Granola alternatives (2026)

Fireflies.ai is an AI meeting assistant that sends a bot ("Fred") into your Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams calls to record, transcribe, summarize, and pull out action items. It stores transcripts in a searchable hub, pushes notes to CRMs and task tools, and offers an AskFred chat to query past meetings. It is built around per-seat pricing where most of the real cost lives in the storage cap and the AI credit pool, not the headline seat price.

Otter.ai is an AI meeting notetaker that records, transcribes, and summarizes calls. Its Otter Notetaker bot (OtterPilot) connects to your Google or Microsoft calendar and auto-joins Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams meetings as a visible guest participant called "Otter.ai", producing a live transcript, an automated summary, action items, and slide captures. It also has an Otter AI Chat that answers questions about the meeting and drafts follow-ups. Plans are priced per user, and the free tier and Pro plan run on monthly minute and import caps rather than unlimited usage.

Fathom is an AI meeting notetaker that joins your Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams calls, records and transcribes them, and generates summaries and action items. Its wedge is an unusually generous free plan: unlimited recording and transcription forever for individuals, with no time or meeting-count limit. Paid plans unlock advanced summary templates, a conversational meeting assistant, team sharing, and CRM field sync. Recording is done by a visible bot that joins the call, though a bot-free capture mode is in beta on Mac.

Circleback is an AI meeting notetaker that joins video calls (or records in-person meetings), transcribes with speaker recognition, and produces notes and auto-assigned action items. Its differentiator is the automation layer: after a meeting it can fire workflows that update a CRM, create tasks, or push data into other tools via 1,000+ integrations. It positions as premium and accuracy-focused, with multi-language support and AI-generated custom insights. There is no permanent free plan, only a trial.

tl;dv is an AI meeting notetaker that joins Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams calls to record, transcribe, and summarize them, then extract action items and key moments. The higher Business tier adds sales-call coaching on top: native CRM sync, scorecards against sales frameworks like MEDDIC and BANT, and objection-handling analysis. It sends a bot into the call, and the free plan is usable long term but caps full AI notes and deletes recordings after three months.

MeetGeek is an AI meeting assistant that sends a bot to join Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams calls to record, transcribe in 100+ languages, summarize, and pull out action items. It organizes transcripts and recordings into searchable team spaces with analytics, and pushes meeting data to CRMs and task tools via integrations, Zapier/Make/n8n, a public API, and an MCP server. The free plan is unusually generous on seats but caps transcription at 3 hours a month, so heavy users move to paid tiers priced per seat.

Krisp started as a desktop AI noise-cancellation tool that strips background noise, echo, and other voices from your mic and speakers on any call app, and that is still its core strength. It has since added a "Meeting AI" notetaker layer that transcribes calls, generates AI notes and action items, records audio and video, and can convert accents in real time. The notetaker works at the audio-device level rather than as a bot that joins the call, so there is no visible meeting-bot. If you mainly want clean audio first and meeting notes second, it fits; if you want a deep CRM-grade notetaker, dedicated tools go further.

Sembly is an AI meeting assistant whose bot joins Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Webex calls to record, transcribe in 40+ languages, and produce structured notes, summaries, and detected tasks. Its Semblian 2.0 layer is genuinely agentic: it can chat across multiple meetings, generate documents and insights from your meeting history, and surface risks, issues, and follow-ups rather than just transcribing. Higher tiers add sentiment analysis, custom note templates, automations, webhooks, and MCP access. It is a bot-joins-the-call product, so participants see a Sembly attendee.

Plaud is a hardware-first AI notetaker. You buy a physical device (the Plaud Note card recorder, Note Pro, or the wearable NotePin/NotePin S) that records in-person conversations, meetings, and phone calls, then the app and a paid subscription handle transcription, summaries, and template-based notes. Unlike bot-based notetakers that join a Zoom or Teams call, Plaud captures audio from the room or phone via the device, so it works for face-to-face meetings and offline conversations. The hardware purchase is required for the core experience; the app exists but the recording capture and Plaud Desktop features depend on owning a device.

Cluely is a desktop AI assistant that listens to your calls in real time, transcribes them, takes meeting notes, and feeds you live on-screen answers and suggested next steps during the conversation. It also takes screenshots of and reads your screen to generate responses. Honest caveat: Cluely markets itself as "completely undetectable" and originally launched under a "cheat on everything" slogan, explicitly designed so the other people on a call cannot see that you are being coached by AI, including hiding itself from screen-sharing software on higher tiers. That positioning raises real consent and ethics concerns, because the other meeting participants are typically not aware they are being recorded, transcribed, and analyzed. Treat it as a personal real-time prompter, not a transparent shared notetaker, and check recording-consent laws in your jurisdiction before using it.