Best Free & Budget AI Meeting Notetakers in 2026 (Otter vs. Fireflies vs. Fathom vs. tl;dv)

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If you're a solo consultant, a two-person startup, or a team lead who just wants meeting notes without a line item on the software budget, the AI meeting-notetaker market has gotten genuinely generous — three of the four major tools we cover here have usable free tiers, not just seven-day trials. But "free" hides very different tradeoffs: one tool caps you on storage, another caps you on AI summaries, another caps you on how many recordings per week. Picking wrong means hitting a wall in week three, not week one.

We compared the free and entry-level paid plans of the four most-reviewed AI meeting-notetaker tools — Otter.ai, Fireflies.ai, Fathom, and tl;dv — as they stand in September 2026, fact-checked against each vendor's own pricing page where we could access it directly.

The free-tier comparison at a glance

A note on accuracy: we were able to independently confirm Otter.ai's pricing directly from otter.ai's own pricing page. For Fireflies, Fathom, and tl;dv, our automated fetch of the vendors' own pricing pages was blocked at the time of writing, so those figures are cross-referenced from two independent secondary sources each rather than confirmed on the vendor's own page — worth a quick check of the vendor's current pricing page yourself before you commit, since SaaS pricing changes without much notice. One specific discrepancy we caught rather than papered over: our two sources disagreed on Fireflies' free-tier storage cap (one said 400 minutes per team, another said 800 minutes per seat) — we're reporting the range rather than guessing which is right.

What each free tier is actually good for

Otter.ai is the most minute-limited of the four (300/month — roughly ten 30-minute meetings), but it's the most transparent about the limit and layers on useful extras even at zero cost: an AI chat you can query within a meeting, and native Zoom/Teams/Google Meet support. If your real usage is "a few important calls a month," Otter's free tier is plenty; if you're in back-to-back meetings, you'll hit the ceiling inside two weeks.

Fireflies.ai takes the opposite approach: no minutes cap and unlimited AI summaries, but a storage ceiling that eventually forces you to delete old meetings or upgrade. For a team that reviews recent meetings and doesn't need a permanent searchable archive, this is arguably the most generous free tier of the four. The tradeoff is losing access to video (audio-only transcription on free) and no transcript export, which matters if you need to hand a transcript to someone outside the tool.

Fathom is the standout for sheer volume — genuinely unlimited recordings, transcription, and storage on the free plan, which is unusual in this category. The catch is that "AI-powered tools" (the actual summaries and action-item extraction most buyers want an AI notetaker for) sit behind a paywall, along with any team collaboration. Free Fathom is closer to "unlimited dumb transcription" than "unlimited AI meeting notes" — read the fine print if AI summarization is the feature you actually want.

tl;dv's free tier is the most visibly built to convert: a hard 40-recordings-per-week cap, automatic deletion after three months, and only 10 AI-generated notes for the lifetime of the account (not per month). That lifetime cap in particular means most users exhaust tl;dv's free AI features within their first couple of weeks of real use, after which the free tier functions mainly as a recorder, not a notetaker.

If you're ready to pay: cheapest real plan, ranked

1. Otter.ai Pro — $8.33/seat/month (annual) — the lowest sticker price of the four we checked. The catch is the minutes-based model (1,200 minutes/month on Pro): heavy meeting users may still need to jump to Business ($19.99/seat annual) to avoid running out mid-month, which changes the real-world math.
2. Fireflies.ai Pro — $10/seat/month (annual) — slightly above Otter on sticker price, but with no minutes cap, so it's arguably the better value once you're past occasional use. Unlocks video recording, transcript downloads, and AI Skills (post-meeting automation) on top of the already-generous free feature set.
3. Fathom Team/Premium — $15–16/seat/month (annual) — this is where Fathom's AI summarization actually turns on; worth it specifically if the free tier's missing AI features were your blocker.
4. tl;dv Pro — $18/seat/month (annual) — the most expensive entry-level paid plan among the four we checked, though tl;dv's strength has historically been multi-language transcription depth and integration breadth once you're past the free tier's lifetime AI-notes cap.

Correction (2026-09-11): an earlier version of this section called Fireflies "the least expensive paid entry point of the four" — that was wrong on this article's own numbers (Otter's $8.33/seat is lower than Fireflies' $10/seat). Fixed to state the sticker-price ranking accurately; our actual recommendation logic (below) was always about total value, not just the cheapest number, but the earlier wording shouldn't have gotten the raw ranking wrong. Caught in independent review, corrected same-day.

Bottom line

If minutes are your constraint and you want the lowest sticker price, Otter is the cheapest paid plan of the four and the easiest free tier to reason about. If you want unlimited AI summaries at zero cost and can live with a storage ceiling, Fireflies currently offers the most generous free feature set of the four, and its $10/seat Pro plan — just above Otter's price — removes the minutes cap entirely. If raw recording volume matters more than AI features, Fathom's unlimited free storage is unmatched — just budget for Team/Premium once you need the AI layer. tl;dv's free tier is the tightest of the four for anyone who wants ongoing AI notes rather than a one-time trial of the feature.

None of these differences are marginal — picking the wrong free tier for your actual usage pattern is the single most common reason teams bounce off an AI notetaker in the first month and conclude "these tools don't work," when really they just hit an avoidable limit.

Methodology & disclosure

We fact-check every figure in this comparison against the vendor's own pricing page wherever we can reach it directly; where that wasn't possible at the time of writing (noted above for Fireflies, Fathom, and tl;dv), we cross-reference at least two independent secondary sources and flag any figures those sources disagree on rather than picking one arbitrarily. Pricing in this category changes frequently — treat the table above as directionally accurate as of September 2026, and verify the current number on the vendor's site before purchasing.

This page contains affiliate links. If you sign up for a paid plan through a link on this page, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. This does not influence which tools we cover, what we say about their free tiers' limitations, or how we rank the paid plans above — the ranking above is by price and feature set, not by which program pays the highest commission.