Compare

Which one do you need?

A screen recorder, a meeting notetaker, and a control room that lives in your MacBook notch. Every feature below ships today. Buy one for $19.99 to $24.99, or all three for $49.99, and it stays bought: no subscription, and nothing you record leaves your Mac.

If you want

Your Mac to stop hiding things

Music, the next meeting, your todos, CPU and battery, your clipboard, your servers, and an AI that can act on them. All of it one glance up, none of it a window.

Crest

If you make

Demos, tutorials, product videos

Recordings that look edited the moment they stop. Zooms, a smoothed cursor, a real backdrop, and a timeline where what you see is exactly what exports.

Take

If you sit in

Calls you keep forgetting

Notes written while you talk, both sides transcribed, decisions and promises pulled out, all of it on your Mac with nothing uploaded anywhere.

Minutes

Crest · the control room

Everything Crest does.

A borderless panel that hangs from the notch. It never takes focus, never steals a click from your menu bar, and sleeps when your Mac does. The free tier is a real app, not a demo: Pro unlocks the rest, once.

Crest's panel in Work mode under the notch: today's calendar with a Join button, todos, clipboard, shelf, and the suite transport rows for Minutes and Take

Drawn from the real interface: Crest 4.11's panel, faithfully recreated.

Now PlayingFREE

Album art, a real scrubber, synced lyrics, the queue and an output picker. Works across Music, Spotify, Safari and any app macOS reports, with a fallback for when it clamps down.

Shelf and clipboardFREE

Drop files onto the notch to park them, capture screenshots straight into it, and search your clipboard history in the same place.

Claude co-pilotPRO

Ask or dictate. It answers, and it can create the reminder, todo or event it just suggested, after you approve it. Uses your own Claude subscription, no API key to paste.

Agent approvalsPRO

Claude Code and Codex ask permission in the notch. Allow or Deny in one click, over fullscreen apps and on any display, without switching windows. The prompt sticks until you answer.

CalendarPRO

The next meeting with a one-click Join, a month grid, and adding or editing events that sync wherever your calendar already syncs.

Todos and NotesPRO

Reminders lists you can tick from the notch, and quick notes that stay where you left them. Minutes files its meeting summaries straight in here.

System statsPRO

CPU, memory, disk, network and battery, live and readable at a glance rather than buried in Activity Monitor.

HostsPRO

Your SSH connections, saved once and opened from the notch in Terminal, iTerm2 or Ghostty. Keys, ssh-agent, or a password kept in your Keychain, never in a config file.

Battery health and devicesPRO

Real cycle count and capacity, plus the charge level of every connected Bluetooth device, and one-tap audio output switching.

ModesPRO

Home, Work and Code layouts that carry their own modules, and an Auto setting that switches by what is actually happening on your Mac.

Suite transportPRO

Start, pause and stop a Take recording from the notch, arm Minutes when a call begins, and see both while they run.

Pomodoro, Weather, Notifications, PRsPRO

A timer that survives sleep, weather where you are, a notification mirror, and your open pull requests, all in the same panel.

Needs a MacBook with a notch, on macOS 14 Sonoma or later. Light on battery: animations pause on battery and in Low Power Mode. Signed and notarized. See Crest in depth

Take · the recorder

Everything Take does.

Screen Studio class staging, native and offline, bought once. A capture is staged the moment it stops, and every part of that staging stays editable as an object on a timeline. The preview you scrub is the file you export.

Take's editor: a recording on the canvas inside its backdrop, the timeline below with three zooms and two idle skips, and the zoom, cursor, camera and privacy inspectors on the right

Drawn from the real interface: the Take editor, where zooms on the timeline are draggable objects, not baked into the picture.

Automatic staging

Backdrop, padding, rounded corners, a true shadow, a spring-smoothed cursor and zooms solved from your clicks. Every capture arrives looking edited.

Live editing

Move a zoom, delete one, change the backdrop or the padding and the canvas updates as you do it. There is no Apply step and no render queue, because the preview and the export run the same compositor.

Cursor you control

Size, hide when idle, and a spotlight that dims everything but the pointer. The cursor is redrawn from its own track, not filmed, so it stays crisp at any zoom.

Blur and pixelate regions

Drag a box over an API key, an email address or a customer name. It follows the timeline and burns into the export, so a demo never leaks what was on screen.

Keystroke display

Shortcuts appear as keycaps while you press them. Terminal and editor tutorials stop needing a voice track just to say what you typed.

Idle skips and speed

Dead air is detected and sped up rather than cut, so the video keeps its rhythm. Keep any span you want at full speed with one tap.

Camera bubble

A live circular camera you can park in any corner or drag anywhere, recorded to its own file and composited at export. Off by default, because most takes do not want a face.

Mic and system audio

Your voiceover and the Mac's own output, captured as separate tracks with a live level meter before you roll.

Captions on device

Transcribed by macOS on your Mac and burned in if you want them. No upload, no per-minute charge.

Screen, window or area

Window capture keeps the cursor and zooms honest even when you move or resize the window mid-take. Area capture picks the right display when you have several.

iPhone capture and 9:16

Record a cabled iPhone inside a real device frame, and reframe any take to vertical with the zooms re-solved rather than cropped.

Exports that tell the truth

MP4, ProRes, an animated GIF and a raw passthrough, each with a real size estimate before you commit. No watermark on any of them, on the trial or after.

Plain files, open folder

Takes are .mov files in ~/Movies/Takes with a sidecar next to them. No library database to corrupt, nothing to export out of if you leave.

Pause, resume, retake

Pause mid recording and pick it up, or throw the take away and roll again without leaving the strip. A take that started always ends as a playable file.

Runs on any Mac on macOS 14 Sonoma or later, universal for Apple Silicon and Intel. See Take in depth · Take vs Screen Studio

Minutes · the notetaker

Everything Minutes does.

It records both sides of a call, writes the notes with the models already inside macOS, and pulls out what people agreed to. Nothing is uploaded, because nothing needs to be. Turn off your network mid meeting and it keeps working.

Minutes showing a finished meeting: the caught action item with its Add to Reminders button and the exact quoted sentence it came from, above the written summary

Drawn from the real interface: Minutes on a Mac. Summaries are written on device.

Both sides of the call

Your microphone and the audio your meeting app plays, recorded as two separate channels. Headphones included: it taps the app's output digitally rather than listening to a speaker.

Two-voice transcript

You and them, kept apart by which channel they arrived on, so nothing gets misattributed to the wrong person.

On-device transcription

Apple's speech models, already in macOS. No model download, no API key, no per-minute cost, no audio leaving the Mac.

Summaries and decisions

A readable recap plus the decisions that were actually made, written by the model shipped with the OS and grounded in what was said.

Catches

"Tuesday at ten" becomes a calendar event and "I'll send the build" becomes a reminder, each one shown to you with an Add button. It revises them live when the plan changes mid call, and never adds anything on its own unless you turn that on.

Named by your calendar

A recording takes the name of the meeting it belongs to and lists who was there, instead of leaving you with Recording 47.

Markdown on disk

One folder of plain .md files you own, readable in any editor forever. The catches survive in them, so a saved note stays actionable months later.

Date-spine library

Meetings down the left in the order they happened, with a waveform under each one so you can see where the talking was.

Three themes

Two Lanes, The Record and The Desk. Not colour schemes: three different layouts for the same work, so it matches how you actually read.

Crest handoff

Finish a meeting and file its summary straight into Crest's Notes, one tap, no sync and no account.

Armed by the notch

When a call is about to start, Crest offers to record it. One tap arms Minutes, and the indicator stays visible the whole time it is running.

Honest about the hard case

macOS can starve other apps of the microphone during some VoIP calls. Minutes warns you live if that happens and rebuilds its engine to win the mic back, and the other side records either way.

Needs macOS 26 on Apple Silicon, because the transcription and summarization models ship inside the OS. See Minutes in depth · Minutes vs Granola

Side by side

What each one is for.

The short version, if you only want one.

CrestTakeMinutes
What it isA control room in the notchA screen recorder and editorA meeting notetaker
You open itBy glancing upWith a global shortcutWhen a call starts
Price, once$19.99$24.99$29.99
Free tierYes, forever7 day trial7 day trial
NeedsmacOS 14, a notchmacOS 14, any MacmacOS 26, Apple Silicon
Runs offlineYesYesYes
Sends anything outNoNoNo
What you end up withYour Mac, more answerable.mov files in a folder.md files in a folder

Every app is a one-time purchase with free updates, and each licence covers 2 Macs. All three together is $49.99, which is $25 less than buying them one at a time.