Fathom alternatives in 2026: what the free plan leaves out

Short answer first: Fathom's free plan records and transcribes every meeting without a cap, in the 38 languages its help centre lists, and keeps the recordings until you delete them. Where it stops is the summary: advanced summaries cover your first five calls a month, and translated summaries exist for six languages besides English. Premium is 20 US dollars a month, or 16 billed yearly. Read AI adds meeting metrics and gives five free meetings a month, Granola takes notes with no bot on a Mac or Windows computer, and Notibo fits a meeting in a room or in a language Fathom does not list.

The figures in this comparison were read on each vendor's own pricing, help and privacy pages on 30 September 2026. When a vendor's pages contradict each other, both versions appear with their source. When a number is not published on any page that could be read, it is marked "not published".

What do you need from the notes after the meeting?

Fathom's pitch is that you stop writing and stay in the conversation. Whether it works for you depends less on the recording, which Fathom gives away, than on what happens to the notes afterwards: forwarded to a client, filed for a board, turned into tasks, or read by colleagues in the language the meeting was held in.

A summary in the meeting's own language

A transcript in Polish and a summary in Polish are two different promises, and not every tool makes both. If you forward notes to people who were in the meeting, check the language the summary is written in, not only the list of transcript languages. At Fathom the two lists differ by 31 languages, as the section on languages shows.

A record of a meeting in a room

Fathom works with online calls that have a meeting link. A board around a table, a project group in a library or an interview in an office has no link, and needs a tool that listens through a microphone in the room. Several of the alternatives below do that, through a phone app or a computer's microphone.

A price that does not grow with every colleague

Fathom's team plans charge per user with a minimum of two, Read AI's licences are individual, and tl;dv and Fireflies charge per seat. A group where one secretary records for everyone pays very differently from a team where everyone records their own calls, so count who records before comparing prices.

What does Fathom's free plan give, and where does it stop?

Fathom calls the free plan "free forever", and its pricing page lists unlimited recordings and transcriptions, instant AI call summaries, and clips and search across calls. The trust centre explains the model plainly: the free app exists because it brings in customers for the paid team product. The limits sit in the AI features, not the recording.

• Recordings stay until you delete them. The help article on how many recordings you can have says Free and Premium users store unlimited recordings indefinitely, with no monthly limit.
• Advanced summaries cover five calls a month. The Free and Premium comparison gives Free advanced summaries for the first five calls each month, then only the General or Enhanced template. The pricing page defines advanced summaries as more than 15 templates, BANT and Sandler among them.
• The rest of the AI is Premium. The same comparison puts AI action items, follow-up emails, custom summaries and Ask Fathom on Premium, and says a new account gets them as a 30-day preview.
• CRM sync is free for three people per domain. HubSpot, Salesforce and Close sync on Free and Premium for up to three users per email domain.

Premium is 20 US dollars a month, or 16 billed yearly. Team is 19 US dollars a user a month, or 15 yearly, and Business 34 or 25, both with a two-user minimum. Every paid plan carries a 90-day guarantee on the pricing page.

For a freelancer who wants a full record and writes the notes by hand, Free may be all they need. For someone who sends a structured summary after most meetings, five a month runs out in the first week of a busy month.

How does Fathom get into a call, and on which computers?

Fathom began as a bot and now offers a choice between a bot that joins the call and capture from your own computer. The choice depends on the machine you use, and the device article is specific about which ones.

• Bot-free capture is a Mac beta, for meetings in English. The pricing page lists a choice of bot and bot-free capture and marks bot-free as a beta feature for Mac. The upgrade article says the new experience is, for now, only for Mac users with English-language meetings, and the device article says Windows support is coming, while both systems keep the bot.
• Mac and Windows only. The device article rules out Chromebooks, Linux, phones, tablets, calls without a meeting link, webinars and breakout rooms.
• Zoom first, then the others. Fathom's article on the 3.0 experience says bot-free video capture for Zoom is available on Mac, bot-free capture for Google Meet is coming through the Chrome extension, and bot-free support for Teams is being extended.
• A room needs a workaround. The in-person article says in-person capture is coming to the iOS app; for now you start a Zoom call on your laptop, invite Fathom and let it hear the room, with every voice credited to you.

Bot-free capture removes the notetaker from the participant list, and with it the visible sign that the call is recorded. The desktop app settings include one that posts a consent message in the meeting chat. Either way, telling the meeting is still the job of the person recording, and the rules differ by country and workplace, as the meeting notes comparison explains in its section on permission.

Which languages can Fathom transcribe and summarise?

Fathom's language article says it supports transcripts in 38 languages and lists them. Counted, the list has 38 names and no regional variants. Danish, Arabic, Hindi, Turkish, Polish, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Vietnamese and Indonesian are on it. Chinese, Hebrew, Persian, Swahili, Urdu and Bengali are not, so a meeting held in any of those falls outside what Fathom lists.

The summary list is much shorter. The section of the same page is headed "Translating Summaries from English", and it says that when a call is detected in Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Italian or Dutch, Fathom translates the summary into that language, sends it in the follow-up email and shows it by default. The page marks translated summaries as available to Premium and Team users. Fathom's overview page tells it more narrowly than the help centre: it says Fathom transcribes and summarises natively in seven languages, English and those six, on Premium and Team plans, and that Ask Fathom can translate into 29 more.

For the other 31 languages on the transcript list, neither page names a summary language of their own. A Danish or Turkish team should therefore record one real meeting and look at the summary Fathom writes before anyone relies on it. Neither page says anything about accuracy in any language, and a place on the list says only that the language is supported.

Where does Fathom keep recordings, and does it train on them?

Fathom answers the storage question in two places, and they agree: the data is in the United States. The training question has a longer answer, because Fathom separates its own models from those of its AI providers.

• Stored in the United States. Fathom's trust centre says all data is stored in the United States and names Google Cloud as its main provider, with Anthropic, OpenAI and ElevenLabs as AI providers, all in the US.
• Your data may train Fathom's own models. The privacy policy, updated 16 August 2026, says de-identified meeting data may be used to train Fathom's in-house models, that you can opt out in your account settings, and that third parties such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google may not train on it.
• Deletion is aimed at 30 days. The same policy says Fathom makes commercially reasonable efforts to delete recordings within 30 days of an account deletion request, without guaranteeing it.

For a European organisation this is a US service, with transfers covered by standard contractual clauses or the Data Privacy Framework, as the privacy policy puts it. The training opt-out is per user, and the trust centre adds that a Team Edition organisation can switch it off for all its members at once.

How do Fathom and the alternatives compare?

The table sets Fathom beside five alternatives on the points above. "Not stated" means the vendor's pages that could be read do not say.

Is Read AI the better fit for a team?

Read AI, at read.ai, measures the meeting as well as recording it. It joins as an assistant called Read, writes a report after the call, and adds numbers about how the meeting went, which some team leads want and some participants will not.

• It scores the meeting. The Read AI pricing page describes transcripts "augmented with listener sentiment and engagement" and a coaching report on talking speed, filler words, bias and charisma.
• Free covers five meetings a month. The free plan gives five meeting reports and transcripts a month, with a maximum meeting length of one hour, four hours on Pro and Enterprise, and eight on Enterprise+. File uploads are not included on Free.
• Pro is 19.75 US dollars a month, or 15 billed yearly. Enterprise is 29.75 or 22.50 and adds audio and video playback; Enterprise+ is 39.75 or 29.75 and needs at least five licences.
• It joins everything by default. The help article on adding Read to a meeting says it joins all meetings on a connected calendar unless you limit it to meetings you host or internal ones. The article on which meetings Read joins names Zoom, Teams and Google Meet as the only platforms, with the desktop app for others.
• The report can reach everyone invited. The sharing and distribution article says the owner's settings decide, and that sharing with participants reaches everyone on the calendar event, whether or not they attended. The article on making a report private calls sharing with everyone invited the default. Recaps go by email, Slack or Teams, and readers need a Read account unless link access is on.

Read's pages give three language numbers. The free plan card says 20+ languages, the feature table 16+, and the help centre's language list, counted here, has 36 entries, with Chinese as Cantonese and Mandarin. The same article says meetings in several languages are not fully supported and may give inconsistent results.

On data, Read's privacy policy says information is stored on servers in the United States and other countries, and that it is used to train and improve Read's models in line with your account settings; its Customer Experience Program, which uses meeting content to improve the service, is opt-in. It also says Read tells people in the call that the meeting is being measured and offers an opt-out, unless the meeting chat is disabled, and that typing "opt out" in the chat removes it.

Read AI suits a team lead who wants numbers about the team's meetings and a report in everyone's inbox. For a consultant in clients' calls, the two defaults, join everything and share with everyone invited, need changing before the first meeting.

How do Granola, tl;dv and Fireflies differ from Fathom?

Granola has no bot at all. Its help page on transcription says it runs only on your computer, using system audio and the microphone, needs the desktop app for macOS or Windows or the phone app, and never saves the audio. Basic is free with 30 days of visible history; Business is 14 US dollars a user a month on the pricing page, billed monthly, since the billing guide keeps annual billing for Enterprise contracts. The Granola comparison looks at it for lectures.

On languages, Granola's multi-language page lists 31 on desktop and 17 on mobile, while the pricing page's tooltip says 32 and 10. On desktop the summary can be set to English or to the meeting's majority language, which is the setting a team that meets in Dutch or Hindi will want. Polish and Ukrainian appear only on the mobile list.

tl;dv keeps video when its bot records and offers an audio-only desktop recorder without a bot. Its free plan keeps recordings for three months and writes full AI notes for ten meetings over the life of the account. Its help centre lists 42 transcript language entries, and its languages page says transcriptions, notes and reports are supported in over 30 languages. Its pricing page says data is hosted and stored in the EU. The tl;dv comparison has the rest.

Fireflies works through a bot tied to your calendar. Its pricing page charges 18 US dollars a seat a month, or 10 yearly, for Pro, and stops a recording at two hours on Free and Pro; on accounts opened since 1 September 2026, the free plan transcribes without limit only while auto-join is on. The Fireflies comparison covers its seats and storage.

Which one fits what you do with the notes?

Decide by what happens after the call, since the recording itself is cheap or free almost everywhere in this table.

• If you mostly need the recording and a searchable transcript, Fathom Free does that without a cap, as long as the meeting runs on Zoom, Meet or Teams and the language is among its 38.
• If you send a structured summary after most meetings, count them. Beyond five a month, Fathom means Premium at 16 or 20 US dollars; Read AI Pro is 15 or 19.75 with metrics included.
• If the summary has to be in a language other than English or Fathom's six, Granola's desktop setting writes it in the meeting's majority language, and Read lets you set an output language.
• If you run a team and want numbers about its meetings, Read AI is built for that, once its join and sharing defaults are set.
• If the meeting happens in a room, Granola records in person on a computer or a phone, Read AI on a phone, and Fathom only by the Zoom workaround.
• If nothing may join the call and you use Windows or meet in a language other than English, Fathom's bot-free capture is not there yet; Granola, the desktop recorders from tl;dv and Fireflies, or a recorder in the browser are the routes, and with each of them you tell the meeting yourself.

Whatever you pick, record one real meeting in the language you actually use before paying for a year.

Where Notibo fits

Notibo is not a meeting bot and has no calendar, team library or CRM sync. If what you use the notes for is a shared team record, a sales pipeline or a report in every inbox, stay with Fathom's team plans, Read AI or one of the others. Notibo covers three cases: a call recorded from your own computer with nothing joining it, a meeting in a room, and a meeting in a language outside a tool's list.

It works in the browser on a computer, with nothing to install. In Chrome or Edge you pick the tab your Teams, Zoom or Google Meet call runs in and switch on tab audio, and your microphone is recorded with it. On Windows you can take the whole system sound instead, which covers a desktop meeting app. On a Mac only a browser tab gives sound; Safari and Firefox give the microphone only. For a room, it uses the computer's microphone or a phone's: Notibo goes on the phone's home screen straight from the browser, without the App Store or Google Play, and records for as long as it stays open on the screen.

After the recording you get a transcript and notes with a summary, the main points and the action items, which you can correct and export as PDF or Word. The transcript comes out in the language spoken, from 78 languages, or 89 entries counting regional variants, and nothing is translated. Voices are told apart only where Notibo can distinguish them, so a meeting of several people should not rely on it.

One recording can run two hours. Files are stored in the EU, on Supabase in Frankfurt, and transcription and the notes run on US processors under standard contractual clauses. The audio is deleted as soon as the notes are saved, so nobody can listen to the meeting again. Notibo trains nothing on it and opts out of model training on every transcription request. The transcription page shows how it works. Pro is free for 14 days with no card, and after that the account keeps 30 minutes a month for free; Pro is 9.99 euro a month or 88.99 euro a year, per person.

Nothing joins the call, so nothing tells the others it is being recorded. That part is yours to do before you press record.