Meetly vs tl;dv: Which Free Meeting Summarizer Wins?

When I started looking for a free tool to summarize my endless Zoom calls, two names kept coming up: Meetly and tl;dv. Both promise to turn conversations into clear meeting notes, transcripts, and summaries. But they approach the problem differently.

I tested both on a 45-minute product review meeting last week. Here’s what I found.

Setup and first impressions

Meetly is dead simple. You connect your calendar, pick the meeting platforms you use, and it starts capturing. The bot joins the call automatically. I had it running in under two minutes. tl;dv needed a bit more configuration — you install their browser extension and grant permissions. Not hard, but less frictionless.

Right away, Meetly’s interface felt clean but a little bare. tl;dv gives you a dashboard with search, tags, and shared folders from the start. Meetly focuses on the note itself, with minimal extras.

Transcript and summary quality

For a 45-minute call with three speakers, both tools produced accurate transcripts. tl;dv caught speaker labels more consistently — it identified each person correctly about 95% of the time. Meetly missed a few switches, especially when two people talked over each other. Not a dealbreaker, but noticeable.

The summaries were where the difference showed. Meetly’s AI generated a clean, bulleted list of key points and action items. It felt like a human had written it. tl;dv gave me a more structured summary with timestamps linked to transcript segments. Useful if you need to revisit a specific moment, but the notes themselves felt more mechanical.

I preferred Meetly’s summaries for quick review. tl;dv’s are better for deep digging.

Free tier limitations

Both tools offer free plans, but they cap differently.

• Meetly: free tier includes 10 meeting summaries per month and basic features. No limit on transcript length.
• tl;dv: free plan gives you 10 hours of recording per month, but transcripts are limited to 15-minute clips unless you upgrade.

For shorter standups or quick check-ins, either works. For longer strategy sessions, Meetly’s free tier feels more generous because there’s no clip length cap. tl;dv’s 15-minute limit on the free plan frustrated me during a 50-minute client call — I had to manually split and stitch.

Realistic tradeoffs

Here’s where it gets tricky. tl;dv integrates with Slack, Notion, and HubSpot out of the box. Meetly currently supports fewer integrations. If your workflow depends on auto-pushing notes to a project management tool, tl;dv wins.

But if you just want clean notes and don’t need all the bells, Meetly is faster to get started. The summaries are more readable right out of the box. I found myself actually reading Meetly’s output, whereas with tl;dv I often skimmed the raw transcript instead.

One tradeoff I noticed: Meetly hasn’t been around as long. Their feature set is smaller, and I hit a couple of minor bugs — the bot dropped once during a call and I had to rejoin. tl;dv felt more stable over a week of testing.

Who should pick which

If you need searchable, timestamped records and plan to upgrade for team features, tl;dv is the safer bet. It’s more mature.

If you value note quality over depth and don’t want a complicated setup, meetly is worth trying. For individual users who just want to stop taking notes manually, it gets the job done with less friction.

I’m not fully convinced Meetly can handle very large teams or enterprise workflows yet. But as a free ai meeting transcription and summary tool in 2026, it punches above its weight for the basics.

For now, I’m keeping both installed. For quick standups I use Meetly. For important client calls I fall back on tl;dv’s reliability and search.