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. Update (2026-09-19): we have since reached Fireflies' own pricing page directly. It lists the free plan as unlimited transcription with limited AI summaries and 400 minutes of storage per team. That settles a discrepancy between our two earlier sources (400 minutes per team vs. 800 per seat) and corrects our earlier description of Fireflies' free AI summaries as unlimited.

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: unlimited transcription, but only limited AI summaries and a storage ceiling (400 minutes per team on Fireflies' own pricing page) that eventually forces you to delete old meetings or upgrade. For a team that mostly needs transcripts of recent meetings and doesn't need a permanent searchable archive, that can be enough, but it isn't an unlimited-AI free tier. 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 unlimited AI summaries and 8,000 minutes of storage per seat, 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 what the free plan offers.
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.

If you're weighing Fireflies.ai against tl;dv specifically, see our Fireflies.ai vs tl;dv head-to-head.