Best AI note taker: 6 picks, 4 tested on the same meeting

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AI note takers, the AI note-taking apps and tools that join or listen to your calls, went from novelty to default in about two years, and the market bloated to match. We took a narrower approach: we picked the four that matter, wrote a full hands-on review of each, and in June 2026 ran the exact same meeting through all of them to see which one we would actually keep.

Two more, tl;dv and Avoma, make the list for jobs the four do not cover, and we say plainly that we have read their docs but not tested them. Every price below was re-checked on the vendor’s own page on November 4, 2026.

What is the best AI note taker?

Granola and Fathom are the best AI note takers for most people, tied at 4.6 out of 5, and the right one depends on whether a bot in your call is a problem. After writing full hands-on reviews of four tools and running the same two-speaker meeting through all four, here is where they land:

• Best for client calls (and our overall pick): Granola — bot-free, and it turns the rough notes you jot into a full summary. 4.6 / 5.
• Best free, and best for sales teams: Fathom — a genuinely unlimited free plan, it records video, and it syncs to your CRM. 4.6 / 5.
• Best for teams: Fireflies.ai — AI search, analytics, and CRM sync across every call, with a near-flawless transcript in our test. Overkill for one person. 4.4 / 5.
• Best for live transcription and speaker labels: Otter.ai — strong real-time captions and it auto-joins from your calendar, but the free tier is stingy. 3.8 / 5.
• Best for a free recording library: tl;dv — unlimited free recordings with clips, though only 10 meetings get full AI notes. Not tested by us.
• Best for sales-call analytics: Avoma — scheduling, notes, and deal insight in one platform, with no free plan. Not tested by us.

If you just want the short version: take client and external calls? Start with Granola. Want an uncapped free plan or you run a sales team? Start with Fathom. Running a whole team that lives in a CRM? Fireflies. Need speaker labels and a full archive of every word? Otter. Want a free archive of every recording? tl;dv. Selling for a living and want coaching data? Avoma.

How did we test and compare these AI note takers?

We wrote a full, hands-on review of four tools, and in June 2026, to make the comparison fair, we ran one controlled test through every app: an 80-second, two-speaker product meeting we generated with synthetic voices, loaded with names, numbers, and jargon, so we knew the exact right answer. Otter and Fireflies took it as a file upload, Granola captured it as a Quick Note, and Fathom recorded it bot-free.

The clip was fiction by design, so no real meeting was ever recorded, but it was written like a real one. Two people, Sarah and David, talked through a product decision with the exact details a tool tends to fumble: a “5.2%” churn figure, an activation jump “from 41% to 58%”, a price moving “from $16 to $19”, an instruction to “tag it P1”, and acronyms like SSO and P95. Because we wrote the script, we knew the perfect transcript and the perfect summary in advance, which turns a vague impression into a scoreable result.

Read the full test-meeting script we scored against

These are the exact words in the clip above. The synthetic voices are Sarah (ElevenLabs’ Rachel) and David (Adam), and we scored every tool’s transcript and summary against this ground truth.

Sarah: Morning, David. Before we start, did the Q3 churn numbers come in?

David: They did. We closed at 5.2% monthly churn, down from 6.8% in Q2. The retention experiment on the onboarding flow is doing the work.

Sarah: That’s a big drop. Which cohort moved the most?

David: The self-serve cohort. Activation went from 41% to 58% after we added the interactive checklist. Enterprise barely moved.

Sarah: So the action item is to port that checklist into the enterprise onboarding before the November release. Can you own that?

David: I can. I’ll loop in Priya from design and scope it by Friday. One risk: the enterprise SSO step breaks the checklist’s deep links right now.

Sarah: Note that as a blocker. Let’s also get the API latency under 200 milliseconds before we ship. Marcus flagged P95 spikes on the EU region.

David: Agreed. I’ll file a ticket for the latency and tag it P1. Anything else for the roadmap review?

Sarah: Just the pricing test. We’re moving the Pro tier from $16 to $19 and watching conversion for two weeks. Decision on the 24th.

David: Got it. I’ll have the dashboard ready Monday.

Tool	Best for	Free plan	Bot?	Video	Paid from	Our rating (June 2026)
Granola	Discreet client calls	30 days of history	No (bot-free)	No (deletes audio)	$14/user	4.6
Fathom	Free use + sales teams	Unlimited recordings	Yes (bot-free beta, Mac)	Yes	$20 ($16 annual)	4.6
Fireflies.ai	Teams: search + analytics + CRM	400 min storage	Yes (Chrome extension without bot)	Yes	$10/seat annual	4.4
Otter.ai	Live transcription + speaker labels	300 min/mo	Yes	No	$16.99 ($8.33 annual)	3.8
tl;dv	Free recording library + clips	Unlimited recordings, 10 full AI notes	Bot or no-bot	Yes	€18 annual	Not tested
Avoma	Sales-call analytics	None (14-day trial)	Bot or bot-less	Yes	$19 annual	Not tested

Prices are the monthly list price unless marked annual, checked November 4, 2026. That single shared test is what lets us rank the first four honestly rather than by marketing copy. It is also where the differences showed up: Fathom’s transcript was the cleanest (it kept “Q3”, “$16 to $19”, and “tag it P1” intact), Fireflies matched it on the specifics with a single punctuation slip, Otter dropped the quarter off “Q3”, and Granola garbled a line or two but made up for it by merging our typed notes with the audio.

On the summary, Fathom, Fireflies, and Otter all produced clean action items with the right owners, while Granola’s enhancement turned six rough bullets into the most complete write-up of the four. The free tiers and the privacy models then separated them further.

June 2026 test result	Transcript on the planted specifics	Summary and action items
Fathom	Cleanest: kept “Q3”, “$16 to $19”, and “tag it P1”	Clean, structured, right owners
Fireflies	Matched Fathom, one punctuation slip	Clean, right owners
Otter	Dropped “Q3” to “Q”	Clean, right owners
Granola	Garbled a line or two	Most complete, merged our typed notes with the audio

We weighted the things that actually decide whether you keep a notetaker: summary quality, free-plan generosity, whether a bot joins the call, accuracy on real specifics, privacy, and price. We did not weight raw word-error rate in isolation, because a tool that transcribes everything but summarizes nothing useful is still a chore.

One thing we deliberately did not do is lean on other review sites. Every verdict here traces back to our own use of the tool or to a primary source you can check yourself: the vendor’s pricing page, a public G2 or Trustpilot score, or a court filing. When we could not stand a claim up against one of those, we left it out rather than dress it up as “users report.” tl;dv and Avoma are ranked from their own pricing pages and help docs only, and their sections say so.

One caveat worth stating plainly: our shared clip was clean, two-speaker audio. Real calls have crosstalk, accents, and three people talking at once, so treat our accuracy findings as a best case rather than a guarantee: a fair head-to-head, not a promise about your worst meeting.

What should you look for in an AI note-taking app?

These are the axes we weighted, and the ones worth weighing for your own week. At a glance, here is which of our four tested picks wins each one, with the detail below:

What to weigh	Why it matters	Winner of our four
Bot or bot-free	A visible bot can be awkward on client calls	Granola (nothing joins)
Free-plan reality	It is what you will actually live on	Fathom (unlimited recordings)
Summary quality	A clean summary beats a raw transcript	Fathom (most structured)
Accuracy on specifics	Names and numbers are what you quote later	Fathom & Fireflies (both kept Q3)
Privacy and training	A notetaker hears everything	Granola (deletes audio, opt-out)
Where notes go	Notes should reach your CRM or channel	Fireflies (major CRMs, plus Slack and Notion)
Consent	Some states require everyone to agree	Any visible bot (it announces itself)

Bot or bot-free. Most notetakers send a visible bot into your call to record it. That is fine for an internal standup, but on a client or sales call a third party in the participant list can be awkward or against policy. Bot-free tools capture your device audio instead, so nothing joins. If your meetings are external, this is the single most important axis.

How real the free plan is. Almost every tool advertises a free tier, but they vary wildly. Some are genuinely unlimited; others cap you at a few hundred minutes a month or hide your older notes behind a paywall. Read the free plan’s limits before you commit, because that is what you will actually live on, not the headline that says “free.” If price is your main filter, our best free AI note taker guide ranks these tools by their free tier alone.

Summary quality, not just transcription. Any tool can produce a transcript. The value is in the summary: does it separate decisions from discussion, pull clean action items, and get the numbers right? In our testing this was the biggest difference between tools that felt useful and tools that handed back a wall of text you still had to read.

Accuracy on the hard parts. Names, figures, and ticket IDs are the details you will quote later, so accuracy on specifics matters more than a headline percentage.

Privacy and compliance. A notetaker records everything everyone says. Check whether it trains its AI on your data by default, whether it deletes the audio after transcribing, and whether it carries SOC 2 or HIPAA if your work needs it.

Where the notes go. A summary trapped in one app is half as useful. The best tools push notes into the places you work, whether that is a CRM for a sales team or a shared channel for everyone else. If your notes need to reach Salesforce or HubSpot without manual entry, weigh that heavily.

A word on consent. Recording a call is a legal question before it is a technical one. US federal law and 38 states plus Washington, D.C. need only one person on the call to consent, according to the Digital Media Law Project, but states such as California, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Washington require everyone to agree. The practical rule is simpler: tell people a notetaker is running. A bot-free tool will not do it for you.

1. Granola — best for discreet client calls

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Granola is our overall pick because it nails the hardest case: high-quality notes on a call where a recording bot would be awkward. Nothing visibly joins the meeting. It captures your device audio quietly, and its signature move is enhancement, not just transcription: you jot a few rough lines during the call, and when it ends Granola folds in everything it heard and hands back a structured summary.

In our test that was the standout. We typed six terse bullets, and Granola’s enhanced notes came back with specifics we never typed but that were spoken aloud, including the exact owners and deadlines, organized into clean sections. No other tool turned our own thin notes into something we would actually send.

In use, Granola feels less like a recorder and more like a smarter notepad. You open a note, type whatever you would normally jot, and it sits quietly in the background until the call ends. The enhancement step is where it earns its keep: it reorganizes your fragments, fills the gaps from what it heard, and formats the result so you can paste it into an email or a Notion doc without cleanup. For anyone who already takes notes by hand, it removes the part you dislike without touching the part you trust.

The trade-offs are real but narrow. The free Basic plan only keeps 30 days of meeting history, so you need the $14/user Business plan to keep a searchable archive. There is no web app (an Android app arrived in July 2026, joining Mac, Windows, and iPhone), export is thin, and because Granola deletes the audio after transcribing, there is no recording to re-watch. For a consultant, founder, or salesperson on back-to-back external calls, none of that outweighs the discretion and the note quality. Investors have backed the approach too, with Granola raising at a $1.5 billion valuation in 2026, though the product, not the funding, is the reason to use it.

On price, Granola keeps it simple. The Basic plan is free but only surfaces 30 days of meeting history; Business at $14 a user adds unlimited history, integrations with Notion, HubSpot, Zapier, and more, API access, and the more advanced AI models, and Enterprise runs $35 a user. The honest read for a solo user is that Granola becomes a $14 tool the moment you want calls older than a month to stay searchable.

Privacy is the other reason it suits client work. Granola only listens when you open a meeting, deletes the audio as soon as the transcript is written, and lets you opt out of model training. In a year when AI notetakers are drawing privacy lawsuits, a tool that stores no audio and joins no call is the easier one to clear with a cautious client or a security team.

Skip Granola if you want to re-watch the audio or video of a call, or your team works in a browser and will not install a desktop or mobile app, neither of which Granola supports.

Who it’s for: anyone whose meetings are client-facing or sensitive, who jots notes during calls, and who wants the quietest possible footprint. In practice that is consultants, agencies, recruiters, and founders, anyone whose calendar is mostly external calls where a visible recording bot would read as intrusive or unprofessional. We score it 4.6 out of 5.

Read the full Granola review for the hands-on detail, and the Granola pricing guide for the full cost breakdown. If going bot-free isn’t the trade you want to make, Granola alternatives covers the rest of the field.

2. Fathom — best free, and best for sales teams

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Fathom wins two titles at once: the most generous free plan of the four we tested, and the best fit for revenue teams. Its pricing page lists unlimited recordings and transcriptions at $0, where Otter caps you at 300 minutes a month and Granola keeps 30 days of history. The one free-plan limit is on the fancier summaries: its help center says advanced summary templates cover your first 5 calls each month, after which you get the standard summary. For a lot of people, the free plan is the whole product.

It also produced the cleanest output in our test. Fathom’s Enhanced Summary broke the meeting into a purpose, key takeaways, topics, and next steps, with every number and name correct, and its action items came timestamped to the moment in the recording and assignable to a person. Its transcript was among the most accurate of the four we tested, level with Fireflies and a step ahead of Otter on the planted specifics. On G2 it held a 5.0 across 7,136 reviews when we checked on November 4, 2026.

Fathom is built to ask little of you: it joins, records, and the summary is waiting when the call ends, broken into the sections you would have written yourself. Ask Fathom, its built-in assistant, then lets you query the call in plain language, like “what did they say about pricing?”, and jumps you to the exact moment in the recording. For a salesperson reviewing five calls a day, that retrieval is the feature that pays for the upgrade.

For sales teams, the standout feature is native CRM sync: it writes call notes and fields straight into HubSpot or Salesforce, with a Deal View and AI coaching scorecards on the Business plan. The catches: it joins by default as a meeting bot (a bot-free mode is in beta on Mac), the summaries lean formal, there is no Android app, and the full AI assistant plus CRM field sync are paid. Founded in 2020 by Richard White, the ex-UserVoice founder, and backed by Y Combinator and Zoom’s own fund.

The pricing ladder is worth understanding, because the free plan is good enough to change the math:

Fathom plan	Price (monthly / annual)	What it adds
Free	$0	Unlimited recordings and transcripts; limited Ask Fathom; advanced summaries on 5 calls a month
Premium	$20 / $16	Ask Fathom AI assistant, unlimited AI summaries in any format
Team	$19 / $15 per user (2-user minimum)	Shared folders and team features
Business	$34 / $25 per user (2-user minimum)	CRM field sync, coaching analytics, admin controls
Enterprise	$35 per user, annual only	Contact sales

For a solo user the free plan is usually enough; the paid tiers earn their keep when a whole team needs notes flowing into a shared system. Prices are from fathom.ai/pricing, checked November 4, 2026.

Skip Fathom if a visible recording bot is a dealbreaker on every call (its bot-free mode is still Mac-only beta), if you need to record from a phone in the room, or if you would rather a notetaker delete the audio than store a replayable video of the meeting.

Who it’s for: anyone who wants clean notes for free, plus any sales or customer-success team that needs notes in the CRM without manual entry. The unlimited free plan is the rare case where the generous tier is not a trap set to upsell you. We score it 4.6 out of 5, tying Granola as a co-leader.

Read the full Fathom review for the hands-on detail, and the Fathom pricing guide for the full cost breakdown. Fathom vs Granola settles our top two head to head, and Fathom vs Fireflies is the one to read before a team rollout.

3. Fireflies.ai — best for teams

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Fireflies is the one built for a whole team rather than a single notetaker, and it is the strongest pick once several people are generating calls every week. We ran the same test clip through it, and the transcript came back near-flawless: it held every churn figure, the 41% to 58% activation jump, and the $16-to-$19 pricing change, with one punctuation slip and zero dropped facts. It even kept the “Q3” detail Otter lost on the identical clip.

What sets it apart is everything around the transcript. AskFred, its assistant, runs on Claude and answers questions across your entire meeting history, not just one call. Conversation analytics turn months of calls into talk-time, sentiment, and topic trends. And the integration layer is deep, auto-logging notes and action items into CRMs such as Salesforce and HubSpot, plus Slack and Notion. For a sales or success org, that plumbing is usually the whole reason to buy.

Capture is hands-off: connect your calendar and the notetaker auto-joins scheduled calls without you starting anything. Its data stance is one of the stronger ones here, too, stating it does not train AI on your meetings and runs a 0-day retention policy with its vendors. On November 4, 2026 it held a 4.7 out of 5 across 756 G2 reviews, listed in G2’s conversation-intelligence category rather than the personal-notetaker one.

The catch is fit. The team machinery is dead weight for a solo user, it rides a visible bot by default with a Chrome extension that records without the bot (per Fireflies’ extension page) as the alternate path, and its AI features are metered by credits. Pricing is per seat, and the headline prices are the annual ones:

Fireflies plan	Price per seat (annual / monthly)	What you get
Free	$0	400 min of storage per team (per its pricing page, November 4, 2026), 20 AI credits, a one-time grant per Fireflies’ AI credits help article (updated October 2026); 3 transcriptions unless Auto Join is on
Pro	$10 / $18	8,000 min of storage per seat, AI search, video recording
Business	$19 / $29	Conversation analytics, team features
Enterprise	$39, annual only	Admin, security, and compliance controls

Prices are from Fireflies’ own July 2026 pricing guide and help center, checked November 4, 2026.

Skip Fireflies if you are a team of one or two who just want clean notes: the analytics, user groups, and CRM sync are weight you would pay for without using, and Granola or Fathom does the core job with far less around it. Skip it too if a visible bot on external calls is a dealbreaker, since bot-free capture is the alternate path here, not the default.

Who it’s for: teams, not individuals. It is the pick once several people are generating calls every week and someone has to search across them, coach against them, or feed their outcomes into a pipeline: sales orgs, customer success teams, and recruiters who live in a CRM. A solo user gets more from Granola or Fathom, and less to learn. We score it 4.4 out of 5: a genuinely excellent team tool, held back only by how much of it a single person will never touch, plus the bot and the credit metering.

Read the full Fireflies review for the hands-on test, the Fireflies pricing guide for every tier broken down, and Fireflies alternatives if the per-seat math doesn’t work for your team.

4. Otter.ai — best for live transcription and speaker labels

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Otter is one of the longest-running names here, and it earns its place on two strengths the others de-emphasize: live, accurate transcription with speaker labels, and OtterPilot, which auto-joins your Zoom, Teams, and Meet calls straight from your calendar so the notes happen without you lifting a finger. In our test it separated the two speakers cleanly and its summary and action items were genuinely strong.

So why 3.8 and not higher? The marks against it are ones neither Granola nor Fathom carries. The free tier is stingy: 300 minutes a month, a 30-minute cap per conversation, and three lifetime imports. A 2025 class action (Brewer v. Otter.ai, now consolidated as In re Otter.AI Privacy Litigation) challenges how it records people, its June 2026 privacy policy lists training its AI on de-identified recordings and transcripts, and its Trustpilot score, 3.0 when we reviewed it in June 2026, had risen to 4.4 across 852 reviews by November 4, 2026. It also dropped a specific in our test, turning “Q3” into “Q” in our test.

Otter’s real strength shows up live. Open the app during a call and the transcript scrolls in real time, speaker by speaker, which is genuinely useful for accessibility or for anyone who reads faster than they listen. Otter Chat then sits on top of your whole history, so you can ask a question across months of meetings, not just one. Its mobile app is built for recording in the room, a reminder that Otter was built for transcription first and meeting summaries second.

None of that makes Otter a bad tool. Its core AI is good, and for the specific job of a searchable, fully-labeled transcript of every word, with calendar auto-join, it is the pick. Just go in knowing the free plan is a trial, not a home, and read its privacy settings on your first login.

On price, Otter’s ladder looks like this:

Otter plan	Price (monthly / annual)	Limits
Basic	Free	300 min a month, 30 min per conversation, 3 lifetime imports
Pro	$16.99 / $8.33	1,200 min a month, 90 min per meeting, 10 imports a month
Business	$30 / $19.99 per user	Unlimited meetings, up to 4 hours each, unlimited imports
Enterprise	Demo only	Admin and security controls

Pro’s allowance is more generous than the free tier’s 300 minutes, but only Business lifts the minute cap, where Fathom’s free plan has no cap at all. That gap is a big part of why Otter sits a tier below the other three despite a genuinely capable AI. Prices are from otter.ai/pricing, checked November 4, 2026; the page also runs short-term promo discounts, which we leave out because they expire.

Skip Otter if the free tier’s 300 monthly minutes and three lifetime imports will not cover your week, if you want video playback rather than a text transcript, or if the 2025 consent litigation and its AI-training terms give your security team pause.

Who it’s for: people who need reliable speaker labels, a complete transcript archive, and hands-off calendar auto-join, and who will pay $8.33 a month on annual billing, or $16.99 month to month, to clear the free-tier limits. The 3.8 is not a knock on the technology, which is mature and accurate; it reflects the consent lawsuit, the AI-training clause, and a free tier built as a trial rather than a home. If none of those bother you, Otter is a stronger pick than its score alone suggests. We score it 3.8 out of 5.

Read the full Otter review for the hands-on detail, and the Otter pricing guide for every tier broken down. If the stingy free tier is the dealbreaker, Otter alternatives covers where to go instead — or read it against the others directly in Otter vs Fathom, Otter vs Granola, and Otter vs Fireflies.

5. tl;dv — best for a free recording library

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A straight disclosure first: we have not run tl;dv through our test meeting, so this section is a read of its pricing page and help center as of November 4, 2026, not a hands-on verdict.

With that flagged, tl;dv solves a different problem from the four above. Its free plan is built around the recording, not the AI: unlimited recordings and transcripts on Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams, in 30+ languages, with the video kept so you can cut and share clips. If what you want is a searchable archive of every call you can rewatch, that is a rare thing to get for nothing.

The catch sits in the AI. Its help center says only your first 10 meetings get automatic AI notes covering the whole call; after that, the automatic notes cover the first 10 minutes of each meeting. Those limits are for the life of the account and do not reset monthly. Free recordings are archived after three days and kept for three months, and you get 4 shareable clips and 20 integration credits.

tl;dv plan	Price per seat (monthly / annual)	What changes
Free	€0	Unlimited recordings; full AI notes on your first 10 meetings only; 3-month storage
Pro	€29 / €18	Individual paid tier
Business	€39 / €29	Team tier

Skip tl;dv if you want the AI to summarize every meeting for free, which is the job Fathom does better on its free plan. Who it’s for: people who rewatch calls and share moments with a wider team, such as product, research, and customer teams, and anyone who wants a free video archive and is happy to write their own takeaways.

Our best free AI note taker guide puts tl;dv’s free plan side by side with Fathom’s.

6. Avoma — best for sales-call analytics

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Avoma is also on this list from its documentation rather than our testing: we have not run it through our meeting, and everything here comes from its pricing page as read on November 4, 2026.

It is the one tool here built for a revenue team’s whole meeting workflow rather than the notes alone. One platform books the meeting, records it, writes the AI notes, saves them to the CRM record, and, with its add-ons, scores calls and coaches reps. It works on Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, Webex, and GoToMeeting, and its pricing page says every plan supports both bot-based and bot-less recording.

Avoma plan	Price per recorder seat (annual / monthly)	Highlights
Startup	$19 / $29	Unlimited AI notes, 1:1 scheduler, notes saved to CRM, video recording
Organization	$29 / $39	Custom AI templates, group and round-robin scheduling, limited conversation intelligence
Enterprise	$39, annual only	SSO, HIPAA, 10-seat minimum
Add-ons	$29 / $35 each	Full conversation intelligence, or revenue intelligence with 2-way CRM field updates

There is no free plan, only a 14-day trial of Organization with every add-on switched on and no card required. That pricing is the trade-off in plain view: once you add conversation intelligence, a seat runs about $48 on annual billing ($19 Startup plus a $29 add-on), roughly double Fathom Business ($25) and about 2.5 times Fireflies Business ($19), so Avoma only makes sense if you will use the scheduling and scoring as well as the notes.

Skip Avoma if you are one person who wants clean notes, since there is no free plan and most of what you would pay for is sales tooling. Who it’s for: sales and customer-success managers who want notes, scheduling, and call scoring in a single bill instead of three tools.

Which AI note taker should you pick?

Pick by the job, not the brand. The honest decision tree is short:

• If your calls are with clients and a bot would be awkward → Granola.
• If you want the best free plan, video replay, or you run a small sales team → Fathom.
• If you need speaker labels, live captions, and calendar auto-join → Otter.
• If a large team searches hundreds of calls and lives in a CRM → Fireflies.
• If you want a free, rewatchable archive of every call → tl;dv.
• If a sales team wants scheduling, notes, and call scoring in one bill → Avoma.
• If you record in person, away from a laptop → a phone app or a hardware recorder.

Working mostly in one platform? Every pick above works on all three big ones, but the built-in options differ, so we have dedicated guides to the best AI notetaker for Zoom and Microsoft Teams. If your calls run on Google Meet, our guide to the best AI note taker for Google Meet weighs Gemini’s built-in “Take notes for me” against these apps and covers Chrome extensions.

Team size tilts the call too. Solo or a handful of people, and Granola or Fathom on a free or single-seat plan is plenty. A growing sales org that needs every rep’s calls flowing into one CRM view leans Fathom Business or Fireflies. A larger company with a security review to clear will find Granola’s no-audio, no-bot model the easiest to get signed off, which is worth as much as any feature when procurement is involved.

If you are still unsure, the lowest-risk move is to start on a free plan. Fathom’s costs nothing and caps no minutes, so you can run a real week of meetings through it before you spend a cent, then switch to Granola if your calls turn out to be the kind where a bot does not belong.

A word on paying. The free plans here are good enough that a lot of people never need to upgrade. You start paying when one of three things becomes true:

You start paying when…	Where to go
You want your full meeting history searchable forever	Granola Business, Otter Pro
You want an AI assistant you can question after the call	Fathom Premium, Otter Pro
Your team needs notes flowing into a shared CRM	Fathom Business, Fireflies Business

If none of those is true for you yet, stay free and revisit when it is.

What if none of the six fits?

A few other names come up often enough to place on the map, each for a narrower job. We have not tested any of these; the notes below come from each vendor’s own pricing page, checked November 4, 2026.

• Fellow started as a meeting-agenda app and now records and summarizes calls too. Its free plan includes 5 AI notes per user for the life of the account, and Team starts at $7 a user on annual billing. Worth a look if your meetings run on shared agendas.
• Krisp is best known for noise cancellation and now sells a meeting notetaker that can run bot-free. There is no ongoing free plan, only a 7-day trial, and Core is $8 a user on annual billing.
• Jamie is a European, privacy-first notetaker that works on any meeting platform and in person. The free plan covers 10 AI notes a month on meetings up to 30 minutes.
• Read AI joins calls as a bot and adds meeting scores and talk-time analytics. Its free plan covers 5 transcripts a month, and Pro is $15 on annual billing.
• Notta and Tactiq are the light, cheap options. Notta offers both a bot and a no-bot recorder, while Tactiq is a browser extension that transcribes Meet, Zoom, and Teams without a bot. Both have small free tiers and paid plans around $8 a month on annual billing.
• NotebookLM and Notion AI are not meeting notetakers in the same sense; they are for research and for notes that already live in your workspace. Reach for them when the job is working with documents, not capturing a live call.
• Plaud and other hardware recorders cover the case none of the software does well: an in-person conversation with no laptop on the table.

Tool	Best for	Bot?	Free plan	Paid from
Fellow	Agenda-led meetings	Bot (bot-less option)	5 AI notes, lifetime	$7 annual
Krisp	Noise cancellation + notes	Bot-free option	7-day trial	$8 annual
Jamie	Privacy, EU, in-person	Not stated	10 notes a month	From €21
Read AI	Meeting scores and analytics	Bot	5 transcripts a month	$15 annual
Tactiq	Captions-based notes in the browser	No (extension)	10 transcripts a month	$8 annual
Plaud	In-person, no laptop	Hardware	n/a	Devices from $159, plus an AI plan

None of these makes our main list, because for most readers the six above cover the same jobs with stronger evidence behind them.

Final word

For most people the best AI note taker is Granola or Fathom, and one question decides it: would a recording bot feel intrusive on your calls? If yes, Granola. If not, start on Fathom’s free plan. Fireflies takes over when a whole team needs every call searchable and synced to a CRM. Start with whichever fits your week, and read the Granola, Fathom, Fireflies, and Otter reviews for the detail behind each verdict.