Minutes vs tl;dv: where should the recording live?

tl;dv gives away more than almost anyone in this category: unlimited recordings, unlimited transcription in more than 30 languages, unlimited storage, and AI notes on your first ten meetings, at no cost. Minutes comes with Crest for $24.99 once and never sends the audio anywhere, because there is no server to send it to. That is the whole argument, and it only decides some meetings.

Last updated: 18 September 2026

Full disclosure: this page is published by the makers of Minutes. tl;dv's prices and limits below are taken from tl;dv's own pages, checked on 18 September 2026.

Side by side

The comparison table is at the top of this page.

Where Minutes is better

• Nothing is uploaded, so there is nothing to trust. Recording, transcription and the summary all run on your Mac with the models that ship inside macOS. It goes online only for the licence check, the update check and, if you choose the multilingual engine, a one-time model download. Pull the cable mid meeting and it keeps working.
• No seats, no cap, no retention window. tl;dv caps a recording at 3 hours on every plan and keeps free-plan data for up to 3 months. Minutes keeps whatever your disk keeps, for as long as you keep it, for $24.99 once with Crest.
• The notes outlive the app. One Markdown file per meeting, next to its audio, in a folder you chose. Stop using Minutes and every note still opens in any editor. There is nothing to export and no cloud account to lose.
• Both sides, kept apart by channel. Your microphone on one track and the audio your meeting app plays on another, tapped digitally rather than heard through a speaker. Who said what is a fact, not a guess from voice matching.
• It asks before it files anything. Decisions and promises come out as catches with an Add button for Calendar and Reminders, each carrying the sentence it came from. Nothing is written anywhere until you tap it.

Where tl;dv fits

• A free plan with real limits. Unlimited recordings, unlimited transcription in 30+ languages, unlimited storage, calendar and email integrations, and AI notes on ten meetings, at $0.
• Built for a team. Global transcript search, shared libraries, scheduled AI reports, playbook monitoring and objection handling for sales calls. Minutes is one person on one Mac.
• It plugs into your stack. CRM field mapping, thousands of integrations through Zapier, plus an API, webhooks and an MCP server on Pro. Minutes writes to Calendar and Reminders.
• It is not Mac only. Web, desktop and mobile apps. Minutes needs macOS 26 or later on Apple Silicon.
• Compliance answers. GDPR, SOC 2 and EU AI Act compliance, data hosted and stored in the EU, and privately hosted AI on request.

The pricing math

tl;dv is free with unlimited recordings and transcription. Pro is $18 per seat per month billed annually and Business is $29, with Enterprise quoted; the pricing page advertises up to 40% off for paying annually, so month to month costs more than those numbers. Minutes comes with Crest: $24.99 once buys Crest Pro, Take and Minutes.

One seat on Pro passes the price of Minutes in the second month, and a team of five passes it in the first two weeks. But for most people the comparison is not Pro, it is free against $24.99, and on price alone free wins. The reason to pay anyway is not a feature. It is that the recording never leaves the machine it was made on.

Why Minutes needs macOS 26 or later

It is a real limit, not a preference. Minutes transcribes with Apple's on-device speech framework and summarizes with Apple's on-device foundation models, and both ship with macOS 26 or later on Apple Silicon. That requirement is the reason there is no server: the intelligence is already in the operating system. tl;dv has no such requirement, because the intelligence runs in its cloud.

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