Earkeep
The Fellow alternative for the day you actually had
Last updated: · Reviewed quarterly
Fellow is a meeting system: shared agendas attached to the calendar event, action items with owners, a template for every ritual. Earkeep has none of that and is not building it. It listens all day without being asked, transcribes on your device, and lets you mark afterwards which stretch of the day was the meeting.
14-day full trial, no account required.
- Nothing to schedule, nothing to start
- Transcribed on your device, never uploaded
- €39 once, not $7 to $25 per seat a month
The short answer
You are choosing between structuring meetings and capturing them. A user in r/ProductivityApps, with nothing to sell either way, summed Fellow up better than we could: it is for "teams that want a meeting system, not just a notes app". If your week runs on agendas people contribute to beforehand and action items that resurface next time, Fellow is nine years deep in that and Earkeep cannot help you. If what you keep losing is what was actually said, in conversations that were never on a calendar, Earkeep records the whole day locally and lets you decide later which parts mattered.
Why people look for a Fellow alternative
Nothing to schedule, nothing to start
Fellow captures four ways, and every one needs a decision in advance: schedule its Note Taker bot onto a Google Meet, Zoom or Teams call, click record in the desktop app, use Zoom's native capture, or open the mobile app. There is no always-on mode. The call that ran past its block, the at-desk conversation that turned out to matter, the huddle nobody scheduled: none of it exists in Fellow, because nobody pressed anything.
A seven-tool round-up in r/MeetingsProductivity ranked Fellow sixth and named the trade-off: "Best for structured meetings... Cons: Less AI automation, more manual setup." Earkeep's setup cost is zero because there is nothing to start: it is already listening, and you drag a span across the timeline afterwards.
One note if in-person is most of your week: Fellow's blog calls it the best in-person notetaker, while its own help centre says the Note Taker cannot tell speakers apart when attendees share one device. Both statements are theirs.
Controls on a server, or no server at all
Fellow became fellow.ai in 2025 and now leads with "The Secure AI Meeting Assistant. Compliant by default. Controlled by you." The controls behind that are real, and for a regulated team excellent: SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA with a BAA, GDPR, retention from zero days to six years, redaction that also removes the matching audio. The strongest of them sit on the Enterprise tier, which has a ten-seat minimum.
What they are not is locality. Fellow transcribes in the cloud, always, with no on-device model and no offline mode. Third-party privacy analyses (BuildBetter, Sally.io) put its core data on AWS in Canada and name Deepgram, AssemblyAI, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google as sub-processors, all US providers, with no EU residency option we could find. Treat that as third-party reporting, not a Fellow statement; the cloud-only architecture is not in doubt either way.
The difference in one line: Fellow will let you set retention on your recordings to zero days. Earkeep never writes the audio down at all. It is transcribed in memory by Whisper or Parakeet on your own machine and discarded.
A record you own, in files your agents can read
Fellow's record lives in a Fellow workspace. There is an export, an API from the Team tier up, and integrations that push notes into Notion, Confluence, Jira, Asana or Linear, but the canonical copy sits on their servers behind an account you keep paying for. Earkeep writes one plain .jsonl per day into a folder you pick, spans marked inline, so grep still works on it in ten years.
The instinct behind that is not ours. An engineering manager posted an unprompted testimonial in r/EngineeringManagers, crediting Fellow with two years of having "really evolved my meetings and how accountable me and my teams are". The top reply was four words: "It's called Apple Notes and Google Docs". Unfair to Fellow's workflow, which the reviews say is genuinely good, and right about the artefact: plain documents you own outlast whichever tool wrote them.
Earkeep runs ten coding and knowledge agents in-app (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor Agent, Gemini CLI, Hermes, Kimi CLI, OpenClaw, opencode, Pi, Qwen Code) against the meeting you are looking at, plus a read-only MCP server with two tools. Fellow's connector is Anthropic-verified with five read-only tools, more than ours; the difference is that theirs read its cloud and ours read files already on your disk.
Side by side
| Capability | Earkeep | Fellow |
|---|---|---|
| Always-on capture | No start button, no bot | A bot, a button or an upload, every time |
| Retroactive spans | Define the meeting afterward | A meeting is a calendar event |
| Collaborative agendas before the meeting | Earkeep starts when the sound does | Shared agendas, 500+ templates |
| Action items and accountability across a recurring series | No task tracking, no shared list | Owners, due dates, resurfaced next time |
| Bot-free capture | No bot exists to join | Botless desktop recording, but its bot is the default for scheduled calls |
| Audio processed on your device | In memory, never written to disk | Cloud only, recordings stored server-side |
| Plain files you own | One .jsonl a day you can grep | Proprietary workspace, export only |
| AI summary when it ends | No, but an agent you connect writes them from the transcript | Summary, decisions and AI action items |
| Files notes into your wiki or tracker | No, but an agent you connect writes them where you keep them | Notion, Confluence, Jira, Asana, Linear |
| Labels who said what | Not yet | Speaker labels with timestamps |
| Keeps a recording you can replay | No audio is ever kept | Searchable recording library |
| Your own agents can read it | ACP agents plus MCP, over local files | Anthropic-verified MCP server with five read-only tools, but over Fellow's cloud |
| Certifications and admin retention controls | No certifications, no admin console | SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA with BAA, zero-day to six-year retention |
| Free tier that doesn't expire | 14 days free, then €39 once | Free forever, but 5 AI notes and 5 recordings lifetime |
| Runs on Windows and mobile | macOS 13+ only | Windows, iOS and Android too |
| One-time purchase | €39, one device | Per user, per month |
| Pricing | €39 one time, one device | Free tier, then $7-25/user/month annual |
| Platform | macOS 13+ | Web, macOS, Windows, iOS, Android, browser extensions |
Built inNo, but an agent you connect canPartlyNot available
What each one costs by year five
Switching takes an afternoon
- Install it, then let a day run. Earkeep starts listening as soon as it is running, so a first day of real meetings, online and at your desk, is captured before you configure anything. There is no import tool and nothing migrates: your Fellow agendas, notes, action items and recordings stay in Fellow.
- Mark yesterday, or connect a calendar. Drag a span across the timeline where a meeting was, or point Earkeep at Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, Outlook or any ICS URL and let every event title its own span. That is the closest thing here to Fellow's calendar anchoring, and it runs after the fact rather than before.
- Decide whether it replaces Fellow or sits beside it. If the agenda and action-item loop is what your team runs on, Earkeep cannot take that over, and the two can coexist: Fellow keeps the structure the team shares, Earkeep keeps your own record of what was said. If you were mostly using Fellow as a notetaker, check the numbers. Its cheapest paid tier is Team at $7 per user per month billed annually ($11 monthly), capped at 10 AI recordings per user per month, so the first tier that stops getting in the way is Business at $15 annually, $180 per person per year, forever. Earkeep is €39 once per device, after a 14-day full trial that needs no email and no account.
Which one fits you
Choose Earkeep if
You want the whole day kept, on your own machine, and the record to be a file rather than an account.
- The conversations you keep losing were never on anyone's calendar
- You would rather not decide in advance which twenty minutes will matter
- Confidential discussions mean the audio must not reach a third party at all
- You want transcripts as plain files your own agents can read directly
- You are buying for yourself and €39 once beats $180 a year indefinitely
Choose Fellow if
Fellow's whole workflow beats Earkeep's, and the honest thing is to say which parts.
- You want agendas before the meeting: a shared doc on the calendar event every attendee adds to days ahead, from a library of 500+ templates. Earkeep has nothing before the sound starts
- You need the follow-through loop: action items with owners and due dates that resurface at the top of the next instance of a recurring series. Earkeep has no task tracking and no loop
- You run 1:1s and manager rituals: nine years of check-in, career development and performance review workflows, which Earkeep is not trying to reproduce
- A team is standardising on one tool with governance behind it: SSO, provisioning, role-based access, audit trails, SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA with a BAA, configurable retention. Earkeep is a single-device purchase with no admin console, and no IT department should standardise on it
- You need Windows, iOS or Android: Fellow runs on all of them plus the web, and Earkeep is macOS 13+ only
Fellow's 4.7 rating across 2,437 G2 reviews is the largest review base of any tool on this list, and the praise in it is overwhelmingly about agendas, visibility and follow-through rather than transcription. That is a real moat and worth trusting. One caveat if you are shopping for the older Fellow: Feedback and Objectives/OKRs are both marked "[Legacy Feature]" in their own help centre and no longer sold, so the manager suite is narrower than the back catalogue suggests. If you run those recurring meetings, start with Earkeep for people managers and Earkeep for engineering leads to see which half of the problem each tool solves for you.
Other tools people weigh this against
Anyone shopping for a Fellow alternative usually has a few other tabs open, mostly notetakers rather than meeting systems. Each of these gets the same treatment as this page: Granola, Otter.ai, Fireflies.ai, MeetGeek and Avoma, or all sixteen side by side.
Frequently asked questions
Is Earkeep a good Fellow alternative?
It is a good alternative to Fellow's notetaker and no alternative at all to the rest of Fellow. Earkeep captures your whole day without being asked, transcribes it on your device and keeps it as plain files you own, none of which Fellow does. It has no agendas, no action-item tracking, no templates, no team workspace and no compliance certifications, which are most of why people buy Fellow.
Does Fellow have an always-on recording mode?
No. All four of Fellow's capture routes need a decision in advance: the bot scheduled onto a call, botless recording started by hand in the desktop app, Zoom's native capture, or the mobile app. Earkeep records mic and system audio continuously from launch, and stops three ways: a timed pause, marking a calendar meeting as never-record, or purging a stretch afterwards.
Is Fellow's free tier enough to evaluate it properly?
Probably not. Fellow's free plan allows 5 AI notes and 5 recordings per user for the lifetime of the account, not per month, which is the thinnest free tier of any tool we compare. There is also a 14-day trial of the paid features with no card, after which the workspace downgrades to Free rather than locking. Earkeep's trial is 14 days of everything, no email and no account, then €39 once.
Where does Fellow process meeting audio, and does Earkeep differ?
Fellow processes everything in the cloud; there is no on-device model and no offline mode. Third-party privacy analyses put its core data on AWS in Canada with US sub-processors, and we found no published EU residency option, so treat that as third-party reporting rather than a Fellow statement. Earkeep transcribes in memory on your own machine, never writes audio to disk, and sends nothing anywhere except a licence check.
Can I run Earkeep alongside Fellow instead of replacing it?
Yes, and for a team that runs on Fellow's agendas that is the sensible arrangement. Fellow keeps the shared structure, the action items and the recap the room can see; Earkeep keeps your own local record of everything said, including the conversations nobody scheduled. Nothing needs connecting between them, because Earkeep writes plain files and asks for no account.
Try Earkeep
14-day full trial, no account required.