Best AI Meeting Notes Tools in 2026

Fireflies wins on the thing that matters after month three: retrieval. Transcripts across Zoom, Teams and Meet land in one searchable archive, and the free plan keeps 400 minutes of storage per team with unlimited transcription and summaries, the only free tier here that does not meter the summaries themselves. Paid starts at $18/mo, mid-range for the category.

The weakness is speaker identification: unless people state their name aloud, you get labelled-but-guessed speakers, and accuracy drops on crosstalk. If your calls are two people, that barely matters. If they are eight-person planning sessions, budget time for cleanup.

Fathom gives away what most rivals meter: unlimited recordings, transcripts and clips on the free plan, with only the advanced AI summaries limited. For solo consultants and founders that is often the whole job done for nothing.

Two caveats. Paid entry is $19/mo, slightly above Fireflies for a narrower archive story. And we found reports of timestamp bugs where multi-hour calls are mis-marked as a few minutes long, annoying when you are trying to jump back to a decision made at minute 80.

Otter is the name everyone knows, and it earns the maturity score: launched in 2016, broad language support, live in-call transcription that is genuinely useful while the meeting is happening rather than after.

It ranks third because of how it treats existing users. Plan limits and pricing changed repeatedly through 2024–2025, drawing sustained 'shrinkflation' complaints, and the current free tier is 300 minutes a month but only three file imports, ever. At $16.99/mo it is not the cheapest either. Strong product, weakest trust record in the top five.

Granola is the contrarian pick: it does not send a bot into your call. It listens on your machine and merges what you typed with what was said, which sidesteps the entire "who is that participant?" problem and the compliance conversation that follows.

The trade-off is absolute: there is no recording and no playback, transcript and notes only. If your team ever needs to re-listen to a disputed call, this is the wrong tool. At $14/mo it is also cheap, though the free tier's history limit is not stated as a number, which we count against it.

Fellow treats the meeting as the unit of work, agendas before, notes during, action items after, with AI recording attached rather than central. Teams trying to fix how they meet get more from it than teams that just want a transcript, and at $11/mo it is the cheapest paid entry in this ranking.

Its free plan is the most misleading here: 5 AI notes and 5 AI recordings per user, lifetime. Read that as a demo, not a tier.

Read.ai adds sentiment and engagement scoring across video calls, so you get a read on whether the room was with you, not only what was said. That is genuinely differentiated and useful for sales coaching.

It sits mid-table because of recurring privacy complaints: the bot joins calendar-based meetings three to five minutes early, which repeatedly surprises participants. Free tier is 5 transcripts and 5 reports a month, one hour max per meeting; paid is $19.75/mo.

tl;dv covers a wide language range and is built around clipping moments out of calls for sharing, which fits product research and sales review workflows.

The free plan is the catch: unlimited recordings, but only 10 fully AI-noted meetings a month, after that you get the first 10 minutes of each. Paid entry is $29/mo, the joint-highest here, so the value case depends entirely on whether you use the clip workflow.

Notta's paid plan is the cheapest real entry point in the category at $13.61/mo, with strong multilingual coverage, and that is the reason to pick it.

Its free plan should be ignored: 120 minutes a month sounds fine until you hit the three-minute cap per recording. That is not a meeting-notes tool, it is a voice-memo tool.

Laxis is built for customer-facing teams: notes flow toward the CRM rather than a document archive, which is the right shape for account managers. $15.99/mo paid, 300 free minutes a month with 30-day history.

It ranks low on reach, not quality, it is primarily a Chrome extension, so anyone on Safari or Firefox is out.

Avoma goes past note-taking into conversation intelligence: deal and coaching analytics on top of the transcript, aimed squarely at sales and customer success organisations.

It is last on this list because of the entry barrier, not the product. There is no free tier, a 14-day trial, then $29/mo, which makes it a deliberate purchase for a revenue team, not something an individual tries on a Tuesday. Sembly ($17/mo, also no free plan) is the cheaper way into the same idea.