Fathom is the best free AI meeting notetaker, with unlimited recordings and summaries at no cost. Granola is best if you dislike meeting bots, since it captures audio from your device. Fireflies suits teams that want searchable call libraries and integrations, and Read AI adds meeting analytics across Zoom, Meet and Teams.
1FathomBest free notetakerBest forIndividuals and small teamsFromFree; Premium $16/mo billed yearlyWhyUnlimited recordings, transcripts and AI summaries on the free plan
2GranolaBest without a meeting botBest forFounders and consultantsFromFree; Business $14/user/moWhyCaptures audio on your device and enhances your own notes with AI
3Fireflies AI NotetakerBest for teamsBest forSales and customer teamsFromFree; Pro $10/seat/mo yearlyWhySearchable call library, AI assistant and many integrations
4Read AIBest for meeting analyticsBest forManagers tracking engagementFromFree; Pro $15/mo billed yearlyWhySummaries plus talk-time and engagement metrics across platforms
Fathom offers the most generous free tier among mainstream AI notetakers: unlimited meeting recordings, transcription and storage with no time limit and no card required, across Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams. Summaries arrive within about thirty seconds of a call ending, transcripts link to video timestamps for…
Best for:Individual contributors, founders, and freelancers who attend multiple meetings daily and want the most accurate free AI notetaker available, with no usage caps that force an upgrade within weeks.Customer-facing teams in sales, customer success, and account management who need auto-populated CRM notes and formatted follow-up emails without paying for a dedicated sales intelligence platform.
Not ideal for: Large enterprise teams that need org-wide meeting analytics, coaching scorecards, or complex admin controls, as Fathom's higher-tier plans focus on team collaboration rather than deep conversation intelligence.
Granola takes a different approach from most notetakers: instead of sending a bot, it captures your computer's system audio locally and then uses AI to expand the rough notes you type during the call. Other participants have no indication anything is recording, which is its core differentiator. It runs as a Mac and Win…
Best for:Founders, product managers, and consultants who attend back-to-back meetings and want AI-polished notes without a visible bot appearing in sensitive client calls, investor pitches, or board meetings.Privacy-conscious professionals and teams at companies where meeting bots are blocked or where participants object to a third-party recording, as Granola captures everything locally with no external participants.
Not ideal for: Teams that need deep CRM automation, sales coaching scorecards, or revenue intelligence features built into their meeting tool, as Granola focuses on clean note-taking and privacy rather than sales workflow automation.
Fireflies is one of the most established AI notetakers, joining meetings to transcribe in over a hundred languages and building a searchable archive of every conversation. AskFred, its assistant, answers questions across past meetings rather than one call at a time, and higher tiers add video recording, conversation in…
Best for:Remote teams and individual contributors who attend multiple meetings daily and need an accurate, searchable archive of every conversation automatically built without any manual effort or setup for each meeting.Sales reps, recruiters, and consultants managing high volumes of external calls who want instant structured notes with action items and the ability to query any past conversation using natural language through AskFred.
Not ideal for: Teams with strict privacy policies where a visible bot participant in their calls is not acceptable, as the Fireflies Notetaker uses Fred bot to join meetings as a visible participant.
Read AI goes beyond transcription into meeting analytics, scoring engagement and attention in real time, tracking speaker balance and sentiment, and producing recommendations about meeting quality itself. Its search layer spans meetings, email, Slack and connected CRM data rather than recordings alone, and a weekly bri…
Best for:Sales and customer success teams that want more than transcription — specifically engagement analytics, attention scoring, and real-time meeting quality metrics that help managers coach reps based on data from every interaction.Executives and team leads managing distributed teams who need a cross-platform AI search that works across meetings, email, Slack, and CRM simultaneously, turning all company communication into a single queryable knowledge base.
Not ideal for: Users who need a bot-free recording experience, as Read AI's primary capture method uses a visible meeting bot that auto-joins calls from your calendar and sends summaries to all meeting invitees including external participants.
Fellow covers more of the meeting lifecycle than most notetakers: collaborative agendas before the call, AI notes and recording during it, and tracked action items afterwards, which suits managers running recurring one-to-ones and team meetings rather than sales calls alone. It offers both bot and bot-free recording un…
Best for:Enterprise teams and people managers in regulated industries like healthcare, finance, and legal who need an AI meeting assistant with proven HIPAA compliance, org-wide governance controls, and a transparent security posture.Growing companies that want to improve meeting culture by combining structured pre-meeting agendas with AI notes and accountability tracking, reducing the number of meetings needed by ensuring every one produces clear outcomes.
Not ideal for: Teams that primarily need advanced conversation intelligence features for sales coaching, deal scoring, or revenue analytics, as Fellow is built around meeting structure and general productivity rather than sales-specific intelligence workflows.
tl;dv records, transcribes and summarises meetings across Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams, and its distinguishing feature is analysis across your whole meeting history rather than one call at a time, surfacing recurring objections, themes and patterns. Higher tiers turn it into a sales intelligence platform with …
Best for:Product managers and UX researchers who need to search across dozens of customer interviews to spot patterns, extract themes, and build evidence-backed roadmaps without watching hours of recordings.Sales managers and revenue operations teams who want automated CRM updates after every call and coaching playbooks that help reps improve based on win/loss analysis across their entire call library.
Not ideal for: Teams that need the simplest possible free meeting notetaker without any setup complexity, as tl;dv's power features can feel overwhelming for users who just want basic transcription and summaries.
Krisp is a voice AI desktop app that pairs the strongest real-time noise cancellation in the category with meeting transcription, AI notes and accent conversion. It works as a virtual microphone and speaker, so it functions with any conferencing tool rather than a fixed list, and audio processing happens locally on you…
Best for:Remote workers, call center agents, and sales professionals who work from noisy environments and need both crystal-clear audio quality and automatic meeting notes from a single, lightweight app that never adds a bot to their calls.Freelancers, coaches, and consultants who want a privacy-first, bot-free meeting notetaker that works silently across any video platform without any calendar permissions or third-party integrations required.
Not ideal for: Teams that need deep CRM integrations, conversation intelligence dashboards, or deal tracking on top of their meeting notes, as Krisp focuses on audio quality and individual productivity rather than sales analytics pipelines.
Avoma is a meeting intelligence platform aimed at sales, customer success and revenue operations rather than general note-taking. Alongside transcription and summaries it offers call coaching with methodology scorecards for MEDDIC, BANT and similar frameworks, conversation analytics covering talk ratio and sentiment, s…
Best for:B2B sales teams of 10 or more that want an affordable alternative to Gong or Chorus, with AI coaching scorecards, deal risk tracking, and automated CRM data entry that turns every customer call into structured revenue intelligence.Customer success and account management teams who need consistent, structured call notes synced automatically to their CRM after every QBR, onboarding session, and renewal conversation to maintain complete account history.
Not ideal for: Freelancers, solopreneurs, or small teams who only need basic meeting transcription and summaries, as Avoma has no permanent free plan and its lowest tier at $19/seat/month is over-engineered for non-sales workflows.
Tactiq is a lightweight Chrome extension that captures live transcripts inside Google Meet, Zoom and Microsoft Teams without a bot joining, without a separate desktop app and without storing a recording on third-party servers, which suits people whose main objection to notetakers is the visible participant. It produces…
Best for:Google Workspace users and teams who want the simplest possible bot-free meeting transcription with instant AI summaries and no onboarding friction, since the Chrome extension works the moment it is installed with no configuration required.Content creators, researchers, and educators who use YouTube extensively and need the free YouTube Transcript Generator alongside their live meeting transcription in a single browser extension.
Not ideal for: Teams that need to transcribe meetings on desktop apps like the Zoom or Teams desktop clients rather than in a browser, since Tactiq's Chrome extension only captures meetings running inside the Chrome browser.
Jamie is a European-built, privacy-first meeting notetaker that captures audio locally on your device rather than sending a bot into the call, which makes it a common choice for consultants, lawyers and anyone handling confidential conversations. It supports more than a hundred languages, works for in-person meetings a…
Best for:Lawyers, consultants, and C-level executives who handle confidential conversations and need a meeting notetaker that never uploads audio to a third-party server or adds a visible bot to their calls.European professionals and teams subject to GDPR who require an AI meeting tool with explicit EU data hosting, no AI model training on customer data, and a clear data processing agreement.
Not ideal for: Teams that need deep CRM conversation analytics, sales coaching dashboards, or pipeline intelligence features built into their notetaker, as Jamie focuses exclusively on private note capture and search rather than revenue operations.
Sembly is a meeting assistant that joins Zoom, Google Meet, Teams and Webex calls and produces unusually structured output. Instead of a paragraph summary it generates Glance Cards, discrete sections for discussion topics, decisions, issues, requirements, events, figures and tasks, each timestamped back to the transcri…
Best for:Project management offices, marketing agencies, and IT consulting firms that need AI to go beyond basic summaries and generate formatted client-facing documents, status reports, and risk logs directly from meeting conversations.HR, legal, and leadership teams that need structured AI meeting outputs with automatic detection of risks, issues, requirements, and decisions captured in a format ready for audit or stakeholder review.
Not ideal for: Individuals or small teams who only need simple meeting transcripts and action items, as Sembly's depth of features and pricing structure is optimized for professional services workflows and will feel over-engineered for casual notetaking.
Supernormal is built for agencies and consulting teams whose problem is not capturing meetings but producing the work that follows them. Alongside transcription and summaries it generates client-facing deliverables directly from a conversation: slide decks, follow-up emails, structured documents and images, using templ…
Best for:Digital marketing agencies, design studios, and PR firms that need to move from client meeting to finished deliverable in minutes, using AI to generate slides, emails, proposals, and documents that are ready to send without manual formatting.Freelance consultants and independent creative professionals who want a single AI tool that captures their client calls bot-free and immediately produces professional client-facing outputs without switching between multiple apps.
Not ideal for: Enterprise sales and customer success teams that need conversation intelligence, CRM auto-sync, deal tracking, or coaching scorecards, as Supernormal is purpose-built for creative agency workflows rather than revenue operations pipelines.
Notta is a transcription-first platform that converts speech to text in real time across 58 languages, which makes it one of the strongest options for multilingual and cross-border teams. Beyond live meetings on Zoom, Google Meet, Teams and Webex, it transcribes uploaded audio and video files in many formats, so record…
Best for:Journalists, researchers, academics, and multilingual business teams that need accurate transcription across 58 languages with real-time bilingual support for international interviews, conferences, and cross-border business calls.Content creators and media professionals who need a single tool to transcribe meetings, import recorded audio or video files, and transcribe YouTube videos — rather than having separate tools for live and recorded content.
Not ideal for: Teams that primarily need real-time engagement scoring, speaker analytics, or CRM pipeline intelligence from their meeting tool, as Notta is focused on transcription accuracy and content accessibility rather than conversation intelligence.
Vowel was an AI video conferencing platform that combined meetings, live transcription, collaborative agendas and searchable recordings in one product, removing the need for a separate video tool and a separate notetaker. Founded in New York in 2018, it was well regarded by early adopters for real-time annotation, acti…
Best for:Remote-first teams that wanted a single platform for hosting, transcribing, and archiving all their video meetings without needing to pay for a separate video conferencing tool and a separate AI notetaker on top.
Not ideal for: Any team looking for an active, maintained product, as Vowel ceased operations in December 2023 and is no longer supported. Teams should use alternatives like Fellow, Fathom, or Otter.ai for similar functionality.
Grain is a meeting notetaker built around video rather than text alone. It records, transcribes and summarises calls, then lets you cut and share clips of specific moments, which is what makes it popular with sales coaching, customer success, product and user research teams who need to show a customer saying something …
Best for:Sales and customer success teams that need to create shareable video clips of key customer moments and share them with product, marketing, or leadership teams — turning meeting recordings into a living customer evidence library.Product managers and UX researchers who want to enrich AI agents like Claude or ChatGPT with full meeting context to generate better analysis, pattern recognition, and synthesis across large numbers of customer conversations.
Not ideal for: Teams that need a fully bot-free recording experience without any visible participant in their calls, as Grain's recording is handled by a meeting bot that joins as a visible participant.
Timeless, previously named timeOS, treats a meeting as a set of triggers rather than a transcript to file. It listens for verbal commitments, phrases like promising to send a proposal or agreeing to schedule a follow-up, and routes them to agents that draft the email, create the task or post the update without you open…
Best for:Founders, sales professionals, and consultants who want their meetings to produce completed tasks and drafted communications automatically, rather than a transcript they have to action manually after every call.Async-first and distributed teams that need context-rich pre-meeting briefs compiled from past calls, emails, and LinkedIn data so every meeting starts with full situational awareness rather than ad-hoc recall.
Not ideal for: Teams that need detailed conversation analytics dashboards, talk-time metrics, or coaching scorecards as core features, as Timeless focuses on triggering actions from speech rather than analyzing conversation patterns.
Circleback is a Y Combinator-backed meeting assistant built around note quality and what happens after the meeting. It produces structured notes and action items across Zoom, Google Meet, Teams and in-person conversations, identifies speakers by name, handles technical terminology and accents, and supports more than a …
Best for:Professionals at enterprise and growth-stage companies who need the most accurate AI meeting notes available and trust-level automation that routes action items to the right tools without any manual intervention after the meeting.Independent consultants, freelance strategists, and high-volume professionals who attend both virtual and in-person meetings and need a single meeting assistant that handles both modes with equal accuracy and automates their post-meeting workflow.
Not ideal for: Teams with very tight budgets looking for a permanently free meeting notetaker, as Circleback does not have a free tier beyond the 7-day trial and starts at $20.83/user/month on annual billing.
Bluedot is a bot-free AI note taker that captures, transcribes and summarises meetings without a visible participant joining the call. It runs through a Chrome extension and desktop and mobile apps, generates custom note templates, and syncs to CRM and other tools. Reviewers consistently rate it at or near the top of t…
Best for:Sales professionals, recruiters, legal teams, and financial advisors who handle sensitive conversations and need a completely invisible recording solution that never adds a visible bot, never trains AI on their data, and auto-syncs structured notes to their CRM or ATS.Teams and individuals who want highly customizable AI notes that automatically adapt to their specific meeting type — from customer calls to all-hands meetings to legal consultations — rather than a one-size-fits-all summary format.
Not ideal for: Teams that need multi-meeting intelligence dashboards, sales coaching scorecards, or deal pipeline analytics built on top of their meeting recorder, as Bluedot focuses on note quality, customization, and CRM sync rather than conversation intelligence analytics.
Most notetakers join your call as a visible bot, which some clients find intrusive. Granola records audio from your own device instead, so nothing joins the meeting. Fathom, Fireflies and Read AI use bots, which makes them reliable for recording video and capturing every speaker. Always tell participants when a meeting is being recorded and follow local consent rules.
How much will you use it?
Free plans differ a lot. Fathom's free plan includes unlimited recordings and summaries. Read AI's free plan covers 5 meetings a month, and Fireflies' free plan has limited summaries and 400 minutes of storage. Granola's free plan keeps only the last 30 days of meeting history. Heavy users should compare the paid tiers.
Where do your notes need to go?
The real time saving comes from sending notes and action items to the tools you already use. Fireflies and Fathom integrate with CRMs and project tools, and Granola's Business plan adds integrations such as Notion and HubSpot. Check that your CRM, calendar and chat apps are supported before you roll a tool out to a team.
What about privacy and security?
Meeting recordings often contain sensitive information. Review each vendor's data retention, model-training and security policies, and look for enterprise controls such as SSO and admin settings on business plans. Limit recording to meetings where everyone has agreed to it.
Prices in US dollars, checked November 15, 2026 on each vendor's official pricing page. Plans change often, so confirm before you buy.
How we pick and rank these tools
We don't run hands-on lab tests of every tool. Instead, each pick is the result of structured research, refreshed every month, and scored against the criteria that matter most for this category.
What we score an AI meeting notetaker on
Transcript and summary accuracy
Bot-based or on-device capture
Free plan limits and history
Integrations with CRM, chat and docs
Search across past meetings
Privacy, consent and security controls
Official sources first. Features, limits and plans come from each vendor's own site, documentation and pricing page, which we re-read before every update.
Prices checked on the day. Every price shows the date it was verified. Promotions are labelled as such, and month-to-month and yearly billing are kept separate.
Real-world signal. We weigh public changelogs, documented limits and independent user reviews (G2, Trustpilot, Reddit, developer forums) for reliability and support issues.
Fit over hype. Picks are ranked by how well a tool fits a specific need, not by brand size, and every pick lists a genuine drawback.
Independent. Rankings are never paid for. Sponsored placements are always labelled and are kept out of these picks.
Refreshed monthly. We re-check picks, prices and plans every month and whenever a vendor ships a major change.
Fathom is the best free AI meeting notetaker, Granola is best if you don't want a bot in your meetings, Fireflies suits teams that need a searchable call library and Read AI adds meeting analytics.
Is there a free AI notetaker for Zoom?
Yes. Fathom's free plan records and summarises unlimited Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams calls. Fireflies, Read AI and Granola also have free plans with tighter limits.
Does Granola join meetings as a bot?
No. Granola captures audio directly from your computer or phone, so no bot appears in the meeting. It combines the transcript with your own notes to write a summary.
How much does Fireflies cost?
As of November 2026, Fireflies Pro costs $10 per seat a month billed yearly ($18 month to month), and Business costs $19 per seat a month billed yearly ($29 month to month). A free plan is available.
