Donna vs tl;dv
Donna or tl;dv? Pick tl;dv if you want zero-ops cloud convenience with EU hosting and video clips. 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.
tl;dv is what a cloud notetaker looks like when it takes European privacy law seriously, and it deserves credit for that. But its pitch concedes the premise: if where your meeting data lives matters enough to advertise EU hosting, it matters enough to ask why it lives on anyone else’s servers at all.
Side by side, structurally
| Axis | tl;dv | Donna |
|---|---|---|
| Where it runs | tl;dv’s cloud (EU-hosted SaaS) | Your own Linux VPS (self-hosted) |
| Where your recordings live | Stored and processed on tl;dv’s EU servers | Your server’s disk and your PostgreSQL database — nothing on a vendor cloud |
| How it attends meetings | Bot joins your calls | Joins Google Meet as a visible participant — on demand, or auto-joined from your calendar’s iCal feed |
| Meeting video capture | Yes — recordings with clips and timestamps | Yes — screen video + audio, compressed server-side after the call |
| Transcription engine | Vendor-managed, 30+ languages | Whisper large-v3 via the Groq API, with your key |
| Who owns the AI keys | tl;dv | You — your Groq key, your DeepSeek key |
| What you get after the call | Transcript, AI notes, clips, multi-meeting AI reports | Eight-section meeting intelligence: decisions with tradeoffs, exact-quote receipts, tensions, what nobody said, position shifts, the room read, and orders |
| Pricing model | Free tier; per-seat pro and business plans | No per-seat fee — you pay your own server and metered API usage |
Where tl;dv genuinely wins
- EU hosting and a serious GDPR posture — the strongest privacy story among the cloud incumbents.
- Wide language coverage for international teams.
- Clip-making and multi-meeting reports are genuinely useful for async video culture.
Where Donna wins
- tl;dv moves the cloud to Europe; Donna removes the cloud. Self-hosting is the end state of the privacy argument tl;dv is making.
- GDPR compliance still means a processor holds your data. With Donna there is no processor — the recording never leaves infrastructure you administer.
- tl;dv’s AI reports summarize across meetings; Donna’s report interrogates a single meeting harder than any summary: receipts, tensions, the unsaid, the room read.
The data question, since nobody else leads with it
tl;dv: Stored and processed on tl;dv’s EU servers. 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
Is Donna more private than tl;dv?
Structurally, yes. tl;dv processes and stores meetings on its EU cloud as a GDPR data processor. Donna eliminates the processor: recording, transcription calls, analysis, and storage all run from your own server with your own API keys, under your administration.
Does Donna support 30+ languages like tl;dv?
Donna transcribes with Whisper large-v3, which is a multilingual model, so non-English meetings transcribe well. The analysis report is written in English today.
Who should pick tl;dv over Donna?
Teams that want zero-ops cloud convenience with an EU compliance story, video clips for async sharing, and per-seat billing they’ve budgeted for. Teams that want the record of their meetings off third-party clouds entirely — and a deeper report — should run Donna.
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