6 tools ranked · prices verified from official pages
Free AI Meeting Notes Tools That Are Actually Usable
"Free plan available" covers three very different things in this category: a monthly allowance you can live inside, a trial wearing a free-plan costume, and a lifetime cap that runs out in your first week.
This page separates them. Every limit below was read off the vendor's own pricing page in August 2026, in the units they actually meter.
Unlimited recordings, transcripts and clips, with only the advanced AI summary limited. No monthly minute counter, no lifetime cap. For one person recording their own calls, the free plan is the product, most people never hit a reason to pay.
Watch for the timestamp bug reports on very long calls if you rely on jumping back to a precise moment.
Entry price
Free plan · from $19/mo
Free tier
Unlimited recordings/transcripts/clips; advanced AI summary generation is limited on the free tier
Platforms
desktop, web, plugin, api
Checked
August 2026
Where it falls short
Reported timestamp bugs where multi-hour calls are mis-marked as only a few minutes long
No straightforward way to selectively record on mobile Zoom/Meet - must start from desktop
Best for free summaries, not just free transcripts
Freemium7.9/10
400 minutes of storage per team, unlimited transcription and summaries, 20 AI credits. The important word is summaries: several rivals transcribe free and then charge for the part you actually read.
Storage is the ceiling here rather than minutes, so it suits bursty use, heavy interview weeks followed by quiet ones, provided you export what you want to keep.
Entry price
Free plan · from $18/mo
Free tier
400 minutes of storage per team, unlimited transcription and summaries, 20 AI credits
Platforms
web, mobile, browser-extension, plugin, api
Checked
August 2026
Where it falls short
Speaker identification is weak unless each speaker states their name aloud
Transcription accuracy drops noticeably with background noise, accents or crosstalk
Best for 300 monthly minutes, if you never import files
Freemium7.5/10
300 transcription minutes a month, 5 workspace members, one concurrent meeting, a workable allowance for a few calls a week.
The trap is imports: three file imports for the lifetime of the account. Recording live is fine; processing recordings you already have is effectively not available on free.
300 transcription minutes a month and 30-day conversation history. Same minute allowance as Otter without the import trap, but everything older than a month disappears, so treat it as a working buffer rather than an archive.
Chrome only, which decides it for some people.
Entry price
Free plan · from $15.99/mo
Free tier
300 transcription minutes/month, 30-day conversation history
Platforms
web, browser-extension, plugin, api
Checked
August 2026
Where it falls short
Primarily a Chrome extension, which limits usability for non-Chrome browser users
Reliability issues reported on long calls, plus a default setting that auto-shares summaries with all attendees, raising privacy concerns
5 transcripts and 5 reports a month, one hour maximum per meeting. Low volume, but you get the analytics layer rather than a stripped version, which makes it a real evaluation rather than a teaser.
Before you use it with clients, know that the bot joins early off your calendar, a documented source of complaints.
Serious, recurring privacy complaints: the bot joins meetings 3-5 minutes early based on calendar events, and other attendees may never have consented to recording
Sentiment analysis is frequently called 'tone-deaf', flagging casual or joking conversations as 'Sentiment: Poor' and risking damaged working relationships
20 meetings total on the free plan, view-only for teammates who are not paying. That is a proper trial of the full product rather than a permanent tier, use it deliberately.
We also count it down for pricing opacity: the Starter and Business prices are not on the public pricing page, so you cannot plan the upgrade before you commit.
Entry price
Free plan available
Free tier
20 meetings total on the free plan, view-only for non-paid team members
Platforms
web, desktop, plugin, api
Checked
August 2026
Where it falls short
Starter and Business plan prices are not shown on the public pricing page - you must click through or book a demo to see per-seat cost, unlike most competitors
No built-in transcript translation; non-English or mixed-language teams need a separate tool
A real monthly allowance. Fireflies, Otter, Laxis and Read.ai all reset every month. You can build a routine on these as long as the cap fits your volume.
A lifetime allowance dressed as a tier. Fellow gives 5 AI notes and 5 AI recordings per user, ever. Otter's three file imports are the same idea in miniature. Neither survives a normal week.
A per-recording cap. Notta's free plan allows 120 minutes a month but stops each recording at three minutes. The monthly number is irrelevant; the per-recording number decides it.
When free stops being enough
The usual breaking point is not minutes, it is retrieval. Once you have sixty calls, you want to search across them, and that is where free tiers with short history (Laxis's 30 days) or storage caps (Fireflies' 400 minutes) push you to pay. If that is your pattern, jump straight to Fireflies at $18/mo rather than cycling through free plans.
The other trigger is teams. Most free tiers are single-seat in practice: Grain makes teammates view-only, Otter caps the workspace at five members. Shared use is the upsell in this category.
Questions people ask
Is there a free AI meeting note taker with no time limit?
Fathom is the only one here with unlimited recordings and transcripts on its free plan; the limit falls on advanced AI summaries instead. Everything else meters minutes, meetings, storage or history.
Can I use a free plan for client calls?
Technically yes, but check two things first: whether a bot visibly joins the call (Read.ai's joins early, which has caused complaints), and whether recordings are retained. Granola keeps no recording at all, which some clients prefer and some legal teams require.
Do free plans include the AI summary or just the transcript?
It varies, and it is the single most important question. Fireflies includes summaries free. Fathom includes basic summaries but limits the advanced ones. Several rivals give you a raw transcript and charge for the summary.
Also in this category
Did not make the ranking, but worth a look depending on your case.
Free-forever meeting recorder with AI notes and multi-meeting summaries for sales and product teams
FreemiumFree plan · from $29/mo· Unlimited recordings but only 10 AI-noted meetings/month in full, then only first 10 minutes/meeting auto-noted; recordings archived after 3 days
