Earkeep vs tl;dv

If your main need is shareable clips inside Zoom and Meet workflows and you're fine paying per seat every month, tl;dv is built for that. If you want everything captured without a bot in the room, your audio never leaving your computer, and one payment instead of a subscription, Earkeep is built for that instead.

Earkeep never asks you to start anything. It listens continuously in the background, and you, or your calendar, mark which stretch of the day was the meeting, after the fact.

tl;dv works the opposite way: it's a bot that has to be invited into a Zoom or Google Meet call to record it. No bot, no transcript, and tl;dv structurally can't capture an in-person meeting, a phone call, or anything happening outside those two platforms. tl;dv's own positioning is explicit about this: the tool is built for the async team communicator who needs to clip and share a key moment from a call, not for capturing everything that happens in a working day.

Earkeep transcribes locally with Whisper or Parakeet models, hardware-accelerated on Apple Silicon. Audio is processed only in memory and never written to disk or uploaded anywhere; transcripts are saved as plain files you own.

tl;dv is a cloud service: your Zoom or Meet audio is recorded and processed on tl;dv's servers, which is also what makes its real-time transcription and instant clip-sharing possible. If keeping meeting audio off third-party servers matters to you, this is the core difference between the two tools. See private by design.

tl;dv's actual differentiator is timestamped highlights: mark a moment during the call and share a short clip instead of the full recording. That's a genuinely useful workflow for async teams. But it only works inside a call tl;dv already joined.

Earkeep's retroactive-span model is a different shape of the same problem: because it's always listening, you don't have to catch the important moment live. You go back after the meeting, or let calendar auto-spans do it, and mark the whole thing, in person or online, on any platform.

Earkeep runs coding and knowledge agents (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor Agent, Gemini CLI, Hermes, Kimi CLI, OpenClaw, opencode, Pi, Qwen Code, or any ACP-compatible agent) directly against your meeting history, plus an MCP server so external tools like Claude Desktop or Cursor can read your meetings too. Our research on tl;dv didn't surface an MCP server or agent integration; if that has changed since June 2026, treat this section as due for a refresh rather than a claim either way.

tl;dv's pricing, as of June 2026: a free tier with unlimited meetings but only 10 AI notes a month, Pro at $20/user/month ($15 billed annually) for unlimited AI notes and CRM sync, Business at $35/user/month ($25 billed annually) for team features and SSO, and custom Enterprise pricing. Even at the annual Pro rate, that's $180 a year per person, indefinitely.

Earkeep is €39 once, per device, with a 14-day full-functionality free trial and no email or account required to try it. There's no per-seat math: what you pay once is what you own.

• You need CRM sync out of the box. tl;dv integrates directly with Salesforce and HubSpot; Earkeep doesn't offer that today.
• Clip-sharing is your main workflow. If your team's real need is grabbing the 30-second moment and dropping it in Slack, tl;dv's timestamped highlights are purpose-built for that, and Earkeep has no equivalent clip feature.
• You live entirely inside Zoom or Google Meet and want zero setup. tl;dv works from a browser with no app to install; Earkeep is a macOS download.
• You want to try it free indefinitely. tl;dv's free tier has unlimited meetings, capped at 10 AI notes a month. Earkeep's free trial is time-limited to 14 days.
• You need Windows or web access. Earkeep is macOS 13+ only; tl;dv works anywhere Zoom or Google Meet runs.

If one of those is you, tl;dv's free tier is a reasonable place to land: this comparison is meant to help you pick the right tool, not just ours.

Product managers and engineering leads researching this space often ask the same question tl;dv's own reviews raise: does it actually give me the context back, not just a transcript? One r/ProductManagement thread put it plainly: "I like TLDV as it is multilingual. But I feel it lacks context."

That's a structural consequence of tl;dv only seeing the meetings it was invited to. A PM's real week includes hallway conversations, in-person 1:1s, and calls on platforms tl;dv doesn't join. Earkeep's always-on capture means every one of those conversations is already kept, in plain files, ready for your own agents to search and summarize. See Earkeep for product managers and Earkeep for engineering leads.