The short version. Fathom has the most generous free tier in the category, with unlimited recording and transcription at no cost. Granola is $14 and the only one that does not join your call as a visible bot. Fireflies is $10 a seat annually and the best value for a whole team. Otter is $8.33 annually and the cheapest, with a monthly minute cap you will meet. Notion only makes sense if your notes should live where your documents already are.
Every price here came off the vendor’s own pricing page on 15 August 2026.
Choosing for a whole team? We keep directory shortlists for operations managers and review them on a schedule.
What separates these, once you stop reading feature lists
They all transcribe well now. Accuracy stopped being the differentiator about two years ago, and any of these will get your meeting down accurately enough. So the comparison has moved to three duller questions that turn out to matter a lot more in practice.
- Does a bot visibly join the call? Most of these add a participant with your name and the word Notetaker after it. Some people do not care. Some clients react to it, and some legal teams have opinions.
- What is actually capped? Free and cheap tiers cap different things: minutes, storage, history, imports. The cap you hit first decides your real cost.
- Where do the notes end up? A perfect summary in a tool nobody opens is worth nothing. This is the reason people abandon these after a month.
1. Fathom: the free tier is the story
Free tier with unlimited recordings and transcriptions. Premium $20/month, or $16/month billed annually. Team $19 per user per month, or $15 annually, with a 2-user minimum. Business $34 per user per month, or $25 annually, adding advanced and custom summaries. Verified 15 August 2026.
Unlimited recording and transcription on a free plan is unusual enough that it is worth checking the page yourself, because it sounds like it should have an asterisk. It does not. For one person who wants their calls captured and summarised, this is a complete product at no cost, and that makes it the obvious place to start.
What you pay for is custom summaries, meaning you define what gets pulled out of every call rather than accepting a generic recap. That matters once your calls follow a repeatable shape, like a discovery call or a weekly client check-in, and it matters not at all before then.
It joins calls as a visible bot, which is the trade against Granola below.
Who it is wrong for: people whose meetings are sensitive enough that a recording changes the conversation. That effect is real and no feature fixes it.
2. Granola: the one that does not announce itself
Basic free with limited meeting history. Business $14 per user per month. Enterprise $35 per user per month. Verified 15 August 2026.
Granola works differently. It listens through your machine rather than joining the meeting as a participant, so nothing appears in the attendee list. It also takes your own rough notes during the call and merges them with the transcript afterwards, which produces something closer to what you would have written if you had time.
That second part is the underrated bit. Pure transcription summaries all read the same, because they are summarising everything equally. Notes shaped by what you thought was important read like you wrote them.
Being invisible is a feature with an obligation attached. Not appearing in the participant list does not remove your duty to tell people you are recording, and in some places everyone has to agree. Use it because the bot is awkward, not because it is a way around the conversation.
Who it is wrong for: teams needing a shared searchable archive across everyone. Granola is strongest as a personal tool and the collaboration story is thinner than Fireflies.
3. Fireflies: the best value across a team
Free tier with unlimited transcription and 400 minutes of team storage. Pro $10 per seat per month billed annually, or $18 monthly, with 8,000 minutes of storage per seat. Business $19 per seat annually, or $29 monthly, with unlimited storage. Enterprise $39 per seat. Verified 15 August 2026.
Fireflies is built around the archive rather than the individual call, which is what you want once more than a few people are using it. Everything is searchable across the whole team, so you can find the meeting where a decision was made without knowing who was in it.
At $10 a seat annually it is the cheapest credible option for a team, and the free tier is genuinely usable because transcription is unlimited and only storage is capped. That is a smarter cap than a minute limit, since it lets you try it properly on real volume.
The summaries are competent rather than remarkable. You are buying coverage and search, not the best writeup in the category.
Who it is wrong for: people who want one excellent personal notetaker. Individually it is outclassed by Granola and Fathom, and it wins on what happens when twenty people use it.
4. Otter: cheapest, and the cap is real
Basic free with 300 transcription minutes per user per month and 3 lifetime imports. Pro $8.33 per user per month billed annually, or $16.99 monthly, with 1,200 minutes and 10 imports a month. Business $19.99 annually, or $30 monthly, with unlimited minutes and imports. Verified 15 August 2026.
Otter is the name most people know and the cheapest paid tier here at $8.33 a month on annual billing. It has been doing this longer than the others and the transcription is dependable.
The thing to check before you buy is the minute allowance, because it is the tightest constraint in this comparison. Pro gives you 1,200 minutes a month, which sounds generous until you count. That is twenty hours. Someone in back-to-back meetings will pass it in a fortnight, and then you are on Business at $19.99, which is more than Fireflies and Granola.
So Otter is genuinely cheapest for light users and quietly not cheapest for heavy ones. Work out your real weekly meeting hours first.
Who it is wrong for: anyone in meetings most of the day. The tier that fits you is not the tier that made you look at Otter.
5. Notion: only if the notes should live with the documents
Free tier. Plus $10 per seat per month. Business $20 per seat per month, which is where the AI meeting notes feature sits along with the rest of Notion AI. Annual billing is advertised at 20% off. Verified 15 August 2026.
Nobody should buy Notion to take meeting notes. Plenty of people should use its meeting notes because they already have Notion, and that is a different sentence with a different answer.
The argument is proximity. If your project docs, decisions and briefs already live in Notion, having the call summary land in the same place beats a better summary in a separate tool you have to remember to open. Abandonment is the real failure mode with these products, and proximity is what prevents it.
It sits at $20 a seat on Business, so as a dedicated notetaker it is poor value against a $14 Granola or a $10 Fireflies. As a feature of something you pay for anyway, it is free.
Who it is wrong for: anyone not already committed to Notion. Do not adopt a workspace tool to get a notetaker.
People this list will not help
Anyone in legally sensitive conversations. HR investigations, legal advice and clinical work have recording rules that come before any product comparison.
Sales teams wanting coaching. You want conversation intelligence rather than note taking, which analyses talk ratios and objection handling. Different category, higher price.
Recruiters. Interview notes against a scorecard is a specific job and there are tools built for it. It is on our list for recruiters.
Anyone whose meetings are the problem. If the issue is too many meetings with unclear purpose, summarising them faster is a way of tolerating it for longer.
Considered, and left off
tl;dv. A reasonable competitor with a generous free tier, particularly for sales use. Left out on depth of coverage rather than quality.
Zoom, Teams and Google Meet built-in summaries. Check these before buying anything, because they may already be included in your licence. They are weaker than the tools here, and free beats better more often than people admit.
Vaultscribe and the self-hosted options. If your audio cannot go to a vendor, everything on this page is unavailable to you and the answer is a self-hosted tool. That is a genuinely different shortlist.
Descript. Better than all of these if you need to edit the recording afterwards rather than just read it, and overkill if you only want notes.
Questions people ask us
Which one should I get for myself?
Fathom’s free tier, and stop there until it annoys you. If the visible bot in your meetings is the thing that annoys you, Granola at $14. If you are in meetings all day and want everything searchable later, Fireflies at $10 a seat.
Do I have to tell people I am recording?
Yes, and the tools that do not join visibly do not change that. Some jurisdictions require every participant to consent. Beyond the legal question, people who find out afterwards react badly and you lose more than you gained.
Which free tier is actually usable?
Fathom’s, by a distance, since recording and transcription are both unlimited. Fireflies is next because it caps storage rather than transcription. Otter caps you at 300 minutes a month, which is five hours and will not last a busy week.
Do these work in meetings that are not on video calls?
Most handle in-person audio through your device, and quality varies with the room far more than with the product. Test yours in the actual room before you rely on it for anything that matters.
Why do people stop using these after a month?
Because the summary lands somewhere nobody goes back to. Whatever you pick, decide where the notes end up and who reads them. That decision matters more than which of these you buy.
Is the AI summary good enough to skip the meeting?
For a status update, usually yes, and that is a sign the meeting should have been a document. For anything involving disagreement or a decision, no. The summary records what was said and misses what was meant, which is the part you attend for.
Comparing tooling across a whole operation? See our directory picks for operations managers.
Last reviewed: 15 August 2026. Every price was read off the vendor’s own pricing page on that date. We review this page quarterly.
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