The clip-on recorders are genuinely good hardware. If most of your meetings happen in rooms — across a table, in a corridor, in a car — a dedicated recorder with a decent microphone array will outperform a laptop, and you do not have to remember to start anything on a screen.
For calls, the physics are against them, and it is worth understanding why before you spend the money.
On a video call, the other person's voice arrives as digital audio, gets converted to sound by your speakers, bounces around your room, and only then reaches the recorder's microphone. You are recording a re-recording. It picks up your room's echo, whatever else is happening nearby, and the frequency limits of small speakers.
Then the meeting software makes it worse, for a good reason. Echo cancellation exists so the person you are speaking to does not hear themselves half a second late. It works by aggressively suppressing the sound of your speakers whenever your microphone is open — which is to say, it is specifically designed to remove the thing a clip recorder is trying to capture. When you talk over each other, parts of their sentence are simply not there.
The result is a recording where you are clear and the person whose commitments you needed to capture is patchy. In a one-to-one call that is most of the useful content gone.
Software running on the computer that is already in the call can take the incoming audio directly, before it ever becomes sound in a room. Both sides arrive at full quality, no echo, nothing suppressed.
The better implementations keep your microphone and the incoming audio as two separate tracks rather than mixing them. That single decision solves speaker identification for free in a two-person call: whatever is on track one is you, whatever is on track two is not. No model has to guess, and it stays correct even when you talk over each other.
If your week contains both kinds of meeting, the honest answer is that they want different tools:
Buying one device and hoping it covers both is where people end up disappointed, and it is usually the online half that disappoints.
I build a local meeting recorder for people who take notes by hand on a reMarkable tablet — the Mac captures microphone and system audio as two tracks and transcribes without uploading anything. There is no public installer yet. What it is and where it honestly stands.