"Private" means something different on every one of these pricing pages.

Somebody searching for a private meeting recorder is usually not shopping in the abstract. A client asked where the recording of their call actually lives. A colleague noticed a vendor's terms allow training on customer audio by default. A lawyer in the room said the word "discoverable" and everyone went quiet. Whatever the trigger, the word "private" turns out to cover at least three separate promises — the recording never leaves the machine, the recording leaves the machine but is never used to train anything, and the recording leaves the machine but a policy says it will eventually be deleted — and most comparison pages blur the three together. This one keeps them apart, tool by tool, because the difference is the entire point of the search.

None of the seven names below is dishonest about what it does. Several are simply built to be hosted products first, with a privacy commitment layered on top rather than a design that makes the question moot.

It is worth being precise about which promise actually matters before comparing the seven, because two people asking for "a private meeting recorder" can mean opposite things. One wants a paper trail: a written policy a compliance officer can point to, a certification a procurement form can check off, a data-processing agreement with a named vendor. The other wants the simpler thing underneath all of that — nobody else's server ever holding a copy, so there is nothing for a policy to have to promise about. Both are reasonable, and only two of the seven tools below can genuinely offer the second, because only two process the recording without sending it anywhere at all.

Granola — bot-free capture, with training on by default

Granola's Business tier is $14 a user a month, checked against its pricing page today; Basic is free with limited meeting history and Enterprise is $35. It runs on macOS, Windows, iOS, Android and Apple Watch, and it captures the computer's own audio rather than sending a bot into the call — a real point in its favour, and one it shares with nothing else hosted on this list except tl;dv's optional mode. The same pricing page states that every tier can "opt out of model training at any time," which is worth reading carefully: the training is on until a person finds that setting and switches it off, and Enterprise is the tier that can flip it for a whole team at once. Its advanced integrations — Notion, Slack, HubSpot, Affinity, Zapier — are not things Coii AudioNotes or MacWhisper have any version of, and for a team already living in those tools that reach can matter more than the training question does. Full comparison here.

Fireflies — a stated no-training line, still hosted

Fireflies' plans run from a free tier through Pro and Business, with pricing detailed on its pricing page as of today. What sets it apart on this specific list is a line stated plainly on its own site: customer data is never used for AI training or for any purpose outside direct business needs, alongside a stated zero-data-retention policy. That is a stronger written commitment than Granola's opt-out model, though it is still a hosted service — the recording reaches Fireflies' servers before any of that policy applies to it. A bot still joins the call on every tier; there is no bot-free mode. For a team that needs a shared, searchable archive of past meetings and still wants a clear written commitment on training, Fireflies is the combination on this page that gets closest to both at once. Full comparison here.

tl;dv — anonymised before it reaches a model at all

tl;dv's own security page states outright that no customer data is used to train the AI, and goes further than most competitors by describing the mechanism: metadata shared with its AI partner is anonymised, and meetings are chunked and reordered before anything leaves tl;dv's own infrastructure, so the partner processing the summary cannot reassemble which pieces belonged to which conversation. It also lets an account choose whether AI processing is hosted in Europe or the US, a control none of the fully American hosted tools on this page offer. Its own bot is optional through a desktop recording mode, matching Granola's bot-free approach in effect if not by default. Of the hosted tools on this page, tl;dv's written explanation of its own pipeline is the most specific about what actually happens to a recording between being made and being summarised, rather than stopping at the headline claim. Full comparison here.

Wispr Flow — the certifications, if that is what "private" means to you

Wispr Flow's notetaker is Mac-only for now, folded into the same $15-a-month subscription ($12 annually) that also runs its dictation product, per its pricing page checked today. What it brings that nothing else here does is a stack of formal certification: SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, and HIPAA-readiness with a signed BAA available. For a reader whose definition of private is "passes our vendor security review," that paperwork answers a question none of the other six names on this page can even attempt to. It does not change the underlying fact that the audio is processed off the Mac. Full comparison here.

Otter — the honest cloud default, de-identified rather than withheld

Otter is worth naming precisely because it represents the category's most common answer rather than an edge case. Its own privacy page states that user data is de-identified using a proprietary method before it is used to train Otter's models — meaning training happens, just not, in Otter's telling, in a way that identifies the speaker afterward. Imported documents are the one carve-out stated as excluded from training entirely. Pricing runs from a free Basic tier through Pro at $8.33 to $16.99 a month and Business at $19.99 to $30, per its pricing page today, and a bot joins the call by default on every paid tier. Full comparison here.

MacWhisper — local processing, at a price paid once

MacWhisper Pro is €64, paid once, confirmed on its own site today, with a free tier alongside it. Recording and transcription both happen locally on the Mac, including capture of Zoom, Teams, Webex and other meeting audio without a bot joining anything. Speaker labelling is automatic. Where it differs from Coii AudioNotes is scope: MacWhisper is a transcription toolkit first, built to also batch-process old recordings, podcasts and YouTube audio, and its summaries route through a connected AI provider of the user's choosing rather than one bundled into the app — meaning the transcript stays local but the summary step is a decision a user has to make, and can point off the Mac if they choose to. Full comparison here.

superwhisper — offline on Apple Silicon, cloud-assisted elsewhere

superwhisper's Pro tier is $8.49 a month on its own pricing card today, with yearly and lifetime options next to it and a 30-day refund on all of them. Its site states it works offline "so you can transcribe anytime," with a documented caveat: offline models run well on Apple Silicon Macs, while Intel Macs are steered toward cloud models instead. Meeting recording and transcription sit in the free tier already, which is generous for a tool built primarily around dictation. It is the closest thing on this page to Coii AudioNotes in spirit — a local-first Mac app — while also being the one built for a different job first, typing text into other apps, with meetings as a second feature rather than the whole product. Full comparison here.

Coii AudioNotes — nowhere for the recording to go

Coii AudioNotes is $19, paid once, for three of your own Macs, with a 30-day trial that needs no card and no account. The microphone and the system audio are captured as two separate tracks, transcribed on the machine while the meeting is still running, and turned into minutes by a language model bundled inside the app — so the summary step, the part every hosted competitor above has to send somewhere, happens on the Mac as well.

Nothing here is a certification. It holds no SOC 2, no ISO 27001, no HIPAA attestation — a real gap against Wispr Flow for a reader whose compliance team specifically needs that paperwork. What it offers instead is the plainer version of the same answer: the recording was never sent anywhere, so there is nothing for a policy to promise not to do with it. Full comparison here and here for the two closest cloud comparisons on this page.

What actually changes, by promise rather than by name

If the requirement is "passes a vendor security review," Wispr Flow's certifications answer it in a way nothing else here can, and no amount of local processing substitutes for a SOC 2 report a procurement team was told to ask for. If the requirement is "does not train on our calls," Fireflies and tl;dv both state that plainly on their own sites today, ahead of Granola and Otter's opt-out and de-identification models respectively. If the requirement is "never leaves the Mac, full stop, no setting to check and no policy to trust," only MacWhisper and Coii AudioNotes actually meet it, and the difference between those two is whether the summary step is something you configure or something that already happened by the time you open the file.

Six seats on Wispr Flow's notetaker at $15 a month is $1,080 a year; the same six people on Coii AudioNotes, at $19 each, once, is $114 total — a comparison that only holds if the certifications were never actually the requirement, which for plenty of teams they are.

It is also worth separating "private" from "encrypted," since the two get conflated often enough to be worth a sentence on their own. Every hosted tool on this page almost certainly encrypts data in transit and at rest — that is table stakes for a company handling other people's audio, not a differentiator between them. Encryption answers "can someone intercept this," not "does this company's own systems ever see or use it," which is the actual question a search for a private meeting recorder is usually asking. A recording can be perfectly encrypted on a server that also trains a model on it once decrypted for processing; the two facts do not contradict each other; they just answer different concerns. Reading a vendor's own security page for the word "encryption" and stopping there is the single most common way this kind of research goes wrong — the two questions live in different sections of the same document, sometimes pages apart, and only one of them is what a "private meeting recorder" search is usually actually asking about.

The table

Which to actually try

Read the two written commitments — Fireflies' and tl;dv's — before assuming every hosted tool trains on your calls by default; two of them, checked today, plainly do not. Read Granola's and Otter's opt-out language before assuming neither does; both, checked today, describe training that is on until a setting is changed. And if the actual requirement was never about training at all, but about a recording that should have no path off the Mac in the first place, MacWhisper or Coii AudioNotes are the two names on this page where that is true by construction rather than by policy — thirty days, every feature, no card, to see which one fits the job before the $19 comes up at all.