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If you’re evaluating self-hosted meeting intelligence, you’ll find these options. Here is how they actually differ — including where an alternative is the better fit.

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The field

Meeting-bot APIs put a bot in the call and give you a server-side API — the only shape that works org-wide (IT deploys it once; every meeting can be captured, governed, audited):
  • Vexa (this project) — Apache-2.0, self-hosted, bot + real-time STT + speaker attribution + the agent/knowledge layer, air-gappable end to end.
  • Attendee — the other credible open-source meeting-bot API (Django/Postgres/Redis). A solid, conventional capture API you build on.
  • Hosted bot APIs (e.g. Recall.ai) — mature and convenient, but your meetings transit their cloud; nothing to self-host.
Local notetakers (Meetily, Hyprnote, and similar) record the user’s own device audio on a laptop. Genuinely private for an individual — but per-seat installs with no server-side fleet, no API for downstream systems, and speaker attribution limited to what mono device audio allows. A personal tool, not an infrastructure layer. DIY (Whisper + your own headless-browser bot) — full control, and an enormous, permanently maintained effort: four platforms’ join flows, admission handling, audio capture, streaming STT, attribution, scaling.

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Vexa vs. the alternatives

Bring your own models covers both halves of the STT contract: the endpoint (TRANSCRIPTION_SERVICE_URL) and the model id (TRANSCRIPTION_MODEL) — so backends that validate the id (Groq, vLLM, OpenAI-compatible gateways) work end-to-end, not just backends that ignore it. See Configuration.

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When to choose what — honestly

  • Choose Attendee if you want only a capture API with the most conventional stack possible, you’re happy wiring your own transcription provider, and the knowledge/agent layer is something you’d rather build yourself. It’s good software and the comparison keeps us honest.
  • Choose a hosted API if your compliance posture allows a vendor cloud and you want zero operations. That’s a real trade — it’s just not the one this project exists for.
  • Choose a local notetaker for personal note-taking on your own laptop with no IT involvement.
  • Choose Vexa when the requirement is organizational and sovereign: every meeting platform, real-time attributed transcripts through an API you host, your STT and LLM endpoints, scaling from one Linux box to an OpenShift cluster inside your walls — and, when you want it, the agent layer that compounds those transcripts into a knowledge base your team owns.
The deeper positioning discussion — why capture sits upstream of every “chat with your docs” tool — is in Concepts. For the regulated-enterprise posture (air-gap, procurement artifacts, OSPS Baseline), see Security & compliance.