Best Free AI Meeting Assistants in 2026
Every meeting assistant in this comparison has a free plan, and the free plans are unusually good. That is not generosity. These products get more valuable the more of your organisation uses them, so the vendors would rather have your whole team on free than one manager on paid.
Which means the real question is not whether to pay. It is what each free tier quietly limits, because they limit different things: some cap how many meetings you record, some cap how far back you can search, and some record everything and charge you to get the good summaries out.
Here is what each one gives you, checked August 2026.
Quick comparison
| Tool | Free plan | Paid entry |
|---|---|---|
| Fireflies.ai | Yes | $10/seat/mo (annual) |
| Otter.ai | Yes | ~$8.49/user/mo (annual) |
| Granola | Yes | $14/user/mo (Business) |
| Fathom | Yes | $15/user/mo (annual) |
| Read AI | Yes | $15/user/mo (annual) |
| tl;dv | Yes | $18/seat/mo (annual) |
| MeetGeek | 5 hrs/mo | $15/user/mo (Pro) |
The paid spread is nearly twofold, from about $8.49 to $18, for products that all transcribe a meeting. What separates them is what happens to the transcript afterwards.
How these rate, aggregated across platforms
Scores from Toolradar, aggregated across G2 and Capterra.
| Tool | Aggregated rating | Reviews |
|---|---|---|
| Fireflies.ai | 4.7 | 735 |
| tl;dv | 4.7 | 486 |
| MeetGeek | 4.6 | 489 |
| Otter.ai | 4.5 | 1,655 |
| Read AI | 4.0 | 35 |
Fathom and Granola have no aggregated ratings. Granola is recent and word-of-mouth; Fathom shares its name with an unrelated analytics product, and we deliberately did not use that product's rating here, which is a mistake that would have been easy to make.
This category rates unusually well and unusually consistently. Four of the five sit between 4.5 and 4.7 on samples in the hundreds or thousands, which says transcription and summarisation are solved problems now rather than differentiators. Otter has the largest sample at 1,655 and the lowest of that group at 4.5, which is the normal incumbent pattern rather than a criticism.
Read AI's 4.0 across 35 reviews is the one below the pack, and the sample is too small to conclude much from.
Fathom: the most usable free tier
Fathom is free, with paid plans from $15 per user per month billed annually.
Fathom's free plan is the one people actually keep using rather than treating as a trial. You get recording, transcription and AI summaries, and the summaries are genuinely good: action items that are actually actionable rather than a restatement of the last thing anyone said.
The interface stays out of the way, which matters more than it sounds in a product that joins your calls. It highlights moments as you go, so the review afterwards is a list of things you flagged rather than a wall of text.
Paid adds team features and deeper integrations. For an individual, the free plan is close to complete.
Fireflies.ai: the cheapest path to a searchable archive
Fireflies is free, with paid from $10 per seat per month billed annually, the second cheapest here.
Its strength is the archive. Fireflies treats your meetings as a searchable corpus rather than a series of documents, so you can ask what was said about a customer across six months and get an answer. For sales and customer teams, that is the actual product.
The free plan covers recording and transcription with limits on how much of that archive stays searchable, which is exactly the constraint that pushes teams to pay. It is a well-designed paywall: you feel it precisely when the tool has become useful.
Integrations are broad, and it will join Zoom, Meet and Teams without configuration.
Otter.ai: the cheapest paid tier, and the oldest hand
Otter is free, with Pro from about $8.49 per user per month billed annually and Business at $20.
Otter has been doing this longer than anyone here and it shows in the transcription itself, which handles accents and crosstalk better than most. It is also the only tool in this group that people routinely use outside meetings, for lectures and interviews, because it works well as a straight recorder.
The free tier gives a monthly allowance of transcription minutes. That is a cleaner limit than most: you know exactly what you have and exactly when it runs out.
Its summaries are less sharp than Fathom's. If the transcript matters more than the summary, that trade is fine.
Granola: the one that does not join your call
Granola is free, with Business at $14 per user per month.
Granola works differently and the difference is the reason to choose it. There is no bot joining the meeting and announcing itself. It listens locally alongside your own notes, then merges what you typed with what was said.
For external meetings that changes the dynamic. Nobody has to consent to a recording bot sitting in the corner, and nobody performs for it. For sensitive conversations, that alone decides the tool.
The trade is that it is built around you being in the meeting and taking notes. It is not the tool for archiving calls you did not attend.
Read AI: summaries plus meeting hygiene
Read AI is free, with Pro from $15 per user per month billed annually.
Read AI adds a layer the others mostly ignore: analytics on the meeting itself. Talk-time balance, engagement, whether the thing needed to be a meeting at all. Some of that is theatre, and some of it changes behaviour when a manager sees that they spoke for eighty percent of a one-to-one.
Transcription and summaries are solid without leading the category. Choose it if you care about how your meetings run, not only what was said in them.
tl;dv: built for reviewing others' calls
tl;dv is free, with Pro from $18 per seat per month billed annually, the most expensive entry here.
tl;dv is aimed at teams who review recordings rather than attend everything: sales coaching, user research, onboarding. Clipping and sharing a specific moment is faster here than anywhere else, and that is what the price buys.
If nobody in your organisation watches recordings of meetings they missed, you are paying for a workflow you do not have.
MeetGeek: the free tier measured in hours
MeetGeek's free plan covers 5 hours of meetings a month, with Pro at $15 per user per month and Business at $29.
Counting in hours rather than meetings or minutes is the clearest unit in this comparison. Five hours is roughly a week of a meeting-heavy job or a month of a quiet one, and you can tell immediately which you are.
Its focus is the summary and the distribution: transcripts and highlights pushed automatically into the places your team already works, rather than living in yet another dashboard nobody opens. For teams whose problem is that meeting notes never reach the people who needed them, that emphasis is the differentiator.
The thing to settle before you install any of these
Recording a conversation has legal and cultural consequences that no pricing page mentions.
Consent rules vary by jurisdiction, and in several of them all parties must agree. Every tool here can announce itself, and Granola's approach sidesteps the question by not joining at all. Decide your policy before the first external call, not after.
Retention is a liability as well as an asset. A searchable archive of every customer conversation is genuinely valuable and is also discoverable. Set a retention period deliberately rather than accepting the default, which is usually forever.
Free tiers and training data. The same question that applies to chatbots applies here, with higher stakes because the input is other people's voices. Check the setting before you record anyone outside your company.
How to choose
If you want one free tool that just works, Fathom, whose free plan is the most complete.
If you need to search across months of calls, Fireflies at $10 a seat is the cheapest way to that archive.
If transcription accuracy is the point, Otter, and its $8.49 annual Pro is the lowest paid price here.
If a recording bot would change the conversation, Granola, which is the only tool here that avoids one.
If you coach people on their calls, tl;dv, and accept the $18 seat.
Most teams should start two people on two different free tiers for a fortnight. The summaries diverge more than the transcripts do, and which style fits your meetings is not something a feature table can tell you.
Related: our guide to AI note-taking apps covers the layer that keeps what you decide, and the Dupple reviews directory has current pricing.
FAQ
Which AI meeting assistant has the best free plan?
Fathom's is the most complete: recording, transcription and genuinely useful summaries without a hard meeting cap. Fireflies and Otter both have solid free tiers with different limits, Fireflies on searchable archive depth and Otter on monthly transcription minutes.
How much do meeting assistants cost?
Entry paid plans run from about $8.49 per user per month on Otter Pro and $10 per seat on Fireflies, through $14 on Granola Business and $15 on Fathom and Read AI, to $18 per seat on tl;dv. All billed annually. Checked August 2026.
Do I need to tell people I am recording?
Usually yes, and in some jurisdictions every participant must consent. All of these can announce their presence in the call. Granola is the exception in approach: it does not join the meeting as a participant at all, which changes the etiquette but does not remove your legal obligations.
Is a meeting assistant worth it if I take my own notes?
Granola exists for exactly that person: it merges what you typed with what was said, rather than replacing your notes with a transcript. If you take notes and still miss things, that combination is more useful than a full recording nobody rereads.
