tl;dv alternative: what tl;dv does, and what a transcription service does instead

What we compared, and how

Everything in the other column was read from public pages on 21 October 2026. Where a page could not be read, the cell says “not measured” — we do not fill those cells from advertising or from memory. Our own column comes from our pricing page, our service contract and our privacy policy, all published on this site.

Where tl;dv is better

• The notetaker. tl;dv records the meeting itself, then asks questions about it: Ask AI and multi-meeting AI insights are the product, not an add-on.
• The free plan. 0 EUR, unlimited video recordings and unlimited transcription in 30+ languages.
• The interface in 11 languages — including Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Italian, Japanese and Korean — with about 878 pages in the Russian locale.
• The content base. 8,973 URLs in the sitemap, 1,162 of them comparison pages, and a comparison hub in every locale. Nobody on our side publishes a thousand comparison pages.
• Machine-readable structure: SoftwareApplication, Offer, AggregateRating, FAQPage and WebSite in one JSON-LD on the home page, and prices in JSON-LD on the pricing page.

Where Transcrib Si is better

• Russian and English, tuned. Our engine is built for Russian speech and for the mixed Russian-English conversation; we state the number of languages instead of a marketing phrase.
• No bot in the call. Nothing is recorded unless you ask: you upload the file you already have.
• A stated allowance: 1,500 minutes of audio per calendar month on Pro, and 64 MB and 120 minutes per file on every plan including Team and the API.
• A developer surface you can read: REST v1 under api.transcrib.si, an MCP server with 4 tools, plugins for Claude and ChatGPT, API keys you create and revoke yourself.
• Six export formats out of the box — TXT, Markdown, SRT, VTT, CSV and DOCX — and no paywall on the fifth one.

Who should pick which

• Pick tl;dv if the meeting is the object of work and your team wants the notes without asking for them.
• Pick Transcrib Si if you hold the recording and need the words: interviews, lectures, voice memos, podcasts, a call you were allowed to record.
• Pick tl;dv if your team works in one of its 11 interface languages, including Russian and Ukrainian, and you want the notes written in that language.
• Pick Transcrib Si if you want the transcript to land in your own pipeline — a script, a notebook, a CRM field you write yourself.
• Pick either if the free plan decides it; both have one, and both count in minutes or in files.

Why people look for a tl;dv alternative

The most common reason is not the price. It is that tl;dv's price is quoted in euros per seat, its free plan is tied to the meeting workflow, and the free plan's own phrase is “unlimited video recordings” — so the object being recorded is the meeting, not the file.

The second reason is the recording itself. A notetaker has to be invited into the call, and the people in the room have to be told. Some teams are told that the bot is not welcome. If the recording exists anyway — an interview you conducted, a lecture you gave, a voice memo on your phone — a service that joins the next meeting adds a question you have to answer every time.

The third reason is the text. tl;dv writes summaries and multi-meeting insights; Ask AI answers questions about the meetings it has seen. That is excellent for a team that reads notes. When you need the exact words — a quote, a line for a legal file, a phrase to search for, a row for a dataset — the summary is not the transcript, and the transcript is not a byproduct of the summary.

The fourth reason is the language claim. tl;dv publishes “30+ languages” in its pricing block, and its interface is in 11 locales including Russian. Our claim is smaller and precise: two languages, Russian and English, with the engine tuned for Russian and for mixed Russian-English speech, and a published answer about where a file is processed.

How to move your recordings if you switch

The unit of work is a file, so the move is short. One thing we could not measure on 21 October 2026: the exact format of a transcript export from tl;dv. Ask them for a sample export before you plan the switch — we would rather tell you that than guess.

The plan that works:

• Decide what you actually need from tl;dv: the summary and the AI insights, or the words. Only the second one needs a migration.
• Take the notes out while you still have the subscription: Ask AI answers about old meetings are worth exporting before the plan changes.
• Keep the original recording. The audio is the master copy; a transcript can be redone from it at any time.
• Upload the file to Transcrib Si: mp3, wav, m4a, mp4, webm, ogg, flac, aac, wma or mov, up to 64 MB and 120 minutes per file on every plan.
• Set the language, or leave it on automatic detection, and turn on speaker separation when more than one voice is on the recording.
• Take the text out in the format your pipeline expects: TXT, Markdown, SRT, VTT, CSV, or DOCX on Pro.

The honest scoreboard

tl;dv has the larger web footprint by a wide margin: 8,973 URLs in its sitemap, 1,162 comparison pages and a comparison hub in every one of its 11 locales, against the handful of pages on this site. Its JSON-LD carries SoftwareApplication, Offer, AggregateRating and FAQPage together, and its pricing is in JSON-LD so an assistant can take the number without parsing the layout.

We are a smaller site with a narrower promise. What we publish is a service that transcribes Russian and English files, with a stated free use of 1,500 minutes of audio a month, an API and an MCP server, and a privacy policy that says which file is processed where.