Best AI Meeting Assistants in 2026: Fathom vs Fireflies vs Otter

Last updated: July 2026. Meeting notetakers have converged on the same feature list — join the call, transcribe it, summarise it, pull out action items. What still separates them is what happens after the call, whether a bot has to announce itself to your guests, and how much you pay for something you’ll use every day. We’ve run all three across real calls. Some links are affiliate links; it never changes our picks — disclosure.

Quick verdict

For one person, Fathom — it’s genuinely free, not a crippled trial, and the summaries are the cleanest here. For a team that needs to search back through everything ever said and keep a CRM current without anyone typing, Fireflies. Otter remains the most reliable live transcription and has the most generous free minutes, but its summaries no longer lead.

Our scores, side by side

Tool	Our score	Best for	From	Watch out for
Fathom	8.4/10	Individuals who want a genuinely free notetaker.	Free	Fewer team/admin features
Fireflies	8.0/10	Teams building a searchable meeting knowledge base.	Freemium	Bot joins can feel intrusive
Otter.ai	7.9/10	Reliable live meeting transcription.	Freemium	Summaries trail Fathom

Scored on	Fathom	Fireflies	Otter.ai
Ease of use	9	7	8
Features	6	9	7
Value	10	7	8
Performance	9	8	7

Scores are ours, from hands-on use — how we test. Pricing verified Jul 2026; vendors change prices, so check the tool page for the current position.

Fathom — our pick for individuals

Actually free and actually good is a rare combination, and it’s the whole argument here. The core product costs nothing and isn’t hobbled to push you upmarket. The summaries arrive within a minute of hanging up and are usually clean enough to forward without editing — which is the thing you’ll judge a notetaker on after a fortnight, not the feature list.

Highlighting during the call is the feature we ended up using most: one tap marks the moment, which beats trying to reconstruct it from a transcript later. The limits are real though — fewer team and admin controls than the others, and it’s focused on Zoom and Google Meet. Neither matters much if you’re one person; both matter if you’re rolling it out to twenty.

Fireflies — best for teams building a searchable record

Fireflies is the one that gets better the more calls run through it. Search across every conversation a team has had turns a pile of transcripts into something you actually query — “when did we last discuss pricing with this account” is a question the other two can’t really answer at team scale.

The CRM sync is the sleeper feature. Call notes and fields landing in the CRM without anyone typing them removes a genuinely tedious job, and it’s the reason sales teams stay. Two honest downsides: the bot joins the call visibly, which some guests dislike, and the features worth paying for are all on the paid tiers.

Otter — the reliable live transcriber

Otter is the veteran and it shows in the reliability. Live transcript appearing as people speak is rock-solid, the free minutes are generous, and the archive search has years of material behind it for long-standing users.

What’s changed is that the summaries no longer lead the category — Fathom’s are better, and that’s the main reason Otter isn’t our default recommendation any more. Speaker identification also slips occasionally, which is worth a correction pass on anything you’ll rely on months later.

What about meetings where a bot isn’t welcome?

All three join the call as a visible participant. If you’re in sensitive conversations — client work, interviews, anything where a recording bot changes the room — that’s a real constraint rather than a preference. Granola takes notes by listening through your own machine instead, so nothing announces itself. We haven’t tested it, so it’s a listing rather than a review, but it’s the tool to look at if the bot is the blocker.

Which should you choose?

• You’re one person and want it free: Fathom.
• A team that needs search and CRM sync: Fireflies.
• Live transcription accuracy above all: Otter.
• No bot in the meeting: Granola (untested by us).

How we tested

We ran each tool across the same set of real calls — a two-person technical discussion, a four-person meeting with overlapping speech, and a call with a non-native English speaker — then compared the summaries against what was actually said. We scored ease of use, features, value and performance, and the reasoning behind each score is on the individual tool pages. No vendor saw this before publication. Full method: how we test AI tools.

FAQs

Is Fathom really free?
Yes — the core notetaking product costs nothing and isn’t a time-limited trial. Paid tiers exist for team administration and CRM sync, but an individual can use it indefinitely without paying.

Do these work outside Zoom and Google Meet?
Fireflies and Otter cover the widest range of platforms. Fathom is more focused on Zoom and Meet, which is one of its recorded limitations.

Do I need to tell people I’m recording?
Yes, and in many jurisdictions you’re legally required to. All three join as a visible participant, which handles disclosure in practice, but consent rules vary by country and by state — check what applies where you and your participants are.

How accurate is the transcription?
All three are good on clear single-speaker audio. Accuracy drops for everyone with crosstalk, strong accents and poor microphones — Otter was the most robust in our testing, and speaker labels were the first thing to break across all three.