Quietly records and transcribes on your Mac, with no bot in the call. You get plain Markdown notes that Claude, Cursor, and Codex can read. $49 once, no subscription.
Connect a Google or iCloud calendar. Quietly watches for the events you mark recordable and ignores the rest.
A small prompt appears when a meeting starts. Tap to record, or skip it. When the meeting ends, choose to extend the recording or stop and transcribe.
A clean Markdown note saves to the folder you chose. Cursor reads it, Claude Code greps it, Raycast finds it. Your meetings turn into context your tools can use.
Legal calls, M&A, hiring debriefs, client work under NDA: a cloud notetaker can’t go in those rooms. Quietly can, because the audio never leaves your Mac, and with Chat on a local model, neither do the transcript and notes.
Quietly captures audio to a temp file on your Mac, transcribes it in the same process, and deletes it unless you choose to keep it.
Whisper transcription, speaker turns, and LLM cleanup all run on your Mac, and Chat can too with a local model in Ollama or LM Studio. No API key, no inference bill.
Notes save as plain Markdown to a folder you pick. There is no proprietary database and nothing to export.
The app only goes online for model downloads, update checks, license validation, Google Calendar sync if you turn it on, and Chat if you pick a cloud model, which sends the meeting you ask about (transcript, notes, and details such as attendees). Audio never leaves.
Notes are plain Markdown in a folder you choose, so any tool that reads files or speaks MCP can see them. You don’t wait for an integration.
Point its filesystem MCP at your notes folder and ask “what did we decide last week?” A first-class Quietly MCP server ships next.
Drop a planning meeting into Cursor’s chat while you code, or grep it from your terminal. Every note lives in your workspace.
Open notes in any editor, grep them, pipe them into your own scripts. Nothing locks you in.
Search every meeting from your launcher. They’re .md files, so indexers pick them up without any setup.
For summaries inside the app, Quietly’s built-in Chat runs on a local model (Ollama or LM Studio) or your own Anthropic or OpenAI key, and cites each answer to the exact transcript line.
Feed your standups and customer calls to Claude, Cursor, or Codex as long-term context. Quietly speaks Markdown and MCP.
On-device Whisper passes the IRB sentence your interviewees signed: “recordings will not leave the device.”
Reads Google or Apple calendars and prompts before meetings you marked recordable. No missed recordings.
Quietly captures the call’s audio and your mic straight from your Mac. No virtual driver, no bot in the call.
⌘R for an instant recording, or Transcribe a file… for any common audio or video file. Same Markdown, same folder.
An on-device LLM removes fillers, fixes broken sentences, and normalises punctuation. The result reads like a cloud service’s transcript, computed on your Mac.
Quietly captures the call and your mic on separate tracks, so the transcript breaks into speaker turns with a new block each time the speaker changes. Per-speaker labels are coming soon.
Whisper large-v3 supports 99 languages, auto-detected per recording. Korean and English are tested daily.
Most meeting tools upload your audio, keep notes in a format your AI can’t read, or bill you every month. Many do all three.
| Quietly | Granola | Otter | Fireflies | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Audio + transcript stay on your Mac (local, with Chat on a local model) | ✓ | cloud | — | — |
| Clean transcript without the cloud (on-device LLM cleanup) | ✓ | cloud | cloud | cloud |
| Chat with your meetings on a local model (Ollama, LM Studio) | ✓ | cloud | cloud | cloud |
| Plain Markdown for Claude / Cursor / Codex (LLM-ready) | ✓ | encrypted DB | — | — |
| Buy once, keep forever (one-time) | $49 once | $14+/user/mo | $16.99/mo | $18/user/mo |
| No bot joins the call | ✓ | ✓ | bot by default | bot by default |
| MCP for Claude Desktop, Cursor, Codex CLI | shipping next | ✓ | — | — |
| Works fully offline | ✓ | — | — | — |
| What you keep if the company disappears | Your .md files | An encrypted SQLite blob | An export window | An export window |
Pricing snapshot · September 2026. Quietly vs Granola · vs Otter · vs Clova Note · best local note takers for Mac
Every download starts a free 7-day trial with no account and no card. If Quietly fits, you pay once. There are no per-meeting fees and no AI credits to top up. You get a year of free updates, and the version you bought keeps working after that.
Free 7-day trial · No account, no card
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