Best Free AI Tools for Meetings & Notes
If your job is back-to-back calls, an AI note-taker is the highest-value free tool you can add: it joins the meeting, records and transcribes it, and hands you a summary with the decisions and action items while you were still talking. The six tools below all have a real free plan — but "free" means something very different in each case, so the limits are printed with every name, and every listing carries a badge: FREE for a genuinely free plan, FREEMIUM for a free tier with real limits, PAID when there is no free plan at all. Two well-known paid tools sit at the end as benchmarks, so you can see exactly what money buys in this category.
How to choose in 30 seconds
- You just want it to work, free, every day: start with Fathom — it is the only plan here with no cap on recordings or transcripts.
- You hate a bot joining the call: Granola records your device's audio instead, so nothing extra appears in the participant list.
- Your meetings run long: check the per-call cap before the monthly cap. Otter's free plan stops transcribing at 30 minutes into a call, and Notta's at 3 — the monthly minutes never get a chance to matter.
- Whatever you pick: tell people the call is being recorded. Consent rules vary by state and country, and every tool here records real people's voices.
The list at a glance
| Tool | Badge | Free plan / price, in one line | The catch |
|---|
| Fathom | FREE | Unlimited recordings, transcripts & storage | Advanced AI summaries limited; a bot joins calls |
| Otter.ai | FREEMIUM | 300 transcription minutes a month | 30-minute cap per conversation; 3 file imports, ever |
| Fireflies.ai | FREEMIUM | Unlimited transcription with calendar auto-join on | 400 minutes of storage per team; no downloads |
| Granola | FREEMIUM | Unlimited meetings, no bot in the call | Free shows only the last 30 days of notes |
| tl;dv | FREEMIUM | Unlimited recordings & transcription, 30+ languages | Full AI notes on your first 10 meetings only |
| Notta | FREEMIUM | 120 transcription minutes a month, 58 languages | Free transcribes only the first 3 minutes per call |
| Avoma | PAID | From $19 per recorder seat/month billed annually; 14-day trial | The intelligence features are $29/seat/month add-ons |
| Gong | PAID | Custom enterprise pricing — no public price list | Quote-only; built and priced for large sales teams |
The tools, checked one by one
Free status: a permanent free plan, not a trial. Unlimited recordings, transcription and storage, with instant AI summaries, clips and search across your calls.
Fathom is the rare case where the free plan is the headline rather than the teaser. It joins your Zoom, Google Meet or Teams calls, and afterwards you get the recording, the transcript and a summary without a monthly minute counter hanging over you.
Best for: most people — heavy meeting schedules on a $0 budget.
Honest limit: the advanced AI summaries are limited on free (the first few calls each month), Ask Fathom is restricted, and a visible bot joins the call — bot-free capture is still a Mac beta.
Free status: the Basic plan is free for as long as you keep the account: 300 transcription minutes a month, shared across recordings and imports.
Otter is the best-known name in this category, and its live transcription — words appearing on screen while people are still speaking — is still the experience to beat. It works with Zoom, Teams and Google Meet, and the shared workspace suits small teams.
Best for: live transcription during the call and easy sharing with a small team.
Honest limit: each conversation is capped at 30 minutes on free, you can import only 3 files in the life of the account, and only your 25 most recent conversations stay visible.
Free status: a free plan with unlimited transcription if calendar auto-join is switched on; new free accounts that do not enable it get only a few transcription credits. Includes AI summaries and 400 minutes of stored recordings per team.
Fireflies aims at teams rather than solo users: its strength is searching across many meetings ("what did the client say about pricing last month?") and feeding summaries into the tools a sales or support team already uses.
Best for: teams that want a searchable archive of customer calls.
Honest limit: the 400 minutes of storage is a running total for the whole team, not a monthly allowance — it fills up. Downloads and video recording are paid features, and the assistant features (AskFred and friends) run on a small one-time bundle of AI credits.
Free status: the Basic plan is free with no card and no time limit: unlimited meetings and AI notes, with no meeting or minute cap.
Granola takes the opposite approach to a meeting bot: it captures your computer's audio directly, so no "Granola Notetaker" ever appears in the participant list. You jot rough notes during the call and Granola expands them into a structured summary afterwards.
Best for: anyone who finds a recording bot awkward on client or interview calls.
Honest limit: on free you can only see the last 30 days of your meeting history. Older notes are kept, not deleted — but they stay hidden until you upgrade, so the free plan has a memory of one month.
Free status: a permanent free plan: unlimited video recordings and transcription in 30+ languages, plus clips you can share.
tl;dv is built around the recording itself: timestamped transcripts, and short clips of the exact moment a decision was made that you can drop into Slack or a doc instead of writing a summary nobody reads.
Best for: building a free recording library and sharing key moments as clips.
Honest limit: full AI notes cover only your first 10 meetings — for the life of the account, not per month. After that, notes cover the first 10 minutes of each call, and free recordings are deleted after about 3 months.
Free status: a free plan with 120 transcription minutes a month and 10 AI summaries — but read the limit below before you count on it.
Notta's strength is languages: it transcribes in 58 of them and handles meetings, uploaded files and in-person recordings in one place. Its paid plans are competitively priced, which is exactly why it is on this list with a warning attached.
Best for: testing multilingual transcription, or as a cheap paid upgrade path.
Honest limit: on free, each conversation is transcribed only up to minute 3. A 45-minute call gives you a 3-minute transcript, so the free plan is a demo, not a working tier — we list it so the "120 free minutes" headline elsewhere does not fool you.
Two paid benchmarks — no free plan
These two are here so the free plans above have something honest to be measured against. Neither has a free plan; both are badged PAID, and their prices are stated exactly as their pricing pages state them.
Price: from $19 per recorder seat/month billed annually ($29 monthly), per Avoma's pricing page. No free plan — there is a 14-day free trial of the full product, no credit card required. Only people who record need a paid seat; viewers and collaborators are free.
Avoma is the sales-team step up from a plain note-taker: recording, transcripts and AI notes as the base, with conversation intelligence and revenue intelligence layered on top — call scoring, competitor mentions, deal tracking synced to the CRM.
Best for: sales teams that coach reps and track deals from real calls.
Honest limit: the $19 headline is only the base seat. The intelligence add-ons most teams buy Avoma for cost $29 per seat/month each, so a fully equipped seat costs far more than the starting price suggests.
Price: custom enterprise pricing. Gong publishes plan tiers but not prices — you get a number by talking to its sales team. No free plan and no self-serve trial.
Gong is the enterprise end of this category: it records and analyses customer conversations at company scale, tracks topics, talk ratios and risks across hundreds of calls, and feeds pipeline forecasts. It is the tool the free ones are implicitly compared against — and the one whose pricing page makes the comparison hardest.
Best for: large sales organisations analysing calls in bulk.
Honest limit: quote-only pricing aimed at big teams with long contracts. For ordinary office meetings it is expensive overkill, and because there is no public price or self-serve trial, you cannot quietly test it the way you can test everything else on this page.
Questions people ask about free meeting note-takers
Which free AI note-taker is truly unlimited?
Fathom, on recordings and transcripts — its free plan has no published cap on either. Granola also leaves meetings uncapped on free, but limits how far back you can see your notes (30 days). Every other tool on this page meters something: minutes, storage, notes or history.
Is it legal to record my meetings with these tools?
It depends where you and the other participants are. Some US states allow one-party consent; others require everyone on the call to agree, and rules differ again internationally. The safe working habit: announce the recording at the start of the call and let the tool's visible presence do the rest. If your employer has a recording policy, that policy wins over this page.
Do these tools work for in-person meetings?
Most are built for Zoom, Google Meet and Teams calls. Notta and tl;dv also offer mobile apps for face-to-face recording, and Granola captures whatever your computer hears. Check the tool's own site for its current in-person support before a meeting that matters.
Why is a "free" plan sometimes worse than a trial?
A trial usually unlocks the full product for a fixed number of days; a free plan is permanent but fenced — and the fence is placed where it hurts (per-call caps, storage, history). That is why this directory prints the fence, not the headline. If a plan on this page is effectively a demo, its badge says so.
Why does a free-tools directory list paid tools at all?
As benchmarks. A free plan only means something next to what the paid version of the category costs — and some well-known names (Avoma, Gong) have no free plan at all, which is itself worth knowing before you sit through a sales demo. Paid tools are always badged PAID with their real starting price; nothing here is badged free on the strength of a trial.
Will my meeting content train the tool's AI?
Policies differ by tool and change over time. Before you record anything sensitive, read the tool's own privacy and data-training settings — several tools here let you opt out, and enterprise plans usually promise no training. Do not rely on a directory listing for a question this important; check the source.
Checked November 2026. Every free plan above was verified against the tool's official pricing page or help documentation. Free plans change without much notice — confirm the current limits on the tool's own site before you rely on them, and tell us via the channel if you spot a change before we do.