Fellow Alternative: On-Device Meeting Notes Without a Workspace

You probably met Fellow through a team. Someone set up the workspace, the Note Taker started joining calls, and notes appeared in a shared library with action items already assigned. Then the edges show up for the person who only wants notes from their own calls. The Free plan’s five AI recordings are for the life of the account, not per month. The Team plan stops at ten AI notes per user per month. Fellow’s own pitch has moved toward compliance officers, retention schedules, and archiving integrations, which is a lot of machinery when the only stakeholder is you. And when a client asks where the recording of your call goes, the answer is Fellow’s cloud.

If you’re searching for a Fellow alternative, the reason is usually one of those three: the meter, the workspace overhead, or the upload. This post compares Fellow with Dictanta, a Mac, iPhone, and iPad app that records without a bot, like Fellow’s desktop app does, and then transcribes and summarizes on the device instead of on a server. Fellow details below come from fellow.ai, its pricing page, and its help center, checked in October 2026.

In this guide9 sections

What Fellow does well

For a company, Fellow is a credible choice:

• Bot or no bot, your pick. The Note Taker bot joins Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams. The desktop app for Mac and Windows records without a bot on any platform, including Slack huddles, and shows a “Meeting Detected” notification when your microphone becomes active. A third mode, Zoom Native Capture, records through Zoom itself if you have a paid Fellow workspace, a paid Zoom account, and host permissions.
• In-person meetings. The Fellow mobile app for iOS and Android records the room, and Fellow lists speaker diarization for in-person and hybrid meetings.
• Breadth. Transcription in 92 languages; more than 50 integrations, including Salesforce, HubSpot, Asana, Jira, Linear, Notion, Confluence, Slack, Zapier, an MCP server, and an API; and Ask Fellow, an agent that searches your whole meeting history and drafts follow-up emails.
• Governance. SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, and GDPR compliance, AES-256 encryption, workspace retention policies, a Zero-Day Retention mode, and Global Relay and Smarsh archiving for firms with FINRA or SEC obligations. Fellow says it never trains its models on customer meeting data, on any plan.

If your company runs on shared meeting notes, needs action items pushed into Jira or Salesforce, or has a compliance team that must pull up any meeting on request, those are real reasons to stay. The rest of this post is for the case where you’re one person, or a small team, and those features are overhead rather than the point.

Where Fellow’s model gets in the way

Bot-free capture still ends in an upload

Fellow’s desktop app captures a call the way any bot-free recorder on a Mac does: microphone access for your voice, and macOS’s screen recording permission for everyone else’s audio. The difference is what happens when you stop. The app offers three choices: Stop & Generate AI Notes, Continue Recording, or Discard. Fellow’s help center is specific about Discard: the recording is not uploaded and no notes are generated. The notes come from the upload.

If an upload fails, Fellow keeps the file on your computer and offers to recover it: a good safety net, and a clear sign of where the work happens. Finished recordings go to Fellow’s Meeting Recordings Library.

Zero-Day Retention doesn’t change the order of operations. Fellow describes it as preventing source recordings and raw transcripts from being kept as persistent records after AI processing. It shortens how long the audio stays with Fellow. The audio still gets there first.

For most internal meetings that’s fine. For an NDA-bound client call, a candidate interview, or a contract that limits which third parties may process a client’s data, “it’s removed after processing” is a longer conversation than “it never left my Mac”.

The meter

Cloud processing costs the vendor money for every meeting, so the plans count meetings:

In practice the Free plan is a trial: five recordings, then you pay. Ten notes a month on Team covers two or three meetings a week. If you record most days, you need Business: $180 a year per user billed annually, or $276 at the monthly rate, before anyone else on the team needs a seat.

A workspace you have to run

Fellow is organized around a workspace. Meetings live as notes in note series, paid plans have admin roles, and enterprise controls let a compliance team retrieve any meeting record in the organization. Even recap emails are a per-series setting: for bot-free recordings, Fellow doesn’t send them until you turn on Send Recap in the series’ automations. That structure is the product’s strength inside a company. For a freelancer, a founder on customer calls, or an employee whose company doesn’t use Fellow, it’s setup, plus an account that holds your meetings.

The on-device alternative

Dictanta keeps the bot-free capture and drops the upload:

• Capture without a bot. On the Mac, click the menu-bar icon. Dictanta spots the meeting app or browser, pre-selects This meeting, and shows what it will capture: the meeting app’s audio plus your mic, in one stream. The other two options are My voice (mic only) and Another app (the frontmost app’s audio plus your mic). macOS files the capture under the Screen & System Audio Recording permission, the same one Fellow asks for, and Dictanta records audio only, never video or a pixel of your screen. Decline the permission and it records your mic only. It works with anything the Mac plays, including Slack huddles.
• Transcription on-device. Apple’s SpeechAnalyzer streams the transcript live while you record, with live captions, and runs offline once macOS has the language model. The details are in on-device meeting transcription.
• Summaries on-device. When you stop, Apple Intelligence starts writing the recap on the same Mac: a TL;DR, action items with owners and due dates, decisions, and open questions. Open Recap appears in the menu bar.
• The audio stays put. The recording is saved on the Mac that made it and never uploaded. iCloud syncs notes and transcripts to your iPhone and iPad; audio is never copied. There is no account and no Dictanta server, and the App Store privacy label reads Data Not Collected.

Because the audio stays, the notes are checkable. Most summary lines show when they were said: on the Mac that recorded the meeting, hover one to hear that moment, or click it to keep listening from there (on iPhone and iPad, tap the time). Lines Dictanta can’t source show no timecode instead of a guess. Click any transcript line and the audio jumps there too.

Because nothing runs in a data center, nothing is counted either: no note allowance, no recording allowance, no cap on recording length. The real ceiling is the summary: it covers up to about 2.5 hours of audio per recording. Long meetings are summarized part by part and merged into one recap, and the summary shows that it’s still writing while it works.

Fellow vs. Dictanta side by side

Fellow figures are from fellow.ai and its help center, checked in October 2026. Notetaker pricing moves, so verify before you decide.

The price row is where volume matters. A solo user who records daily needs Fellow Business at $180 a year. Dictanta Pro is $79.99 a year, and Lifetime is $149.99 once, which is less than one year of Fellow Business and never renews. One purchase covers Mac, iPhone, and iPad.

Get Dictanta on the App Store. The first three recordings are free with every feature. The count is shared across your devices, and the app shows how many you have left.

What you give up by leaving Fellow

The trade isn’t one-sided:

• Speaker labels. Fellow diarizes in-person and hybrid meetings. Dictanta doesn’t label speakers — the transcript is one mixed stream. The working substitute is the audio: play the moment behind a timecoded line and you hear who said it.
• Languages. Fellow transcribes 92 languages. Dictanta transcribes in your device’s main language, and translates a transcript into Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, or Simplified Chinese as an on-device reading view.
• Integrations and Ask Fellow. No CRM push, no Jira or Asana sync, no API, no MCP server, and no agent that answers questions across meetings. Dictanta searches every title, transcript, and summary in the app (titles and transcripts show up in Spotlight too), and it hands work off by hand: drag action items into Things or Reminders, drag the recap into Mail or Notes, or export a file.
• Team workspace and governance. No shared library, admin roles, or archiving connectors. If your firm has to archive meeting records through Global Relay or Smarsh, Dictanta isn’t built for that job.
• Calendar automation. Fellow’s Chrome extension can start a bot-free recording when you join a Google Calendar conference link. Dictanta has no calendar integration. You click record in the menu bar, or press ⌃⌥⌘R once you’ve turned on the optional global record shortcut in Settings.
• Windows and Android. Dictanta is Apple-only.

Switching from Fellow

1. Install Dictanta on your Mac, and on your iPhone if you record in person. It needs Apple Intelligence turned on: an Apple silicon Mac (M1 or later) on macOS Tahoe 26.4 or later, an iPhone 15 Pro or later on iOS 26.4, or an iPad with M1 or A17 Pro or later on iPadOS 26.4.
2. Turn on Start Dictanta at login so it’s in the menu bar before every call.
3. When the next call starts, click the menu-bar icon and confirm This meeting is selected. macOS asks once for the Screen & System Audio Recording permission.
4. Tell the room. Fellow’s help center notes that disclosure for bot-free recordings is your responsibility, and the same is true here. One click copies a short note for the chat: you’re recording to take notes, the audio stays on your device, and no bot joins.
5. Click stop when the meeting ends, then Open Recap. If you relied on Fellow’s recap emails, Copy Recap is the replacement: it turns the notes into a clean message with the summary, owners, deadlines, and timestamps, ready to paste into email or Slack.
6. Export where your notes live: Markdown for Notion or Obsidian, Word or PDF for clients, SRT or JSON for anything else.

Fellow’s recovery screen can save a failed upload as an M4A file. Those files, and any other M4A, MP3, WAV, or AIFF recordings you have, import by drag-and-drop or ⌘O, and Dictanta transcribes and summarizes them too. Run both tools side by side for a week of real meetings before you cancel anything.

When Fellow is still the better fit

Stay with Fellow if your team shares meeting notes as a working habit, if action items must land in Jira, Asana, or Salesforce without anyone copying them, if half the team is on Windows, or if a compliance function needs retention schedules, redaction, and archiving. Those are organizational requirements, and Fellow is built around them.

If you want a lighter cloud tool for one person, Otter vs. Granola compares the two most common individual picks; Granola skips the bot and keeps no audio, and both process in the cloud. Circleback is another cloud notetaker with a bot-free Mac app in the menu bar. The on-device route is for the case where the requirement is that the audio never leaves your machine and you can still hear it later.

Bottom line

Fellow is built for organizations. For one person, the same design means a workspace to run, a recording allowance to watch, and an upload behind every set of notes. A Fellow alternative that runs on-device removes all three. Dictanta records without a bot, transcribes and summarizes on your Mac, keeps the audio on the device that recorded it, and lets you hear the moment behind any summary line that shows a timecode. You give up speaker labels, broad language coverage, and integrations. If those matter less than where the audio goes, record your next three meetings free and compare.

FAQ

Does Fellow record meetings without a bot?

Yes. Fellow’s desktop app for Mac and Windows records any meeting platform without a bot, using your microphone and the computer’s audio, and its iOS and Android apps record in-person meetings. The recording still uploads to Fellow, which generates the transcript and AI notes; Fellow’s help center says a discarded recording is not uploaded and gets no notes (checked October 2026).

Is there a Fellow alternative that doesn’t upload meeting audio?

Yes. Dictanta records, transcribes, and summarizes on-device on Mac, iPhone, and iPad, with Apple’s SpeechAnalyzer for the transcript and Apple Intelligence for the summary. The audio is saved on the device that recorded it and never uploaded. iCloud syncs notes and transcripts; audio is never copied.

How much does Fellow cost compared with Dictanta?

As of October 2026, Fellow’s Free plan includes 5 AI recordings per user for the life of the account. Team is $7 per user a month billed annually ($11 monthly) with 10 AI notes a month, and Business is $15 billed annually ($23 monthly) for unlimited. Dictanta is $9.99 a month, $79.99 a year, or $149.99 once, with nothing metered.