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 | Self-hosted desktop app (macOS/Windows) | Your own Linux VPS (self-hosted) |
| Where your recordings live | On your device — fully local processing available | Your server’s disk and your PostgreSQL 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 | Whisper.cpp locally; summaries via Ollama or your own API key | Whisper large-v3 via the Groq API, with your key |
| Who owns the AI keys | You | You — your Groq key, your DeepSeek key |
| What you get after the call | Transcript and AI summary | Eight-section meeting intelligence: 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 — you pay your own server and metered API usage |
Where Meetily genuinely wins
- Fully offline mode — with local Whisper and Ollama, 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 VPS, 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 postgresql database — nothing on a vendor cloud. For boards, client work, hiring, negotiations, and one-on-ones, that line is usually the whole decision.
Questions, answered straight
Donna and Meetily are both self-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 self-hosted software from Flocci Technologies, deployed onto your own VPS — 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
Donna deploys onto your own VPS in an afternoon: nginx, pm2, PostgreSQL, your API keys. Early access is open — tell us about your team and we’ll get her a seat at your table.
Request early access