Fathom
Free AI meeting recorder and notetaker
The free AI notetaker most people should start with, as long as a visible bot joining your calls is not a dealbreaker.
Individuals and sales or customer-facing teams who want unlimited free recording and summaries without paying Otter or Fireflies prices.
A visible bot joins every call by default, which gets awkward on sensitive external meetings, and the quiet bot-free mode is Mac-only beta.
Reach for it when your calls live on Zoom, Meet, or Teams and the bot does not bother your guests. Skip it if recording optics will cost you a deal.
What you're actually getting
Fathom is an AI meeting assistant that joins your Zoom, Google Meet, or Teams call, records and transcribes it, and hands you a structured summary with action items the moment you hang up.
By default a Fathom notetaker joins as a visible participant, with join and leave announcements. A bot-free mode that records your system audio instead is in beta on Mac as of mid-2026, so the quiet option exists but is not fully shipped.
The headline is the free plan, which is genuinely unlimited: unlimited recordings, transcriptions, and basic automated summaries, with no monthly minute cap. That alone beats Otter's 300-minute free limit and Fireflies' capped AI summaries.
Probably the easiest one to start with. Their free plan is very generous, and the summaries are clean. Great if you're just trying an AI note taker for the first time.
Where it earns its keep
It earns its place for anyone who lives on video calls and wants the record kept for free. You can search across past calls and clip highlights into playlists, so the archive stays usable long after the conversation ends.
For sales and customer-success teams, the Business tier does real work: CRM field sync writes meeting insights back into Salesforce or HubSpot records automatically, Deal View pulls every call on a deal into one page, and AI scorecards plus coaching metrics let managers review rep performance.
The review pools back this up. G2 sits at 5.0 across 7,000 reviews and Capterra at 5.0 across 809, with reviewers praising transcription accuracy, the generous free tier, and CRM sync.
The accuracy of the transcription is top-tier, even with background noise, and the AI-generated summaries are a total game-changer for my productivity.
Where it'll bite you
The visible bot is the number-one trap. It is the most common complaint in the review pools, and on sensitive external or enterprise calls the "who is this participant" moment creates friction and recording-consent awkwardness. Bot-free mode is Mac-only beta, so most users do not have the quiet option yet.
No mobile app is the second. Fathom has no in-person or phone capture, so anything off a desktop video call falls back to manual notes.
The summaries can read stiff and formal, and reviewers say they miss nuance in messy or implicit conversations. IT teams rolling out at scale report that managed deployment is hands-on, with the desktop install requiring local admin and no clean MDM story out of the box.
There are some bugs in terms of sharing recordings and granting access.
What it costs, really
Free is the real starting point: $0 for unlimited recordings, transcriptions, and basic AI summaries. Premium is $20/user/mo ($16 annual) for advanced summary templates, AI action items, and the Ask Fathom assistant.
Team is $19/user/mo ($15 annual, 2-user min) for shared search, team playlists, and keyword alerts. Business is $34/user/mo ($25 annual) for CRM field sync, Deal View, and coaching scorecards, and Enterprise is a custom quote with SSO, SCIM, and HIPAA BAA.
The bill stays predictable because pricing is per seat with no minute meter, so the only surprise is how many seats you need once the team tries it.
Started on fathom's free tier and it worked fine until my usage grew past what free could handle.
This makes it difficult to maintain a complete record within a CRM, as any links or notes shared in the chat are lost.
Same job, other tools
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