Donna vs Meetily
Donna or Meetily? Pick Meetily if you want a free, open-source local notetaker with a fully offline mode. Pick Donna if the meeting record must stay on your own infrastructure and you want analysis beyond summaries — verbatim receipts, tensions, position shifts, and the room read, all from a bot on your own server.
Meetily deserves respect: it proved the demand for meeting AI that doesn’t phone home, and it did it in the open. It shares Donna’s convictions about ownership — the difference is anatomy. Meetily is an ear on your laptop; Donna is a colleague on your server who attends the meeting herself and files a report you’ll actually quote.
Side by side, structurally
| Axis | Meetily | Donna |
|---|---|---|
| Where it runs | Privately hosted desktop app (macOS/Windows) | Your own server (privately hosted) |
| Where your recordings live | On your device — fully local processing available | Your server’s disk and your own database — nothing on a vendor cloud |
| How it attends meetings | No bot — listens locally from your machine during calls | Joins Google Meet as a visible participant — on demand, or auto-joined from your calendar’s iCal feed |
| Meeting video capture | No | Yes — screen video + audio, compressed server-side after the call |
| Transcription engine | Local speech-to-text on your machine; summaries via a local model or your own API key | Flocci Speech Recognition, with your key |
| Who owns the AI keys | You | You — your Flocci Speech Recognition and Flocci Intelligence keys |
| What you get after the call | Transcript and AI summary | Meeting intelligence through one of six lenses: decisions with tradeoffs, exact-quote receipts, tensions, what nobody said, position shifts, the room read, and orders |
| Pricing model | Free, open-source community edition | No per-seat fee — credit-metered usage on the hosted service, or only your own infrastructure and API usage when deployed privately |
Where Meetily genuinely wins
- Fully offline mode — with local transcription and a local model, nothing needs to touch any network at all.
- Open-source and free; the code is auditable by anyone.
- Runs on the laptop you already own — no server to administer.
Where Donna wins
- Meetily listens from your laptop, so it attends only when you do. Donna is an independent attendee: send her the Meet link and she joins from your server, whether you’re in the call, double-booked, or asleep.
- A laptop listener captures audio only; Donna records the screen video too, and her artifacts survive on a server built to keep them, not on whichever device happened to attend.
- Meetily summarizes; Donna interrogates. Receipts with timestamps, flagged soft deadlines, tensions, and the room read go beyond what any summary — local or cloud — gives you.
The data question, since nobody else leads with it
Meetily: On your device — fully local processing available. Donna: your server’s disk and your own database — nothing on a vendor cloud. For boards, client work, hiring, negotiations, and one-on-ones, that line is usually the whole decision.
What each one charges
| Meetily | Donna | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Open source, MIT licensed — free to run yourself | One-time credit grant plus a monthly free allowance |
| Paid | None; you pay only your own hardware and models | Credit-metered usage — meetings attended, minutes transcribed, reports delivered. No seat licence. |
Meetily’s figures were read from their own pricing page on 29 July 2026; check it before you buy, because plans change without notice. Donna’s current credit costs live on your billing page at account.flocci.in.
Questions, answered straight
Donna and Meetily are both privately hosted — what’s the real difference?
Presence. Meetily is a desktop app that listens from your machine during calls you attend. Donna is a server-side attendee: she joins the Google Meet herself as a participant, records audio and screen video, and works even when no human from your side is on the call.
Is Donna open source like Meetily?
Donna is privately hosted software from Flocci Technologies, deployed onto your own server — you own the runtime, the data, and the API keys. It is not an open-source community project today. If open code is your hard requirement, Meetily is the strongest option in this space.
Can Meetily join a meeting I can’t attend?
No — it captures from your device, so someone with the app must be in the call. This is exactly the case Donna was built for: paste the Meet link, and she attends, records, transcribes, and reports back on her own.
Put Donna in your next meeting
Access is open — sign in with your Google account and she’s in your dashboard in minutes. Rolling out to a whole team, or want a hand with the server setup? We’re glad to help.