Fathom's free plan is already generous, so people looking for an alternative usually have a specific complaint. The bot joins calls as a visible participant with no silent mode on most plans, advanced AI summary templates cap at 5 a month after the trial, and team features need Team ($19/mo per user, 2-user minimum) or Business ($34/mo).
Granola suits people who take their own notes and want AI to merge them with the transcript. tl;dv is the closest free like-for-like for sales teams. Read AI goes further on meeting analytics, and Krisp pairs notes with noise cancellation.
| App | Free tier | Paid from | Top plan | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fathom | Yes | $20/mo | $34/mo | Sales call review, CRM-synced recaps, hiring interview notes |
| Granola | Yes | $14/mo | $35/mo | Teams that want meeting notes wired into their existing tools (Slack, Notion, HubSpot) plus MCP access to Claude/ChatGPT |
| tl;dv | Yes | $29/mo | $39/mo | Sales and customer-facing teams that want unlimited free recording plus deep CRM and workflow integrations |
| Read AI | Yes | $19.75/mo | $39.75/mo | Teams that want engagement analytics and coaching feedback on top of standard meeting transcripts |
| Krisp | No | $16/mo | $30/mo | Noisy or remote work environments, call centers, cross-platform meeting transcription |
Monthly prices in US dollars before tax, from each vendor's official pricing (US list price; weekly-billed plans converted to a monthly figure). Updated November 2, 2026
Granola blends what you type during the meeting with the transcript and turns both into a shareable summary. Business ($14/mo) adds unlimited history, Notion, HubSpot, Attio and Zapier integrations, and MCP and API access.
Pick it if: Fathom's automatic summaries miss the points you care about and you'd rather steer them.
Where it falls short: The free plan keeps only 30 days of meeting history.
Full Granola pricing →tl;dv records and transcribes unlimited meetings in 30+ languages for free and connects to 5,000+ apps. Business ($39/mo) adds sales coaching insights and team analytics.
Pick it if: you use Fathom for sales call review and want CRM connections before paying anything.
Where it falls short: Free AI notes are limited to about 10 meetings a month.
Full tl;dv pricing →Read AI acts as a meeting coach with participant analytics, and its search spans meetings, email and Slack; the free plan includes unlimited enterprise search. Fathom's coaching metrics and scorecards sit on its Business plan.
Pick it if: you want engagement feedback on every kind of meeting, not only sales calls.
Where it falls short: Free covers just 5 meeting transcripts a month, and paid plans are per seat.
Full Read AI pricing →Krisp Core ($16/mo) combines an unlimited AI note-taker with real-time noise cancellation and an hour a day of accent conversion, across meeting platforms.
Pick it if: background noise or accents cause more trouble on your calls than note-taking does.
Where it falls short: There's no free plan beyond a 7-day trial, and noise cancellation can be CPU- and battery-heavy on older laptops.
Full Krisp pricing →For a solo user, the relevant Fathom plan is Premium ($20/mo), which adds advanced summaries, AI action items and a custom bot. Team ($19/mo) looks cheaper per user but requires at least two seats, so it only makes sense when a colleague joins too.
Yes. The free plan includes unlimited recordings and transcriptions with instant AI summaries, clips and playlists. Paid plans add advanced summaries, AI action items, team-wide search and CRM field sync.
On free plans, Fathom is more generous: unlimited recordings against Otter Free's 300 transcription minutes a month. Otter suits teams that want to follow a real-time transcript during the call.
How we choose: prices come from each vendor's official pricing page and are re-checked every week. We take no affiliate fees, so rankings aren't for sale.