Three months. That is how long tl;dv keeps your recordings and transcripts on its Free and Pro plans before deleting them. Teams usually find this out the hard way — someone goes looking for a decision from a Q1 planning call in June, and it is gone.

That deletion window is the single most common reason people search for a tl;dv alternative. It is not that tl;dv does a bad job in the moment. It is that meetings age, and the value of a meeting record often shows up weeks or months after the call ends, when someone needs to check what was actually agreed.

This is an honest comparison, including the places where tl;dv is genuinely the better tool.

What tl;dv Does Well

tl;dv earned its market position honestly. The free plan includes unlimited video recording on Zoom and Google Meet, which is rare — most competitors cap free recording at a handful of meetings a month or restrict video to paid tiers. Transcription covers 30+ languages with reasonably fast turnaround.

Its standout feature is timestamp navigation. You can search a transcript for a keyword and jump straight to that moment in the recording, which makes reviewing a 45-minute call take five minutes instead of thirty. For sales teams building call-highlight reels or coaching new reps, this is a real workflow advantage.

tl;dv also built a name for itself as a Gong alternative for smaller teams — it packages some conversation-intelligence features (talk-time ratios, keyword tracking, coaching playlists) at a price point far below Gong's enterprise minimums.

Where tl;dv Falls Short

Three issues show up repeatedly in reviews and switch-away posts.

The deletion window. Free and Pro tier recordings and transcripts are wiped after roughly three months. Business tier extends retention, but the point stands: on the plans most individuals and small teams actually use, your meeting history has an expiration date. If your workflow depends on being able to reference a decision from six months ago, this is disqualifying by itself.

Cross-meeting search is shallow. tl;dv is strong at finding a moment inside a single recording. It is weaker at answering questions that span many meetings — "what have we told this customer about pricing across the last four calls" is a harder ask than jumping to a timestamp, and it is not what the product is built around.

Video is gated. On the Free and Pro tiers, AI notes are capped at roughly ten meetings a month, and full video review sits behind pricing tiers that climb from around $18/seat to $59/seat for Business. Teams that want unlimited AI summarization end up paying more than the "free unlimited recording" headline suggests.

There is also no native mobile app, and reviewers consistently mention the interface feels cluttered once you have more than a few dozen recordings.

Meetbook: A Different Starting Assumption

Meetbook is built on a different premise: a meeting's value does not end when the call does, and it does not live only in one transcript. Every recorded meeting is transcribed by AssemblyAI, speakers are labeled automatically, and the transcript is indexed into Qdrant as a vector store — not just archived as a searchable text file.

That indexing is what makes the RAG-based chat work. You can ask a question in natural language — "what did the Anderson account say about renewal timing" — and Meetbook searches across your organization's meeting history, not just one call, to answer it. That is the direct answer to the "shallow cross-meeting search" gap in tl;dv.

Reports (generated with GPT-4o-mini via LangChain) auto-detect action items, decisions, and takeaways, and push them out through the channel your team actually works in — email, Slack, Notion, or WhatsApp — rather than requiring someone to log back into a separate dashboard to retrieve them.

Meetbook is also multi-tenant by design. Agencies and consultancies running meetings across multiple client organizations get data isolation between tenants baked into the architecture, not bolted on as an enterprise add-on. That matters for anyone managing meeting data on behalf of more than one company under one roof.

Where Meetbook Falls Short

To be direct about it: Meetbook does not currently offer the timestamp-jump video review UX that makes tl;dv good for building sales-coaching reels, and its free tier does not match tl;dv's unlimited free video recording. If your primary use case is "record every call, skim to the good parts, cut a highlight clip for the team," tl;dv's interface is more purpose-built for that specific job today.

Meetbook also does not publish a public language count to compete directly against tl;dv's 30+ claim — transcription covers 30+ languages via AssemblyAI as well, but if multilingual coverage breadth is your deciding factor, verify both vendors' current language lists before committing, since these change.

Head-to-Head

	tl;dv	Meetbook
Free plan	Unlimited video recording (Zoom, Meet)	Free tier with capped transcription minutes
Retention on lower tiers	~3 months, then deleted	No forced deletion window on paid plans
Cross-meeting search	Keyword search within a recording	RAG chat across full meeting history (Qdrant)
Speaker labeling	Yes	Yes, automatic
Delivery channels	In-app, some integrations	Email, Slack, Notion, WhatsApp
CRM sync	Available on higher tiers	Salesforce, HubSpot
Multi-tenant / agency use	Not a core design focus	Built-in tenant data isolation
Compliance	GDPR	SOC 2 Type II, GDPR
Video timestamp navigation	Strong, purpose-built	Not the primary interface focus
Pricing	Free / $18 Pro / $59 Business per seat	Free tier, paid plans scale from there

Pricing and plan details change. Confirm current terms on each vendor's pricing page before deciding.

Who Should Actually Switch

Stay on tl;dv if: your main job is reviewing individual calls quickly, building highlight reels for coaching, and you are comfortable that anything older than three months (on lower tiers) is disposable. If your team's meeting archive genuinely doesn't matter past this quarter, the deletion window is a non-issue and tl;dv's free video recording is hard to beat on price.

Switch to Meetbook if: you have caught yourself needing to reference a meeting from months ago and couldn't, you manage meetings across multiple client organizations and need real tenant separation, or you want meeting outcomes to land automatically in Slack, Notion, or a CRM record instead of sitting in a separate app you have to remember to check.

The honest middle ground: these products optimize for different failure modes. tl;dv optimizes for reviewing this week's calls fast and cheap. Meetbook optimizes for not losing institutional knowledge as your meeting history grows. Which one you need depends on whether your meetings matter more in the next seven days or the next twelve months.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is there a free tl;dv alternative with unlimited recording? Fathom offers unlimited free recording for individual users with no forced deletion window on the free tier. Meetbook's free tier is capped on transcription minutes but does not delete your history on paid plans the way tl;dv's lower tiers do.

Does Meetbook keep meeting recordings longer than tl;dv? Meetbook does not enforce the roughly three-month deletion window that applies to tl;dv's Free and Pro tiers. Always confirm current retention terms directly with each vendor, since policies change.

Can I search across multiple past meetings, not just one transcript? That is the core difference in this comparison. tl;dv's search works within a given recording via timestamp lookup. Meetbook indexes meeting transcripts into a vector database and answers questions across your full meeting history through RAG-based chat.

Which tool is better for sales call coaching and highlight reels? tl;dv. Its timestamp navigation and clip-building tools are more purpose-built for reviewing calls and cutting highlights than Meetbook's current interface.

Does either tool support agencies managing multiple client accounts? Meetbook is built multi-tenant, with data isolation between client organizations as a core design feature. tl;dv's plans are structured around single-organization teams.

tl;dv Alternative for Teams Meetbook Comparison