Nobody takes meeting notes by hand anymore. The question for a small business isn't whether to use an AI notetaker — it's which of the three serious options actually fits your meeting load, and which pricing plan won't surprise you. Fathom, Otter.ai, and Fireflies all claim to be free. All three free plans have sharp edges. We pulled current 2026 pricing and modeled the real monthly cost for a 5-person team.
Here's the framing that matters: a 45-minute meeting typically produces about 30 minutes of cleanup work — writing up notes, extracting action items, emailing the follow-up. At 20 meetings a month, that's 10 hours of admin. Even at a conservative $50/hour loaded cost for whoever's doing it, that's $500/month in note-writing. Every paid tier on this page costs less than that. So the decision isn't "is it worth it" — it's "which one, at which tier, for how many seats." (If you're still building your AI stack from scratch, our 12 AI tools actually worth paying for in 2026 shows where notetakers fit among everything else.)
The price picture: current annual-billing prices
All three vendors run four-ish tiers. Prices below are per user (or per seat) per month on annual billing, verified September 2026. Prices change often — verify on the vendor page before you buy.
| Tool | Free plan | Cheapest paid seat | Team tier |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fathom | $0 — unlimited recordings & transcripts | $16/mo (Premium, individual) | $15/mo/user (Team, min 2 seats) |
| Otter.ai | $0 — 300 min/month, 30-min per-conversation cap | $8.33/mo/user (Pro) | $19.99/mo/user (Business) |
| Fireflies | $0 — unlimited transcription, 800-min storage | $10/mo/seat (Pro) | $19/mo/seat (Business) |
The short read: Otter has the cheapest paid seat at $8.33, Fireflies the cheapest true team plan at $10, and Fathom the most generous free tier. The devils live in the caps and the credit systems — that's what the next three sections are for.
Fathom: the best free tier, built to pull you into a sales stack
Fathom's free plan is the most generous of the three: unlimited recordings and unlimited transcription, free forever, with a 30-day Premium trial when you sign up. The catch is in the summaries: the free tier gets 5 advanced AI summaries a month. After that, you get the basic chronological format only. If you run fewer than 5 real meetings a month, this plan is effectively a paid-quality product for $0.
Paid tiers: Premium at $16/user/month (individual), Team at $15/user/month with a 2-seat minimum, and Business around $25/user/month for deeper CRM and coaching features. Monthly billing runs higher ($20/$19/$34 respectively). Paid plans add custom summary templates, CRM sync to Salesforce and HubSpot, team playlists and coaching analytics, and admin controls. Fathom is certified SOC 2 Type II and lists GDPR and HIPAA compliance, and all paid plans carry a 90-day refund window.
Two things worth knowing: Fathom's bot is a visible meeting participant — clients see it join. There's a bot-free capture option in beta, but don't count on it everywhere yet. And Fireflies' own comparison notes that Fathom stays inside the meeting while competitors extend into email and Slack — Fathom's automation story is strongest if your team already lives in a CRM.
Honest limitation: the paid tiers are priced and feature-shaped for sales teams. If your business has no CRM and no coaching workflow, Business at ~$25/user is paying for machinery you'll never switch on. Stay on the free plan — it's genuinely the best free deal here — or jump to a paid tier only when you've outgrown the 5-summary cap.
Otter.ai: the cheapest paid seat, with minute caps that matter
Otter is the oldest name here and the only one with true real-time transcription — you watch the words appear during the call, not after. OtterPilot auto-joins scheduled Zoom, Google Meet, or Teams meetings from your calendar, so there's no manual step once it's wired up. Transcription covers English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, and Chinese (Simplified).
The free Basic plan gives 300 minutes a month — sounds like 5 hours, until you hit the 30-minute per-conversation cap. A normal hour-long meeting gets cut off mid-recording unless you restart it manually, and you only get 3 file imports for the lifetime of the account. It's a trial tier wearing a free-tier costume.
Pro is the value play: $8.33/user/month on annual billing ($16.99 month-to-month) for 1,200 minutes and a 90-minute per-conversation cap, plus unlimited storage, team vocabulary, and Salesforce/HubSpot/Zapier integrations. Business runs $19.99/user/month annually ($30 monthly) with unlimited transcription and a 4-hour per-conversation cap; Enterprise is custom-quoted and reserves the deeper sales tooling like live coaching, SSO, and the HIPAA add-on.
Honest limitation: watch the per-conversation cap, not just the monthly total. A 95-minute quarterly planning session on Pro gets cut off at 90 minutes. If your meetings regularly run long, you may be buying Business at more than double the price just to lift one limit — in which case Fireflies' or Fathom's unlimited-conversation plans start looking cheaper.
Fireflies: the cheapest real team plan — with a credit system to understand
Fireflies' free plan offers unlimited transcription — the genuinely strong part — but storage is capped at 800 minutes per seat and AI summaries are limited. The AI-features side is governed by a credits system: even on paid plans, AI summaries, AskFred (its "ask your meetings anything" search), and smart highlights consume monthly AI credits. Pro gets 20 credits a month, Business 30, Enterprise 50. It's the hidden variable other pricing pages don't have — check whether your usage burns through 20 summaries a month before you commit.
Pricing: Pro at $10/seat/month billed annually ($18 month-to-month) with 8,000 minutes of storage per seat; Business at $19/seat/month annually ($29 monthly) with unlimited storage, conversation intelligence (talk-time ratios, sentiment, topic tracking), and video screen capture; Enterprise at $39/seat/month with HIPAA, SSO, and custom data retention. Core transcription quality is the same on every plan — you're paying for storage, analytics, and controls, not accuracy.
Fireflies' strengths are breadth: 100+ transcribed languages (far beyond Otter's handful), 100+ integrations, an Email Assistant for Gmail and Outlook, Slack connectors, and CRM automation. It also carries SOC 2 Type II and GDPR on every plan including Free, and states it doesn't train AI models on customer data. The trade-off: Fireflies processes recordings after the meeting — there are no live captions during the call. If real-time on-screen transcription matters, Otter wins that round outright.
Honest limitation: the credits system and the storage caps are the real pricing, more than the per-seat number. A team that records everything but rarely revisits old calls is fine on Pro; a team that generates 40+ AI summaries and AskFred queries a month may burn credits and face top-ups. And if your meetings run in person with no bot allowed, Fireflies' cloud-only design has no local-recording story.
The 5-person-team math
Assume five people who each attend real meetings. Here's the cheapest reasonable paid tier for each tool, annual billing, all-in:
| Tool | Plan | Per-seat/month (annual) | 5 seats/month | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fathom | Team | $15 | $75 | Unlimited everything, CRM workflows, coaching analytics |
| Otter.ai | Pro | $8.33 | $41.65 | 1,200 min total/user, 90-min per-meeting cap, CRM sync |
| Fireflies | Pro | $10 | $50 | Unlimited transcription, 8,000-min storage/seat, 20 AI credits/mo |
Otter Pro is the cheapest five-seat bill at about $42/month; Fireflies Pro runs $50; Fathom Team runs $75. Now stack that against the note-writing it replaces: 10 hours a month at $50/hour loaded is $500. Every option on this page costs under a sixth of the problem it's solving — a payback so lopsided that picking on features instead of price is the rational move. And if your budget is truly $0, Fathom's free plan is the only one here that handles real meeting volume without caps that bite.
Verdict by meeting load
- Solo owner, under ~5 real meetings a month: Fathom free. $0, the best summaries of the three free tiers, and the paid upgrade is a clean jump to $16 when you outgrow it.
- Budget-conscious team, lots of meetings: Otter Pro at $8.33/user. Cheapest per-seat bill — but verify your meetings fit the 90-minute per-conversation cap before you commit five seats.
- Agency or consultancy with CRM workflows: Fireflies Business ($19/seat) if you want conversation intelligence and broad integrations; Fathom Team ($15/user) if your workflow ends at the CRM and you want the cleaner summaries.
- Multilingual team or global clients: Fireflies, no contest — 100+ languages versus a handful at Otter.
- Real-time captions during the call: Otter. Fireflies processes after the meeting ends.
- Regulated industry (healthcare, finance): Fireflies Enterprise or Fathom Business, which carry HIPAA-relevant controls. Otter reserves its HIPAA add-on for Enterprise — get the compliance answer in writing before you buy.
One last StackSmarter habit applies here: re-check pricing quarterly. Notetaker pricing moves — free tiers get capped, credits get repriced, annual discounts get restructured. Set a calendar reminder; stale numbers are how $0 plans turn into $99/month surprises.
FAQ
Will clients mind the AI bot joining our meetings?
Some will. All three tools join as a visible participant and announce recording, which handles consent in most jurisdictions — but on sensitive sales or client calls, ask permission up front. Fathom and Fireflies both offer bot-free options on some plans and platforms, though they're not universal yet. When in doubt, lead with "mind if our notetaker joins?" before the meeting starts.
How accurate is the transcription, really?
Vendor claims run as high as 99%, but independent reviewers put real-world results closer to 88–95% on clear, native-English audio, dropping with strong accents or heavy crosstalk. That's consistent across all three tools — it won't be the deciding factor between them. Always skim the summary against the transcript for anything contractual.
Can a small team really use a free plan forever?
It depends on the tool and your volume. Fathom's free plan is the only one that scales — unlimited recordings, with the 5-advanced-summaries-a-month cap as the nudge to upgrade. Otter's 300-minute monthly cap and 30-minute per-conversation cap make free impractical beyond light testing. Fireflies' free tier works for light users but the 800-minute storage cap and credit limits push heavy users to Pro quickly.
What happens to our meeting archive if we cancel?
You keep access to existing recordings and transcripts on a free plan (subject to that plan's caps), but paid features like advanced summaries, conversation intelligence, and extra storage go away with the subscription. Export important transcripts — all three tools support transcript downloads on paid tiers — before you downgrade.