tl;dv records for a team. This one records for you.

tl;dv is sold to people whose calls are the job. Its home page is about automatic CRM updates and follow-ups after every meeting, and its pricing is per seat, in euros, with the usual jump from an individual plan to a team one. That is a coherent product for a sales, success or research team, and if you are buying for one of those this comparison is going to end in its favour on most rows.

Coii AudioNotes is sold to one person with one Mac. $19 USD once, three of your own machines, updates included, nothing renewing. It records your microphone and the system audio as two separate tracks, transcribes them on the machine while the meeting is still happening, tells speakers apart by voice print, and writes the minutes with a language model bundled inside the app — so all of it works with the network off, and none of it is uploaded anywhere.

The two products barely overlap in who they are for. What follows is the detail, including the parts where tl;dv is plainly ahead.

Prices, checked today

From the tl;dv pricing page on 3 September 2026. It is denominated in euros, which is worth noticing before you compare it to a dollar figure.

There is a Free tier with no time limit — their FAQ describes recording, transcription and insights on a free forever plan.

Coii AudioNotes is $19 USD, once, sold through Lemon Squeezy as merchant of record, which handles VAT at checkout. Thirty days of the complete app first, with no card and no account.

The arithmetic that matters is not this month's. Three years of one Pro seat on annual billing is €648. Three years of this app is $19, because there is no second year and no third one. That gap is not a trick of presentation — it is the difference between buying software and renting a service, and the service is doing things for you in the meantime that the software is not.

Two ways it records, and one thing that does not change

tl;dv offers both approaches, which is worth stating precisely because their own pages emphasise different halves of it.

Their home page says no bot is required. Their own review page, last updated August 2026, describes the default for scheduled meetings: tl;dv joins your Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams calls automatically as a visible participant. The same page describes a desktop app that records directly, with or without a bot, and notes that a desktop recording option and an MCP server have been added since the review was first written.

Both are true; they are two modes. The mode you get depends on how you set it up, and if a visible participant matters to you it is worth confirming which one you are actually running before a client call rather than after.

What neither mode changes is the destination. tl;dv is a hosted service — that is how search across a team's calls, the CRM updates and the shared access work at all — so the recording is processed on their infrastructure either way.

Coii AudioNotes has no mode to choose. There is nothing to join with, because there is nowhere for the audio to go. It records what the Mac is already playing and what your microphone is already hearing, and the whole pipeline finishes on the machine. The only network traffic the app makes is activating your licence and a clock check when it launches: no analytics, no crash reporting, no update check.

The table

Rows where tl;dv is ahead are marked, because you would find out within a minute anyway.

Where tl;dv wins

It captures meetings you are not in. A bot that joins scheduled calls covers the meeting you double-booked, the one you joined late and the one a colleague took instead of you. Coii AudioNotes records the Mac it is running on, while you are sitting at it. There is no version of this app that solves the other case, and if you need that solved, buy tl;dv.

It is built around a team's shared archive. Everybody's calls in one searchable place is the reason per-seat pricing makes sense for a product like this, and it is most of the value for a revenue team. Ours is one person on up to three of their own Macs. Nothing is shared and there is nobody to administer.

It updates the CRM. Automatic follow-ups and record updates after a call is not a convenience for a sales team; it is the point. This app has no integrations whatsoever. Its answer is that a note is a file and files go wherever you move files, which is a fine answer for an archive and a poor one for a pipeline.

It ships an MCP server. If you want your meeting history reachable from an AI assistant you already use, tl;dv has built that and we have not.

The free tier has no time limit. You can run tl;dv at €0 and decide over months. Ours is thirty days with everything unlocked, and then it asks for $19 — better if you want to test the whole product, worse if you want to decide slowly.

It is not tied to a Mac. If half your team is on Windows, this comparison is over before it starts. macOS 13 or later is our entire supported list, and it is not a roadmap.

Where Coii AudioNotes wins

Nothing is uploaded. Not the audio, not the transcript, not the summary. No retention window to read, no region to choose, no sub-processor to register, and no policy that can be revised next year and apply to the calls you recorded this year. There is no server of ours for any of it to reach.

That is a fact about where bytes go, not a certification. Coii AudioNotes claims no HIPAA, SOC 2 or ISO 27001 compliance, and anyone implying that "it stays on the Mac" is equivalent to an audit is overselling it. What it does mean is that the answer you hand your own compliance officer is short and checkable, which is more than most vendor questionnaires produce.

The minutes are written offline rather than owed to you. Recording without a connection is common; producing the finished summary without one is not. The language model that turns the transcript and your typed notes into minutes is bundled with the app, so a call from a train, a basement meeting room or a plane is written up before you stand up.

It records things that are not a meeting platform. tl;dv's list is Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams, with the desktop app covering what is outside them. This app has no list, because it does not integrate with anything: a Slack huddle, a Discord call, a browser conference nobody has heard of, a phone on speaker beside the laptop, or four people around a table with no software involved.

Two tracks, not one mix. Your microphone and the system audio are written to separate files — the room and the call, kept apart rather than summed. That is what gives the speaker separation something clean to work with, and why the app never has to work out whether the voice it just heard was yours.

One payment, and no account to lose. $19 covers three of your own Macs with updates included. There is nothing to log into, nothing to be locked out of, and no support ticket that starts with "I cannot reach my recordings". They are files in a folder you chose.

Speaker separation, honestly

Both label speakers. Both handle the demo case well — two people taking turns, each on their own device, each with a usable microphone — which is also, in fairness, most calls.

Both struggle in the same places, along with everything else in the category. Three or more voices sharing one channel. People finishing each other's sentences. Somebody on a car speakerphone. Four colleagues around one laptop microphone at the end of a table. A comparison implying one product has solved that is selling something.

Whichever you buy: say a name early. "Thanks for joining, Petra" in the first minute does more for a transcript than any setting in either app.

A seat is a person, and people move

The part of a per-seat subscription that nobody models at purchase is what happens on the day somebody leaves.

With a team product the archive is organisational: the calls sit in an account the company administers, the leaver's seat is reclaimed, and whether their meetings remain searchable is an administrative question with an administrative answer. That is the correct design for a company's records, and it is one of the reasons a revenue team should buy a revenue team's tool rather than a single-machine app.

It is the wrong design for a consultant, a freelance researcher or a solo practitioner, where the archive and the person are the same thing. In that case what you want is exactly what a team tool is built to prevent: recordings that belong to a laptop rather than to an account, with no administrator, no provisioning, and nothing that changes when your relationship with a company changes.

Coii AudioNotes is that second shape. The licence covers three of your own Macs, the files are in a folder you chose, and there is no account for anybody to administer — including us. If that sounds like a limitation, it is; it is also the point, and it is why the two products barely compete for the same buyer.

What each one is actually optimised for

A last framing, because the feature rows can obscure it.

tl;dv is optimised for the meeting being useful to somebody who was not in it. Everything follows from that: the bot that attends whether or not you did, the shared search, the CRM write-back, the MCP server. Judged against that goal it is a well-built product, and the euro-denominated per-seat pricing is the honest shape for it.

Coii AudioNotes is optimised for the meeting being useful to you, later, without anybody else having been involved. Everything follows from that too: two clean tracks so the transcript is worth trusting, on-device transcription so it is ready before the call ends, a bundled language model so the minutes do not depend on a connection, and a folder of files rather than an account, so the archive outlives the software.

Buying either one because of a price is how people end up with the wrong one. Work out which of those two sentences describes your week, and the price difference stops being the interesting part.

What switching costs

Your archive stays with tl;dv. There is no importer here and none is coming. Export what matters while the subscription is live — good practice before cancelling anything, wherever you land next, because a lapsed account is the wrong moment to discover how the export works. Recordings and transcripts held by a service are yours to retrieve and theirs to hand over; nothing here is a promise about how that goes.

The CRM workflow has no replacement. If tl;dv was writing back to your records after every call, that stops on the first day and nothing in this app picks it up. Be honest with yourself about how much of what you were paying for was that.

The shared archive stops too. If colleagues search your calls, or you search theirs, there is no equivalent here at all — this app has one user by design.

You gain a directory. Recordings, transcripts and minutes become files in a folder you chose, covered by whatever backup you already run, readable by anything, and outside anybody's retention schedule including ours. An expired licence would not make them unreadable, because nothing reads them but the filesystem.

The habit costs about a week. tl;dv attends on its own; this app expects you to press record. That is a small friction several times a day at first and the most common reason somebody goes back.

What neither of them does

Neither answers the consent question, and neither should. Recording rules differ by country and by state, one-party and all-party consent are genuinely different regimes, and nothing on this page is advice about your particular call — that comes from somebody qualified, and tl;dv's own review page makes the same point about disclosure. What the two tools change is the narrower question of who else ends up holding the audio.

Neither does live captioning for a room, and neither does real-time translation for an audience. Neither is a bulk transcription service you can hand two hundred old files to and walk away from.

On an older Mac

tl;dv does the heavy work on its own infrastructure, so the age of your laptop barely matters; the network is the constraint. Coii AudioNotes does the transcription and the summary on your machine, so the machine is the constraint. On Apple Silicon the transcript keeps pace with the conversation. On an older Intel Mac it works and the summary takes longer after the call ends. If your Mac predates Apple Silicon, spend the thirty days on real meetings rather than a two-minute test.

Local processing is a trade rather than a free win: nothing uploaded and full offline capability, paid for in CPU time and battery.

Which one to buy

Buy tl;dv if your calls feed a pipeline; if a team searches one archive; if meetings must be captured whether or not you attend; if notes have to reach a CRM automatically; if anyone on the team is on Windows; or if a free tier with no time limit suits how you decide.

Buy Coii AudioNotes if you are the only person who needs these recordings; if they are the kind that should not be uploaded at all; if you want finished minutes with no connection rather than a queued job; if the calls you record are not always on Zoom, Meet or Teams; and if $19 once fits better than a seat billed every month in a currency you may not think in.

And the third answer, which is free: for one meeting a week, Voice Memos and five minutes of typing is enough. Every tool on this page starts earning its price around the fourth or fifth call a day, or the first time nobody could remember what was agreed and it mattered.

If tl;dv is one of several on your list, Fireflies is the closest comparison to it, Otter is the other big bot-based option, and Fathom is the one with the strongest free tier, Granola is the most capable of the no-bot tools, and Wispr Flow does dictation as well as meeting notes. The library has the rest. Or download this one — thirty days, every feature, no card and no account, and the price only comes up afterwards.