Best Free AI Note Taker: The Free Tiers, Honestly Ranked
On raw generosity, the best free AI note taker is Fathom. Its free plan puts no ceiling on how many meetings you record or how many minutes get transcribed, and nothing else in the category matches that. We make a competing product, and it's still the honest answer. Ours gives 300 transcription minutes a month — respectable, mid-pack, and not the reason anyone should choose us.
So that's settled in the first paragraph. The rest of this is the part that actually saves you time, because “unlimited” is carrying a lot of weight in that sentence. Every free plan in this category is metered somewhere. The useful question isn't which one sounds most generous on a pricing page — it's which meter you personally will hit first, and how bad it feels when you do.
Free doesn't mean unmetered. It means the meter moved.
Vendors don't give away compute out of kindness. Free plans exist to get a tool into a company through one curious person, so each one is engineered to be generous exactly where most people won't notice and tight exactly where teams eventually break. There are five places the limit can sit, and knowing which is which turns a confusing set of pricing pages into a ten-minute decision.
1. Minutes per month
The most legible meter. Otter gives 300 minutes a month on its free plan; Laxis gives 300 as well. It refills on a schedule, so a heavy week borrows from a light one and nothing accumulates against you. If your calendar is five or six real meetings a week, this rarely bites. If you're in back-to-back calls, you'll spend the last week of every month deciding which conversations deserve the recorder.
2. Meetings, counted once and never reset
tl;dv's free plan includes ten meetings with AI notes. Not ten a month. Ten, across the life of the account. Recording and transcription stay unlimited, which is why the plan reads so well at a glance, but the summarised-notes allowance is a one-time grant. People discover this in month two and describe it as a bait and switch; it isn't, it's just written in a place nobody reads.
3. Storage, sometimes shared across a whole team
Fireflies meters free accounts at 400 minutes of storage — and that pool belongs to the workspace, not to you. Three colleagues on the same free workspace are drawing from one tank. The recordings aren't blocked so much as the archive fills up, and the archive is the thing you joined for. The Fireflies review we published earlier goes deeper on how the storage and credit systems interact.
4. AI credits and summary allowances
This is where Fathom puts its price. Capture and transcription cost nothing; the polished summaries, the templates tuned by meeting type, the assistant you can question across your history — those are rationed at roughly five advanced summaries a month on free. Fireflies does something similar with 20 AI credits. The recordings pile up happily. What you're short of is the layer that makes the recordings worth having.
5. The length of any single recording
The quietest meter, and the one that produces the most swearing. Otter stops a single conversation at 30 minutes. Laxis free stops a recording at 45. Neither matters for a standup. Both matter enormously the first time you run a customer workshop or a two-hour planning session and the transcript ends in the middle of the important part. Fathom, tl;dv and Granola don't impose a per-session ceiling on free.
The whole comparison in one line
Fathom meters intelligence. Otter and Laxis meter minutes. tl;dv meters meetings, once, forever. Fireflies meters storage across your whole team. Granola meters memory. Pick the constraint you can live with rather than the number that looks biggest.
The free tiers, side by side
Figures below come from each vendor's live pricing page as of September 2026. Free plans in this category change often, usually by tightening, so re-check anything load-bearing before you commit a team to it.
| Tool | What the free plan gives | What's metered | Where it bites |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fathom | Unlimited recording and transcription; about 5 advanced AI summaries per month | AI summaries | You keep every recording but ration the good write-ups. Heavy note-readers upgrade fast. |
| tl;dv | Unlimited recording; 10 meetings with AI notes, counted for the lifetime of the account | Meetings, once ever | Month two. The counter never resets, and most people assume it does. |
| Otter | 300 transcription minutes a month; 30-minute cap on any single conversation | Minutes and session length | Long calls truncate mid-sentence. The monthly pool empties by week three on a busy calendar. |
| Fireflies | 400 minutes of stored audio shared across the workspace; 20 AI credits | Storage, team-wide | Your archive fills faster than you expect because colleagues share the same pool. |
| Granola | Bot-free capture with a rolling note history of roughly 30 days | How long notes survive | Nothing stops you today. In five weeks, last month's notes are gone. |
| Laxis | 300 transcription minutes a month; 45-minute cap per recording; 100+ languages with automatic detection; 30 days of conversation storage | Minutes, session length and retention | Workshops and long discovery calls cut off, and month-old notes age out. Mid-pack on volume, generous on languages. |
Ranked, with the reason attached
A ranking without a reason is just a leaderboard. Here's the order we'd actually recommend, and the specific person each one is right for.
1. Fathom
Best for sheer volume
Nothing else lets you record and transcribe without counting. Speaker separation is reliable, the interface gets out of the way, and the paid step up is sane at roughly $20 a month, or about $16 on annual billing. The honest caveat: the free summaries are rationed, so if you read write-ups rather than transcripts, free Fathom becomes an archive you don't use. Still the plan we'd point a solo operator toward first. We went through the tiers in detail in our full Fathom notetaker review.
2. tl;dv
Best free video capture
Unlimited video recording on free is unusual, the clipping tools are genuinely good for sharing a two-minute moment with someone who skipped the call, and EU data residency is a real differentiator for European teams. Just hold the lifetime meeting counter in your head the whole time. Pro is $18 a month on annual billing, $29 month to month.
3. Fireflies
Best free searchable archive
The search across past calls is the strongest in this group, the integration list is long, and 100-plus language support on transcription is unusual at this price. Pro runs $10 a month annually and Business $19. The trade is that free storage is shared team-wide, so the more colleagues you invite, the faster everyone's archive fills.
4. Otter
Best for light, solo use
Three hundred monthly minutes, live captions that are legitimately useful for accessibility, and a mature mobile app. Pro is about $8.33 a month annually, the cheapest paid step in this comparison; Business is $20. The 30-minute per-conversation ceiling is the thing to check against your calendar before anything else.
5. Granola
Best for people who don't want a bot
Granola captures what your machine already hears, so no extra participant appears in the call and nobody has to be told they're being recorded by software. Notes blend your own typing with the transcript, which produces write-ups that sound like you. Desktop coverage spans Mac and Windows, with both mobile platforms alongside, and Business is $14. Free keeps roughly 30 days of history, which is fine for weekly rhythm and wrong for anything you'll need to cite next quarter.
6. Laxis
Best free plan for transcribing in another language
Mid-pack on volume: 300 minutes a month, 45 minutes per recording, and a 30-day window on stored conversations — the same shelf-life trap we just docked Granola for, so treat free as a working memory rather than an archive. What is unusual at zero is the language coverage: transcription across 100-plus languages with the spoken one detected automatically, rather than the handful most free tiers ship with. Live side-by-side translation is not part of it — that starts on Premium at $15.99 per user a month, or $9.99 monthly on annual billing, which also lifts the recording cap to two hours and makes storage unlimited.
Four traps that show up around week three
Free plans rarely fail on day one. They fail after you've built a habit, which is the point at which switching costs something. These are the four that catch people.
The limit that never resets
Anything described as a total rather than a rate deserves a second read. Ten meetings, 100 minutes, three summaries — if the page doesn't say per month, assume it isn't. This is tl;dv's structure, and it's the single most common source of surprise in the category.
The pool you're sharing
A team-wide storage limit behaves nothing like a per-seat one. On a shared 400-minute pool, inviting a colleague halves your practical capacity and you may not notice who consumed it. Check whether a free limit is written per user or per workspace, because the words look similar and the outcome doesn't.
The archive with a shelf life
Rolling history is a real trade, not a trick, and Granola is upfront about it. But it changes what a note is for. If your notes exist to jog your memory this week, rolling history is fine. If they're the record of what a client agreed to in March, you need retention, and retention is paid everywhere.
The export you assumed was there
Most free plans let you copy text out. Fewer let you download the video, run a bulk export, or reach anything through an API. That's a deliberate design: the archive is the lock-in, and export is the key. Test it in your first week, while you have twelve meetings to move rather than two hundred.
The test that settles it
Open last month's calendar and count two things: how many hours of meetings you'd actually want recorded, and how long your longest call ran. Those two numbers eliminate most of this list in about ninety seconds — far faster than reading six pricing pages.
When free is genuinely enough
Plenty of people never need to pay, and the vendors know it. Free works properly when you're one person rather than a team, when your meetings are short enough to clear the per-session caps, when nobody else needs to open your notes, and when you read transcripts rather than depending on a polished summary of every call.
Freelancers with four or five client calls a week sit comfortably inside every free plan here. So do students, and anyone using a note-taker mainly to check what was said rather than to run a process on top of it. If that's you, take Fathom, take the unlimited recording, and stop reading comparison articles.
When free stops being enough
The transition is usually less about volume than about other people. A second person needs access to a call they missed. Someone asks for a shared workspace. A meeting gets referenced in a contract dispute and you need the recording from four months ago. None of that is billed by the minute, and all of it lands on paid tiers.
The other common trigger is the moment notes stop being an end in themselves. When a summary has to land in a CRM record rather than a folder, you've crossed out of free everywhere in this category — every vendor treats CRM sync as a paid feature. At Laxis, HubSpot and Salesforce sync lives on the Business plan, which lists at $29.99 per user each month and drops to $19.99 a month on annual billing, alongside a four-hour recording cap and automatic switching between up to five languages inside a single meeting. Worth naming plainly so nobody upgrades to the middle tier expecting it.
And one limit that no tier lifts: Laxis is not HIPAA compliant and doesn't sign BAAs. If you're handling protected health information, that rules us out regardless of budget, and you should be checking the same question against every other name here before you record a single patient conversation. It's the kind of thing worth settling before pricing, which is part of why our wider guide to picking an AI note taker starts with capture and compliance rather than cost.
Five things to check before you commit
- Is the limit a rate or a total? Per month resets. Lifetime doesn't. This is the single highest-value line on any pricing page.
- Is it per person or per workspace? Shared pools shrink every time you invite someone.
- How long can one recording run? Compare against your longest real meeting, not your average one.
- How long do notes survive? Rolling windows are fine for rhythm, fatal for records.
- Can you get your data out today? Export while you have a dozen meetings, not two hundred.
Run those five questions across any shortlist and the answer usually falls out on its own. If you want the same landscape organised by what the tools do rather than what they cost, our AI meeting assistant overview covers how capture, summarisation and follow-up actually differ between products.
The bottom line
If you want the most meeting hours for nothing, take Fathom and ration the summaries. If you want video clips to share, take tl;dv and watch the lifetime counter. If you want to search two years of calls, Fireflies is worth the storage trade. If a strange name joining the call is the objection, Granola. If your calls are in a language most free tiers don't transcribe, ours does — though translation and retention both start at Premium. Six plans, six different constraints, and no single winner — which is precisely why the best free AI note taker for you depends on which meter you were going to hit anyway.
Frequently asked questions
Which AI note taker has the best free plan?
Fathom, on raw volume. Its free plan puts no counter on recording or transcription minutes and charges nothing to keep them, rationing only its advanced summaries at about five each month. tl;dv runs it close, though its ten AI-note meetings are granted once and never refill. Otter and Laxis each give 300 minutes monthly.
Is there a completely free AI meeting note taker?
No mainstream tool is free without a limit somewhere. Fathom comes closest by charging nothing for recording and transcription and metering only its advanced summaries. Others cap monthly minutes, total meetings, stored hours, or how long your notes stay available. Work out which of those meters applies before you build a habit around a plan.
How many minutes do free AI note takers give you?
It ranges from unlimited to 300 minutes a month. Fathom and tl;dv do not cap recording minutes at all. Otter and Laxis each give 300 minutes monthly and also cap a single session, at 30 and 45 minutes. Fireflies frames its free limit as 400 minutes of stored audio shared across the whole workspace.
Can you export notes from a free AI note taker?
Usually yes, but the format is often restricted. Free plans commonly allow copy and paste or a plain text download while reserving bulk export, video download and API access for paid tiers. If moving your archive later matters, test the export path in week one rather than after you have 200 meetings stored.
Do free AI note takers work with Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams?
Yes. Every tool compared here captures Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams on its free plan, usually by joining the call as a labelled participant. Granola and Laxis can also record the audio already playing on your machine, so nothing extra appears in the participant list. Dialers and webinar platforms are more often paid.
When should you pay for an AI note taker instead of staying free?
Pay once the free plan starts changing your behaviour: when you skip recording a long call because of a length cap, when a teammate cannot open a meeting because storage is shared, or when notes disappear before you need them. The other trigger is a workflow requirement such as CRM sync, which every vendor keeps on paid tiers.
