | Cloud | Unlimited recordings; no action items |
| Fireflies | Yes — “always visible in the participant list” | In Fireflies' cloud | Cloud | Unlimited transcripts, 400 min storage/team |
| Otter | Both — “Otter Notetaker” auto-joins, or the desktop app records botlessly | In Otter’s cloud | Cloud | 300 min/month, 30 min per conversation |
| tl;dv | Desktop app records “with no meeting bot required” | In tl;dv’s cloud, EU-hosted — except AI summarisation, which may run in the US | Cloud | Free plan exists; prices geo-vary, no USD figure verifiable |
| Jamie | No — “The AI note taker. Without a bot.” | No — its docs say the audio is deleted after transcription | Cloud, Frankfurt | 10 meetings/month, 30 min cap |
| MacWhisper Pro | No — records system audio | Yes, local | On your Mac | Free tier is free forever; Pro is €64 once |
| Apple Notes | No | Yes, in the note | On your Mac (M1 or later) | Free with macOS |
Two of those cells are not answered where you would look for them. Jamie’s pricing page says nothing about audio retention — its docs do. Fathom’s free-tier summary cap is in the help centre, not on the plan card. Read the documentation, not the pricing table.
Otter deserves a note, because “Otter is the bot one” is now half wrong. It ships both: “Otter Notetaker” joins Zoom, Meet and Teams from your calendar, and the desktop app records “the audio from your device” with nothing joining. Both end in Otter’s cloud, and its own help centre puts the consent burden on you either way: “You’re responsible for notifying participants and obtaining any required consent before recording.”
If the recording itself has to survive
For anyone who has needed the sentence rather than the gist — a disputed commitment, a number, a client quoting you back to yourself.
Narada. Records your microphone and your Mac’s output as separate streams, transcribes both on-device with Parakeet TDT v3, and leaves an .m4a and a timestamped transcript in a dated folder you picked — with a Markdown summary and a JSON analysis beside them once an AI mode is on. Move the folder to another Mac and it all still works; no library database holds it hostage. Pick this if you want the archive to outlive the subscription. Weaknesses further down, and there are five.
MacWhisper Pro. €64, “Pay once”, including lifetime updates — the tier table is on macwhisper.com. Pro is where meeting capture lands: “Automatically record meetings in Zoom, Teams, Webex, Skype, Chime, Discord and more”, plus automatic speaker recognition and batch transcription. Pick this if you mostly transcribe files and dictate and meeting capture is a bonus. Weakness: it’s a transcription tool with meeting features added, not a meeting product — no calendar-triggered recording, no follow-up ledger, and its meeting detection notifies rather than starts, so you click Record every time. The Mac App Store edition is a different app on a subscription and has no meeting detection at all.
Fathom. Keeps recordings, with clips and playlists to watch them back. Weakness for this group: they live in Fathom’s cloud, so retention is their policy decision rather than your filesystem.
Granola is the wrong tool here, and it isn't close. Its security page: “Granola doesn’t store the audio from meetings - it transcribes in real time on macOS/Windows, or after your meeting using temporarily cached audio on Mobile.” Deliberate design, not a bug — and the same page names Deepgram, Assembly, OpenAI and Anthropic behind the notes. If you like everything else about Granola, the side-by-side is here.
If nothing may leave the Mac
Usually because IT blocked something, or because you signed an NDA that didn’t contemplate a transcription vendor.
Narada's on-device mode runs the summary as well as the transcript locally: a Gemma model via MLX, no account, no key, no network. The bill, because a claim like that is only believable with one attached — Apple Silicon only (the app runs on Intel; this mode doesn’t), a one-time 3 GB or 7 GB model download depending on your RAM, 7–8 GB of memory held while it works and released about three minutes after it goes idle, and notes that are lighter than the cloud's. That last one is in the app’s own settings screen, not a footnote.
MacWhisper runs local Whisper and Parakeet models, which covers the transcript half of the same ground — though its Assistant sends the transcript to OpenAI or Anthropic if you use it, and DeepL if you translate. Superwhisper is dictation-first — macOS, Windows and iOS, with meeting recording as a feature — and its docs price Pro at $8.49/month, $84.99/year or $249.99 once. Read the tier split before relying on it here: local voice models are a Pro feature, so the free path runs in the cloud.
Granola, Otter, Fireflies, Fathom, tl;dv and Jamie all fail this test by construction. They’re cloud services. That’s their architecture, not an accusation.
One nuance on Narada, because half-truths here are worse than nothing: audio never leaves the Mac in any mode, but in the paid Pro AI tier and in bring-your-own-key mode the transcript text goes to OpenAI after you explicitly consent (and to whatever server you name, if you point it at your own endpoint). If that’s disqualifying, use the on-device or recorder-only mode; both are free.
If you need a team, a CRM, and other people’s calls
Then Narada is the wrong answer — no sharing, no team workspace, no admin console, no integrations to push anything anywhere.
Fireflies is built for it, priced per seat: $10 annually on Pro (regularly $18), $19 Business, $39 Enterprise, unlimited storage from Business up. Otter Business is $30/user/month or $19.99 annually, unlimited meetings, 4-hour cap. Fathom Team is $19/user/month, $15 annually, two seats minimum. tl;dv covers Google Meet, Zoom and Teams and stores recordings in the EU, which some procurement teams care about a great deal — with one carve-out in its own privacy policy: for summarisation, “limited portions of meeting transcripts” go either to EU Google Cloud regions or to the United States, depending on a setting in your account.
The trade here is the bot and the upload, in exchange for something a local app genuinely cannot do: capture a meeting nobody on your side attended.
If free and unlimited is the whole constraint
Fathom, and it isn’t close. $0, “Unlimited recordings + transcriptions”, instant AI summaries, search across calls.
Two limits are on Fathom’s own pricing page. Bot-free capture is marked "*Beta feature for Mac” — so if your reason for shopping is that you don’t want a bot in the participant list, you’re relying on a beta path. And action items are not on the free plan; they start at Premium, $20/month or $16 annually. A third limit is only in the help centre: free gets “Advanced summaries for your first 5 calls each month”, and the plainer template after that.
The rest of the free tiers, for scale: Jamie gives 10 meetings at 30 minutes, Otter 300 minutes a month, and Granola hides your own notes after 30 days — “Notes older than 30 days are not deleted — we keep them stored — but they are not accessible in Granola.” Narada’s free tier gives away a different shape of thing: unlimited local recording, on-device transcription and files you own, with the summaries needing your own API key, the on-device model, or $6.99 a month.
If you only need this occasionally
Apple already ships two thirds of it. Notes records and transcribes audio inside a note, and with Apple Intelligence on it can summarise the recording. Two limits from Apple’s own page: transcription needs “Mac computers with M1 or later”, and the device language has to be English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese or Traditional Chinese.
The bigger limit is the one Apple doesn’t bother stating: it records a microphone. On a video call you get your own half and nothing else. That’s the whole system-audio problem, and it’s why this category exists.
Where Narada is the wrong answer
Five things, none of them phrased kindly:
- Mac only. macOS 15.6 or later, no Windows, no iPhone, no web app. If half your team is on Windows, stop reading.
- No team features at all. No sharing links, no shared workspace, no admin, no seats. It’s a single-user tool that keeps files on one machine.
- No integrations. Nothing pushes into Notion, Slack, HubSpot or a task manager. Export is “here is the folder”. There’s a read-only Claude Desktop connector, and its search is keyword matching, not semantic — a search for “invoice” won’t surface the meeting where you said “billing”.
- One developer. That’s why bugs get fixed on a weekend, and why there’s no support SLA.
- The AI is either lighter or it costs. On-device notes are lighter and need Apple Silicon plus a multi-gigabyte download; the better ones mean Pro AI at $6.99/month or $69.99/year (3-day trial), or your own OpenAI key. No live transcription either — the transcript arrives after the meeting — no translation, and speaker labels are unnamed (
Speaker 1,Speaker 2) and exist only on the call’s audio, never for an in-person recording.
And one item that belongs in any comparison of local recorders: macOS audio can fail mid-recording — a device gets reshaped underneath you, the HAL drops cycles. Narada compares every finished recording against itself and marks it Incomplete, with a reason, when frames are missing rather than handing you a clean-looking file holding 6% of the meeting. It cannot get the missing audio back. Nobody can. A tool that never warns you isn’t more reliable; it just isn’t checking.
Before you record anything
None of these apps makes recording lawful, and none of them tells the other participants for you. Consent rules vary by country and by US state, and some places require everyone to agree rather than just you. Say at the top of the call that you’re recording — four seconds, and it’s settled.
Sources
Every page below was read on 4 August 2026.
- granola.ai/security — “Granola doesn’t store the audio from meetings…"; Deepgram, Assembly, OpenAI, Anthropic named.
- granola.ai/pricing — Basic $0 / Business $14 / Enterprise $35 per user per month.
- docs.granola.ai — subscriptions and billing — the rolling 30-day note-access window, monthly-only billing.
- fathom.ai/pricing — Free $0 “Unlimited recordings + transcriptions”; “Choice of bot-free* and bot capture-types (*Beta feature for Mac)"; Premium $20/$16; Team $19/$15 (2-seat minimum); Business $34/$25.
- help.fathom.video — free vs premium for individuals — “Advanced summaries for your first 5 calls each month”.
- fireflies.ai/pricing — Free: unlimited transcripts, “400 mins/team” storage; Pro $10, Business $19, Enterprise $39 per seat annually.
- guide.fireflies.ai — how Fireflies joins and records — “Fireflies is always visible in the participant list to ensure compliance.”
- otter.ai/pricing — Basic “300 monthly transcription minutes”, 30-minute cap, “3 lifetime audio/video file imports”; Pro $16.99 / $8.33 annual; Business $30 / $19.99 annual.
- help.otter.ai — Otter Desktop App — botless recording of device audio, and the consent burden it places on the user.
- help.otter.ai — stop Otter Notetaker from automatically joining — the bot mode and its calendar auto-join.
- meetjamie.ai/pricing — Free €0 (10 meetings, 30 min), Plus €21, Pro €39, Team €33/seat, annual billing; meetjamie.ai — “The AI note taker. Without a bot.”
- docs.meetjamie.ai — data — audio uploaded to Frankfurt, processed on Modal GPUs, then “we delete all audio files permanently”.
- tldv.io/desktop-app — records “directly from your system audio, with no meeting bot required”; Google Meet, Zoom, Teams. Its pricing page is priced in the visitor’s local currency, so no USD figures here.
- tldv.io/privacy — European hosting, and the AI carve-out placing transcript portions in the EU or the United States by account setting.
- macwhisper.com — €0 free tier, Pro €64 “Pay once”, “Includes lifetime updates”; Pro’s “Automatically record meetings in Zoom, Teams, Webex, Skype, Chime, Discord and more”; “We use local models to transcribe your files”.
- docs.macwhisper.com — record meetings — the “Meeting Detected” notification, and no meeting detection in the Mac App Store edition.
- superwhisper.com/docs — Pro — $8.49/month, $84.99/year, $249.99 once; local voice models are Pro-only.
- Apple Support — Record and transcribe audio in Notes on Mac — “M1 or later”, the ten device languages, Apple Intelligence summarisation.
- Narada’s Mac App Store listing — free recorder tier, Pro AI $6.99/month or $69.99/year, 3-day trial, macOS 15.6 or later.
Zoom’s and Microsoft’s own assistants are left out of the table on purpose: what they cost and cover depends on the licence your organisation already holds, and printing a Microsoft SKU price from somebody’s blog is how comparison pages go stale. Ask whoever administers your account — if it’s already licensed, it’s the cheapest thing to try first.
Questions people ask about this
What is the best AI meeting notes app for Mac?
There is no single answer, because the tools differ on things you cannot change later — whether a bot appears in the call, whether the audio file survives, and whether transcription happens on your Mac or on a server. Decide which of those is a dealbreaker first, then the shortlist is usually two or three apps.
Does Granola keep the audio of my meetings?
No. Granola’s security page states that it “doesn’t store the audio from meetings”, and names Deepgram, Assembly, OpenAI and Anthropic as the providers it uses. You get the notes and the transcript, not a recording to listen back to.
Which Mac meeting apps work with no internet connection?
Ones that transcribe on-device. MacWhisper runs local models, and Narada transcribes on-device with a local AI mode — Apple Silicon only — that also writes the summary offline. Both fetch their models once over the network first. Anything that lists Deepgram, AssemblyAI or OpenAI as a transcription provider needs the network every time.
Can I get AI meeting notes on a Mac without paying a subscription?
Partly. Narada’s recorder tier — capture, on-device transcription, files in your own folder — is free, and its AI works with your own OpenAI key or fully on-device with no Narada subscription. Its managed Pro AI tier is a subscription at $6.99 a month or $69.99 a year with a 3-day trial. MacWhisper Pro is a one-time payment, but it is a transcriber, not a notes product.
Try it on your next call
Narada records your Mac's audio and your microphone, transcribes on-device, and hands you the decisions and follow-ups. Free to use, no account, no bot in the meeting.