What is the best AI meeting note taker in 2026?

Fathom does what the others won't: its free plan has no minute cap. Recordings and transcriptions are unlimited, and AI summaries land as soon as the call ends. If you run ten client calls a week, it's the only free plan that holds up month after month.

You can let a bot join your calls or use botless capture, which is still in beta. Premium costs $16 per user per month billed yearly, $20 monthly. Team plans need at least 2 users: Team at $15 ($19 monthly), Business at $25 ($34 monthly). Business adds field sync with HubSpot and Salesforce, so deal notes land on the right record without copy and paste.

Its limit: the pricing page says nothing about supported languages or where recordings are hosted. If your security team asks where the data sleeps, you won't get an answer as crisp as tl;dv's. And the botless mode being in beta means the bot is still the default.

Tip: the free plan is enough for solo use. Only move to Team if you want a shared call library, and remember the 2-seat minimum: a two-person Team plan billed yearly costs $30 a month in total.

tl;dv is built in Aachen, Germany. Its rarest feature: you choose whether the AI that processes your calls runs in the EU or the US. The company says it is GDPR compliant and spreads hosting across Google Cloud, AWS and Hetzner. If you sell to European clients, that one setting answers the question their legal team will ask.

You can start for free. Pro costs €18 per seat per month billed yearly (€216 a year) or €29 monthly. Business costs €29 billed yearly (€348 a year) or €39 monthly. The pricing page we read lists euros, so your card will be charged with a currency conversion if you pay in dollars.

tl;dv says it detects the language as it changes during the call. That matters for mixed-language meetings: Gemini in Meet handles only one language per meeting. A French-language comparison rates its French as decent rather than great, so if you work in several languages, spot-check the summaries.

Its limit: the exact limits of the free plan aren't clearly shown on the pricing page we read. Check them in your account before you build a routine on it. The bot is visible in every call.

Tip: pick EU hosting when you create your workspace, before your first recording. It's simpler than moving a call history later.

Granola never joins your meeting. It captures audio from your computer or phone, transcribes it, then deletes the audio. Nobody sees a bot in the participant list. That fixes the most common complaint in forum threads about note takers: clients asking to remove the bot before they speak freely.

It blends the notes you type during the call with the transcript to write the summary. It runs on desktop, iOS, Android and even Apple Watch, so it works for in-person meetings too. On security, Granola shows a SOC 2 Type II report (an independent audit of its security controls) and trains its AI on anonymized data, a setting you can turn off in one click. It's off by default on Enterprise.

Basic is free but keeps only 30 days of history, with Slack as its only integration. Business costs $14 per user per month and Enterprise $35, with single sign-on (SSO), SCIM user provisioning and HIPAA. The pricing page doesn't say whether those prices are yearly or monthly.

Its limit: botless doesn't mean consent-free. You still have to tell people you're recording, and in all-party consent states such as California, everyone on the call must agree. Training on anonymized data is on by default outside Enterprise.

Tip: on day one, open the privacy settings and turn off training on your data. If you stay on Basic, export the notes you need before the 30-day window closes.

Otter is the name most people know, and its Pro plan is the cheapest paid plan here: $8.33 per user per month billed yearly for 1,200 minutes a month and up to 90 minutes per conversation. Monthly, it's $16.99, more than double. Business costs $19.99 billed yearly, with unlimited meetings and up to 4 hours per conversation.

The free Basic plan gives 300 minutes a month, but caps each conversation at 30 minutes. Most team meetings run longer, so the free plan is really a trial. OtterPilot joins every calendar meeting that has a video link by default, on Zoom, Meet and Teams. Otter supports six languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese and Chinese.

Its limit is trust. A class action filed in the US in 2025 alleges that Otter recorded people on calls without the consent of all participants to train its AI. Those are allegations, not a ruling. On Trustpilot, 26% of reviews are one star, mostly about subscriptions users didn't know they had and slow human support. On the Zoom community forum, users report they can't disconnect it.

Tip: turn off auto-join in the first five minutes. If Otter keeps coming back, disconnect your Zoom account and your calendar in Otter, then uninstall the Otter app from the Zoom Marketplace. All three steps, or the bot returns.

MeetGeek supports more than 100 languages with automatic detection, and lets you store data in the EU or the US. For a team that talks to clients in English, Spanish and German in the same week, that's a practical mix at a low price.

Pro costs $9.99 per user per month for 20 hours of transcription, then $0.50 per extra hour. Business, at $17, makes transcription unlimited. The free plan gives 3 hours a month, enough to try it on a few real calls.

Our full MeetGeek review scores it 4.0 out of 5 and walks through its features. You'll also find its pricing in detail and, if it isn't the one, MeetGeek alternatives.

Its limit: 3 free hours go fast, one daily standup burns through them in under a week. And overage on Pro is billed by the hour, so a heavy month can cost more than planned.

Tip: past 34 hours a month, Business is cheaper than Pro with overage. Run the math on your busiest month, not your average.

Read.ai works on Zoom, Teams and Meet on every plan, including the free one, and supports several languages, French included.

The free plan is short: 5 meeting reports a month, with meetings capped at 1 hour. Pro costs $15 per user per month billed yearly, $19.75 monthly. Enterprise is $22.50 billed yearly ($29.75 monthly), and Enterprise+ $29.75 ($39.75 monthly).

Its limit: at $15 billed yearly, it costs nearly twice Otter Pro and almost as much as Fathom Premium, whose free plan already covers what many people need. And 5 free reports a month won't last a working week.

Tip: use the free plan on your recurring weekly meeting only. Five reports cover a month of one weekly call, which is enough to judge the summaries before you pay.