Fathom, Otter, and Fireflies all do the same job: send a bot into the meeting to record, transcribe, summarize, and list action items. Split first: if you just want meetings written down for free, pick Fathom; if you want live captions during the meeting and to edit as you go, pick Otter; if your meetings exist to follow up sales leads and the notes need to land in a CRM, pick Fireflies.
Check the free limits first, before they run out mid-month
Fathom free: unlimited recording, transcription, and storage, with deep AI summaries five times a month; Premium costs $16 a month (annual billing). Otter free: 300 minutes a month, with a 30-minute cap per meeting; Pro costs $8.33 a month (annual billing) for 1,200 minutes a month. Fireflies free: unlimited transcription, with storage capped at 400 minutes (shared across the whole team); Pro costs $10 per person a month (annual billing). All three can be tried for free; the difference is where the ceiling sits: Fathom caps the number of deep summaries, Otter caps the length of a single meeting, Fireflies caps team storage.
Three kinds of people should not pick the same tool
Beyond the free limits, two things decide it. First, language: Fireflies supports 100+ languages, Otter lists only six, so international teams should first check whether their language is on the list. Second, where the notes go afterward: Fireflies can sync notes and talk-time analytics to Salesforce and HubSpot, so sales debriefs need no second round of copying; Fathom gives clean summaries with good clipping and search, ideal for turning meeting content straight into to-dos; Otter's strength is inside the meeting, with live captions and in-meeting AI questions the other two do not have, and its mobile app can record in-person meetings too.
Who they are not for, and what must be settled before the meeting
Otter's free plan is not for hour-long meetings, it cuts off at 30 minutes. Fireflies' free plan is not for a whole team archiving long-term, the 400 minutes fill up and then have to be cleared. Fathom's free plan is not for people who need deep summaries all month, five a month run out fast. And one thing applies to all three: participants must know they are being recorded. In August 2026, a US court allowed class-action claims against Otter over recording consent to proceed, so the compliance risk is real. Confidential meetings belong in none of these tools; all three store recordings in the cloud.
