ai meeting assistants · comparison
Most "AI meeting assistants" just transcribe and summarize. A few are starting to act, pushing tasks to your CRM, Linear or Notion after the call. We split them on the two distinctions that actually decide the buy: bot-free vs a bot that joins the call, and transcribe-only vs genuinely agentic. Fireflies and Otter win on price and integrations for teams; Granola wins if you refuse to let a bot show up in the room; Circleback and Sembly go furthest on doing the follow-up work for you. The catch is almost never the headline price, it is the free-tier limit: seat counts, how long recordings are kept, or summaries locked behind a paid plan. Every plan below is translated into plain math and checked against the vendor's live page. Looking for AI that places and answers phone calls instead? That is a different category, see best AI voice agents.
Pricing decoded and verified 2026-05-30 against each vendor's live page; volatile figures flagged "verify live".
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11 meeting assistants, compared down every row. The best cell per row is marked.
Fireflies.aiCRM sync + search
Granolabot-free Mac notetaking
Otter.aitranscription + AI chat
Fathomfree unlimited recording
Circlebackpost-call automations
tl;dvnotetaker + sales coaching
MeetGeekrecurring affiliate payout
Krispnoise-free calls + notes
Sembly AIagentic meeting AI
Plaudin-person + phone capture
Cluelylive call coaching Fireflies.ai CRM sync + search Granola bot-free Mac notetaking Otter.ai transcription + AI chat Fathom free unlimited recording Circleback post-call automations tl;dv notetaker + sales coaching MeetGeek recurring affiliate payout Krisp noise-free calls + notes Sembly AI agentic meeting AI Plaud in-person + phone capture Cluely live call coaching // scraped weekly · every cell carries source and date · volatile cells flagged verify live
The one-line gotcha behind each entry price.
Fireflies.ai$18/seat/moThe seat price is not the whole bill. The Free and Pro plans cap storage (800 mins/seat on Free, 8,000 mins/seat on Pro), and every plan includes only a small AI credit pool (20 on Pro, 30 on Business, 50 on Enterprise) that limits AskFred and AI-app actions, so power users pay for credit add-ons. The cheap $10 Pro price is annual-only; paying monthly is $18. The bot also visibly joins the call as a participant, which is a privacy flag for some external meetings. Full Fireflies.ai pricing →
Granola$14/user/moThe free Basic plan is closer to a trial than a permanent free tier: history access is limited and is widely reported as a 25-note lifetime cap (not monthly) added in the early-2026 rebrand, so heavy users hit a wall fast and must move to the $14 Business plan to keep unlimited history. The pricing page lists only monthly per-seat prices with no annual discount shown, and there is no self-host or on-prem option. Full Granola pricing →
Otter.ai$8.49/seat/mo (billed annually)The "unlimited" transcription everyone associates with Otter only exists on Business ($19.99/seat/mo annually) and Enterprise. Free is 300 min/mo with a 30-min-per-meeting cap and 3 lifetime imports, and Pro is 1,200 min/mo. The notetaker also joins as a visible participant named "Otter.ai" that all attendees see and are notified recording is active, so it is not a silent recorder, and it auto-leaves after about 12 minutes of silence. API access and SSO are gated to Enterprise. Full Otter.ai pricing →
Fathomfree; paid $15/seat/mo annualThe free plan is genuinely generous on recording and transcription, but the AI features are throttled: Ask Fathom works on a single call only and advanced summary templates plus AI action items require Premium. CRM field sync (HubSpot/Salesforce) is locked to the top Business tier, not Team. Recording is done by a bot that visibly joins the call (a bot-free mode is Mac-only beta), so attendees see a notetaker present. The deepest annual discounts require yearly upfront billing. Full Fathom pricing →
Circleback$20.83/seat/mo (billed annually)No free plan exists, only a trial, so usage at any scale is a paid per-seat cost from the start. The headline $20.83 and $25 figures are the annual-billed monthly rates; pay monthly and it is $25 (Individual) and $30 (Team) per seat. Custom data-retention controls are gated to the Team plan and above, and Circleback joins the call as a visible bot, which can raise participant-consent and privacy questions. Full Circleback pricing →
tl;dv$18/seat/mo (billed annually)Three traps. (1) The free plan looks unlimited but auto-deletes every recording after 3 months and only gives full AI notes on your first 10 meetings, then summarizes just the first 10 minutes. (2) Pricing is per recording seat, so everyone who needs the notetaker on their calls needs a paid license. (3) Monthly billing carries a steep ~63-66% premium over annual, so the advertised "from $18" only applies on an annual commitment. Also, every recording maxes out at 3 hours and a bot visibly joins the call. Full tl;dv pricing →
MeetGeek$9.99/seat/mo (or ~$6/seat/mo billed annually)Pricing is per seat and the headline ~$6/seat Pro rate is annual-only; pay monthly and Pro is $9.99/seat (60%+ higher). Pro also caps transcription at 20 hours/seat/month and bills $0.50/hour over that, plus per-meeting recording is capped (2h Pro, 3h Business). Storage retention is tiered too: free keeps transcripts only 3 months and audio 1 month with no video, and Pro stores no video at all, so older recordings age out unless you are on Business or higher. And because it records by sending a visible bot into the call, every participant sees it join. Full MeetGeek pricing →
Krisp$8/seat/mo (billed annually)The headline $8 is annual-only; month-to-month is double ($16/seat). There is no free tier anymore, only a 7-day trial, so after the trial you pay to keep even basic noise cancellation. Real-time accent conversion is metered (1 hr/day on Core, 4 hr/day on Advanced), and storage is capped (10 GB on Core, 60 GB on Advanced). Salesforce/ConnectWise CRM sync and SSO/SCIM require the pricier Advanced or Enterprise tiers. Full Krisp pricing →
Sembly AI$10/seat/mo (annual)Two stacked catches. First, the bot visibly joins the meeting as an attendee, so there is no silent recording. Second, the tiers gate things teams assume are standard: Basic is mic-only (no video), holds just 1 year of meeting history, and is limited to a single user, while Pro keeps only 2 years of history and caps AI-generated documents and insights at 5 per user. You need MAX for unlimited history and HD video, and MAX requires a 3-seat minimum. AI artifacts (documents/insights) are absent on Basic entirely. Full Sembly AI pricing →
Plauddevice $159 + free or from $8.33/mo annualTwo stacked costs that bot-based competitors do not have: you must buy a physical device (from $159, up to $189 for Note Pro) AND pay a subscription to unlock AI. The free Starter plan only transcribes; every summary, template, and Ask Plaud feature is paywalled. Transcription minutes are capped (300/mo free, 1,200/mo on Pro) and unused minutes do NOT roll over, they reset monthly. The headline Pro price ($8.33/mo) is annual-only; month-to-month is $17.99. The Team plan's $20/seat launch rate expires August 31, 2026, then rises to $25/seat annually. Because it records the room or phone audio rather than joining a call, in many jurisdictions you are responsible for getting consent from everyone recorded. Full Plaud pricing →
Cluely$19.99/moThe core selling point is also the catch: Cluely is built to be undetectable to the people you are meeting with, so it records, transcribes, and analyzes other participants who usually have not consented. The free tier caps daily AI responses and notetaking, and the genuinely "hidden during screen share" capability is gated behind the $149.99/mo Pro + Undetectability tier, which is roughly 7.5x the regular Pro price. There is no published multi-seat/team discount, so cost scales linearly per person, and annual billing is offered via a toggle but the discounted annual rate is not stated on the public pricing page. Full Cluely pricing →
It depends on the tool. Bot-based notetakers (Fireflies, Otter, Fathom, MeetGeek, Sembly) send a visible participant that joins the meeting to record it. Bot-free tools (Granola, and Plaud via hardware) capture audio locally with nothing showing up in the participant list. If a visible bot is a dealbreaker for your team or clients, that is the first thing to check.
Almost always one of three things, not the headline price: a cap on how many meetings or minutes you can record per month, how long transcripts and recordings are retained before they are deleted, or AI summaries and ask-the-meeting features locked to a paid plan. We decode each free tier into what you actually get.
Most only transcribe and summarize. The genuinely agentic ones push tasks and CRM updates automatically: Circleback and Sembly (Semblian) go furthest, and several others trigger follow-ups through Zapier or native integrations. We mark plainly which tools only capture versus which act.
No. Meeting assistants sit in on calls you are already having and write them up, billed per seat. AI voice agents (Vapi, Retell, Bland) place and answer phone calls on their own, billed per minute. If you want software that handles phone calls, see our best AI voice agents page instead.