Quill vs Meetily: two local-first AI meeting assistants

You've decided your meeting audio shouldn't go to someone else's cloud. Quill and Meetily both start there: each transcribes on your own machine by default, and neither sends a bot into the call. What separates them is everything that happens around the transcript, before the meeting and after it.

Disclosure: Meetily claims were checked against its public documentation as of v0.4.0, September 2026.

What they share

Both run speech-to-text locally rather than shipping audio to an external API. Neither joins as a visible participant.

The step after transcription is where the architectures diverge. Meetily’s setup downloads a Qwen 3.5 model alongside the transcription model, so summaries are written on your machine by default.

Quill transcribes audio on your computer, and your meetings are stored on your own machine rather than in their cloud. For notes and summaries, Quill routes the transcripts through its own processing layer to zero-retention LLM providers, and they aren't kept after processing. If you want that step on your machine too, BYO LLM bypasses our servers entirely, and Quill can be configured to run completely offline.

Meetily also offers "Hosted AI," its own hosted summary service.

Meetily: open source, on-device by default

Meetily is MIT-licensed and the source is on GitHub. You can read it, audit what it does with your audio, and run the whole stack yourself.

Its default path is private. Onboarding downloads two models, roughly 2 to 3 GB in total, and from then on both transcription and summarization run locally. If your requirement is that nothing about a meeting ever leaves the machine, Meetily meets it out of the box and Quill meets it once you configure BYO LLM or offline mode.

What Meetily doesn't have is the layer around the summary. As of v0.4.0 its docs describe no calendar sync, no integrations with Slack, Notion or CRM tools, and no MCP support. Calendar and Obsidian integrations are on their published roadmap. Notes come out of Meetily as notes. Moving them anywhere else is manual.

Quill: the work around the meeting

Quill transcribes on your computer and stores your meetings there. The difference shows up on either side of the call, and most of it is Quilliam, the agent that reads your meeting history and can act on it. Meetily has nothing like it yet.

Before a meeting, Quill syncs your calendar and writes a short brief from your past conversations with the same people: two to four bullets on what you committed to last time, what's still open, and what came up elsewhere that bears on this one. Each bullet links to the meeting it came from.

During the call, transcripts are written chunk by chunk as the conversation goes. Quill captures your system audio and your microphone, so it works the same on Zoom, Teams, Meet, anything else with a dial-in, and a conversation across a table. You can run the meeting in Spanish and get the notes in English.

You can also just ask. "What did we commit to in the last three calls with Jordan?" goes to Quilliam, which answers from your own meetings rather than making you scroll them. Those conversations are stored locally alongside everything else, and your question travels the same path as a summary: through Quill's processing layer to the same zero-retention providers, covered by the same BYO LLM switch if you'd rather it didn't.

Afterward, Quill writes a recap, pulls out action items, and drafts follow-ups. Then it can put them where the work actually lives. Sixteen tools are wired up out of the box: Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Attio and Affinity on the CRM side; Linear, Jira through Atlassian, GitHub, ClickUp and monday.com for tracking work; Notion, Obsidian, Airtable and Gamma for notes and docs; plus Slack and Todoist. CRM and project tools are on Pro.

All of it runs over MCP, and Quill is on both sides of that protocol. The client is what lets Quilliam take actions inside Notion or Linear rather than just hand them data. The server goes the other way, exposing your meetings to Claude Code, Cursor, Codex or Claude Desktop, and it binds to 127.0.0.1 and refuses any non-localhost origin, so that access never crosses your machine.

Point Quill at any other MCP server, or wire up a custom webhook, and that works the same way.

There's also a Quill mobile app for recording away from your desk, on iOS and Android. Mobile is a Pro feature, and a phone recording reaches your machine through Quill Cloud, which syncs end-to-end encrypted under a sync password you hold. Your organization can switch mobile off entirely. Meetily has no mobile app today. It ships desktop apps for macOS and Windows, with Linux build-from-source for now and a native app in development.

Side by side

FAQs

Does Quill send my audio to the cloud? Not from the desktop app by default, where audio is transcribed on your computer and stays there. The mobile apps are the exception: a phone recording travels through Quill Cloud to reach your machine, end-to-end encrypted, and your organization can turn mobile off. Separately, and on either platform, Quill routes the transcript through its own processing layer to zero-retention LLM providers by default, and it isn't kept after processing. If you'd rather nothing left your machine at all, BYO LLM bypasses our servers entirely, and Quill can be configured to run completely offline.

Where are my meetings stored? Locally, on your own computer, not in our cloud. You control how long recordings are kept. If you use the mobile app, that recording passes through Quill Cloud encrypted on its way to your machine; the copy you keep and work from is the local one.

Can Meetily connect to Slack, Notion or a CRM? Its v0.4.0 docs describe no out-of-the-box integrations and no MCP support. Quill ships with sixteen connected tools and works with any MCP server, with CRM and project tools on Pro.

What's the setup difference in practice? Both install like a desktop app and both download a speech model on first run. Meetily also downloads a summary model, roughly 2 to 3 GB in total. Quill connects to your calendar and routes summaries through its default LLM providers unless you configure your own.

Download Quill and record your next meeting.