Meetily vs Scriberr
Both are alternatives to Otter.ai. Here's how they stack up — verified facts, no spin.
Also searched as Scriberr vs Meetily — same comparison, one verdict.
Meetily and Scriberr are closely matched on ownership (95 vs 92) — this one comes down to pricing and to which trade-offs below you can live with.
Meetily
TOP PICKMIT-licensed meeting notes that record, transcribe and summarise entirely on your own machine.
Meetily is a desktop meeting assistant from Zackriya Solutions that captures your device audio, transcribes it in real time with Whisper or NVIDIA Parakeet, and writes summaries through a model of your choosing — Ollama on the same computer if you want the whole loop local, or Claude, Groq, OpenRouter or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint if you don't. Recordings, transcripts and models stay on the machine. The Community Edition is MIT-licensed and free; a separate Pro licence adds diarization, templates and richer exports, so it is honest to call this open-core rather than purely open-source.
Scriberr
Self-hosted transcription server with an API, for a household or a small team.
Scriberr is an MIT-licensed, offline transcription application built for self-hosters: you run it on your own server, upload audio, and it transcribes with NVIDIA Parakeet, Canary or Whisper models and word-level timing. Because it is a server rather than a desktop app, several people and devices can share one install, and it exposes an API for automation. It is the right shape if transcription is a service in your infrastructure rather than something on one laptop — with a maintenance caveat worth reading before you commit.
Side by side
6 points of comparison, every one read from a verified field. Green marks the side that wins a row outright. A dash means we do not hold that fact — never that it is zero.
| Meetily | Scriberr | |
|---|---|---|
| Sovereignty ScoreOur transparent 0–100 composite for data ownership and exit cost. | 95 | 92 |
| Open source | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hostable | Yes | Yes |
| Local-first data | Yes | Yes |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Pricing | Community Edition free and open source — local transcription, local AI summaries, audio/video import, retranscription. Optional Pro licence is $120 per user per year, shown as $10/user/month billed annually against a $25 list price, with a 14-day trial; Pro adds speaker diarization, a custom AI model connector, custom summary templates, PDF/DOCX/Markdown exports and MCP/webhook/CLI integrations. Enterprise volume licensing is quoted. Verified on meetily.ai/pricing 2026-09-25. | Free and open source; you supply the hardware. The project takes donations through Ko-fi and has no paid tier. |
Meetily is Macrostack's recommended Otter.ai alternative, so it's our pick here.
Meetily
Strengths
- +Audio, transcripts and summaries can stay entirely on your device — the project's own documentation states all processing is local
- +Packaged installers for macOS and Windows, with Metal and CoreML enabled on Mac and a Vulkan Whisper build on Windows; the README also lists Linux
- +Your choice of model at both ends: Whisper or Parakeet for transcription, Ollama locally or Claude/Groq/OpenRouter for summaries
- +Actively developed and widely used — v0.4.1 released 2026-09-12, roughly 31,000 GitHub stars
- +The free Community Edition is genuinely usable, not a demo: live transcription, imports and local summaries are all in it
Trade-offs
- −No bot joins the call, so it records the audio on the machine you are meeting from — it cannot cover a meeting you attend from your phone
- −Speaker diarization, custom summary templates and PDF/DOCX/Markdown export sit in the paid Pro licence, not the free edition
- −The Windows installer needs an AVX2-capable x64 CPU, and CUDA acceleration requires building from source with an NVIDIA toolchain
- −You own the maintenance: model downloads, updates and disk space are yours, and there is no mobile app or web workspace
- −Transcription speed and accuracy depend on your hardware and the model size you pick — test it on a real recording before committing
Scriberr
Strengths
- +Runs entirely on infrastructure you control, with no third-party cloud in the path
- +Modern model choice — NVIDIA Parakeet and Canary as well as Whisper — with word-level timing
- +One install serves several people and devices, which a desktop app cannot do
- +Has an API, so transcription can be wired into other tools you run
Trade-offs
- −Development was openly paused for much of 2026 while the maintainer changed jobs and moved; the last tagged release is v1.2.0 from December 2025, though commits have resumed (repository last pushed 2026-09-20)
- −The documentation links published on its own site (scriberr.app/docs) returned 404 when we checked on 2026-09-25, so setup currently means reading the repository
- −A single-maintainer project, as the maintainer states plainly himself
- −It transcribes uploaded audio rather than sitting in your meetings — no live meeting capture and no action items
- −Self-hosting is real work: a machine, storage, updates, and enough CPU or GPU to be worth using
Which one fits you
The trade-offs above, turned into a decision. Find the line that describes your team.
Choose Meetily
if a lower exit cost matters more to you than any single feature, and audio, transcripts and summaries can stay entirely on your device — the project's own documentation states all processing is local.
Choose Scriberr
if runs entirely on infrastructure you control, with no third-party cloud in the path.
Neither, yet
if both carry a real cost you should weigh first — no bot joins the call, so it records the audio on the machine you are meeting from — it cannot cover a meeting you attend from your phone, and development was openly paused for much of 2026 while the maintainer changed jobs and moved; the last tagged release is v1.2.0 from December 2025, though commits have resumed (repository last pushed 2026-09-20). If either of those is a dealbreaker for your team, the shortlist is wrong rather than the choice.
Meetily vs Scriberr — common questions
Is Meetily a better fit than Scriberr for speech recognition & transcription?
It depends on what you are optimising for, and the honest split is this: Meetily scores 95 to Scriberr's 92 on data ownership and exit cost, so it is the safer choice if you care about being able to leave. Scriberr earns its place on a different axis — runs entirely on infrastructure you control, with no third-party cloud in the path. Neither is a wrong answer for every team; the table above is the actual comparison.
What happens if we want to switch later?
Meetily keeps its data local or in open formats, so leaving is an export rather than a negotiation. Scriberr is still self-hostable, so the files stay on your server either way — but it is not local-first by design, so check what its export produces before you rely on it.
Can I self-host Meetily or Scriberr?
Both can be self-hosted. The difference is what it costs you in time rather than whether it is possible — see the setup and maintenance rows above.
Are Meetily and Scriberr both alternatives to Otter.ai?
Yes — both appear in our Otter.ai comparison, which is why they are worth putting side by side. People usually arrive here already having decided to move off Otter.ai and now choosing between the two replacements, which is a narrower and much easier question.
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Facts verified 2026-09-25. Licenses and pricing change — spotted something out of date? That's a correction we want.