Before comparing meeting assistants, answer one question: does your video platform already include one? If your team runs on paid Zoom, you very likely own an AI assistant and are not using it. If you run on Microsoft Teams, the equivalent is a substantial per-seat add-on. That single fact changes the economics more than any feature comparison.
This guide covers seven tools in three groups. It focuses on what separates them structurally: whether a bot joins your call, whether your admin will even allow that, what the free tier really caps, and how notes reach your CRM. Every figure below is linked to the vendor page it comes from, and where a vendor does not publish something, that is stated rather than estimated.
For apps that organise notes you write yourself, including Granola’s bot-free meeting notes, see our guide to AI note-taking apps. This article is about the meeting layer specifically.
Three kinds of meeting assistant
Third-party bot-based tools join your call as a visible participant via a calendar invite. They work across Zoom, Google Meet and Teams, and are the most feature-rich option. Everyone on the call can see the bot, which is a transparency feature and an etiquette problem depending on the meeting.
Botless capture records audio through a desktop application on your own machine. Nothing joins the call and no participant appears. Convenient, and it shifts the responsibility for telling people onto you.
Platform-native assistants are built into Zoom or Teams. They add no new vendor, no new contract and no bot, but they only work on that platform. The moment a meeting moves elsewhere, they have no presence.
Do you already own one?
This is the section most comparisons skip, and it is where the money is.
Zoom includes it, under a new name. Anyone working from an older guide should know that the AI Companion brand has been retired. Zoom’s announcement of ZoomMate, published in June 2026, states that “Meeting summaries, smart compose, transcription, call summaries, voicemail prioritization — all the capabilities that used to carry the AI Companion name are still built right into Zoom Workplace”, and that “Eligible paid Zoom Workplace plans continue to include core AI features at no additional cost”. ZoomMate is a separate new add-on product on top of that, and Zoom publishes no price for it on that page.
On Zoom’s own Workplace pricing page, with the currency selector set to US dollars, Pro is $14.16 per user per month and Business is $18.33, both billed annually. Zoom prices in local currency by region, so read the figure for your region at the source rather than trusting a converted number.
One correction worth making explicitly: the free Basic tier is no longer AI-free. The same pricing page lists meeting summaries for three hosted meetings a month and 20 AI queries a month on Basic. What the paid tiers buy is the unmetered version — Pro lists unlimited AI note-taking, for conversations on Zoom, through third-party apps and in person.
Microsoft charges separately. Microsoft publishes Microsoft 365 Copilot at “$30.00 user/month, paid yearly”, or $31.50 paid monthly on an annual commitment, and states that “A separate license for a qualifying Microsoft 365 plan is required.” Teams Premium is published at “$10.00 user/month, paid yearly” and lists AI-powered intelligent recap, real-time notes and action items and live translation of captions and transcripts — a lighter layer than Copilot at a third of the price.
The practical consequence: a Zoom-standardised team should activate what it already pays for before buying anything. A Microsoft-standardised team will often find a third-party tool cheaper per seat than the Copilot add-on, provided its admins allow external bots.
Bots, admin permission and consent
Three practical constraints decide whether a bot-based tool will work for you at all.
Your admin may block it. Bot-based tools join as external guests, and an organisation’s administrator settings may restrict or require approval for external bots joining meetings. Check this before evaluating anything, because it can eliminate four of the seven tools here in a single policy setting.
The bot is visible, which is mostly good. A bot-based tool appears in the participant list, so everyone on the call can see that something is capturing it. That is a transparency benefit. It is also, in a client pitch or a sensitive one-to-one, an intrusion some people react badly to.
Consent is your responsibility either way. Recording rules vary by country and, in the United States, by state, with some jurisdictions requiring only one party to consent and others requiring all participants. Announce recording at the start, note it in the invitation, and check your employer policy for external calls. This is general information rather than legal advice. Where capture happens without a visible bot, that duty falls entirely on you.
Third-party bot-based tools
1. Fireflies
Fireflies is the integration workhorse. Its pricing page puts unlimited transcription on every tier including Free, and separates the plans by storage and recording length rather than by transcription volume.
Free gives “400 mins of storage/team” — a team-wide pool, not per person. Pro is $10 per seat per month billed annually, or $18 monthly, raising storage to “8,000 mins of storage/seat” with a two-hour recording limit. Business is $19 annually or $29 monthly, with unlimited storage and a three-hour limit. Enterprise is $39 per seat, annual only, with a four-hour limit, HIPAA compliance and custom data retention.
Its differentiator is reach: transcription in 100-plus languages on every tier, and an integrations directory advertising “Seamless Integrations With 100+ Apps You Love”, with Salesforce and HubSpot among the CRM connectors named on the page. If the reason you want an assistant is that meeting notes should land in a CRM without anyone retyping them, this is the category default. Its AI assistant, AskFred, answers follow-up questions across past meetings.
On accuracy, one honest note: Fireflies publishes “99% accuracy in English and 95% in other languages”. That is a vendor self-report measured under undisclosed conditions, not an independent result.
2. Fathom
Fathom has the most generous free tier here. Its pricing page lists the Free plan as “Free forever” with “Unlimited recordings + transcriptions”, “Instant AI call summaries”, “Clips, playlists + search across calls” and a choice of bot-free capture, in beta on Mac, or bot capture.
What the free plan does not include is the deeper AI layer. Reading the feature matrix on that page, advanced summaries, AI-generated action items and the conversational meeting assistant all start at Premium. Premium is $20 per month, or $16 billed annually. Team is $19 per user monthly, or $15 annually, with a two-user minimum. Business is $34 per user, or $25 annually, and adds CRM field sync, Deal View and coaching metrics. Enterprise is quoted by sales and is the tier carrying custom data retention, SSO, SCIM and a signed HIPAA business associate agreement.
One limit that catches teams out: CRM syncs are capped at “Max 3 users/domain” on Free, Premium and Team. Full CRM field sync is a Business feature. Fathom does not publish a supported-language count or an accuracy figure on its pricing page, so this guide quotes neither.
3. tl;dv
tl;dv sits between the two on price and leans on clips: timestamped highlights you can share for coaching or handover without sending a full recording.
Its pricing page shows a genuinely unusual free plan — unlimited video recordings and “unlimited transcriptions in 30+ languages” — but it is the AI that is metered, not the recording: the free tier includes 10 meetings with AI notes and 10 Ask AI queries. Pro is $18 per seat per month billed annually and lifts both to unlimited, adding custom AI note templates and over 5,000 integrations. Business is $29 per seat billed annually, with premium transcription, custom vocabulary and multi-meeting AI analytics. Enterprise is custom.
The page advertises GDPR, SOC2 and EU AI Act compliance, EU hosting and privately hosted AI on request, but not HIPAA. If you handle health information, that rules it out.
4. Avoma
Avoma is the sales-intelligence option rather than a notetaker: conversation analytics, coaching scorecards and deal intelligence layered on top of recording.
Its pricing page lists Startup at $19 per user per month billed annually, or $29 monthly, for up to 25 paid seats; Organization at $24 annually, or $39 monthly, for up to 100 seats; and Enterprise at $39 per user with a ten-seat minimum. The intelligence layer is where the cost actually sits, and it is sold as add-ons: Conversation Intelligence and Revenue Intelligence are each $29 per seat per month billed annually, or $35 monthly, and Lead Router is $19 annually or $25 monthly. A Startup seat with conversation intelligence attached is therefore $48 a seat annually rather than $19 — read the add-on column, not the plan header.
There is no free plan. Avoma offers a “Free 14-day trial of the Organization plan” with “all Add-ons enabled” and “no credit card required”. Viewers and collaborators are free on every tier.
Avoma makes sense if a manager is actually running a coaching motion. For a team that needs recording and summaries, it is a large premium for software that will go unopened.
Botless capture
5. Krisp
Krisp began as noise cancellation and now includes meeting notes as a native feature, which makes it the botless option in this guide. It captures audio through a desktop application rather than sending a participant into the call, so it works with any meeting software, including platforms the bot-based tools do not support, and sidesteps the admin-permission problem entirely.
Its pricing page lists Core at $8 per user per month billed annually, or $16 monthly, and Advanced at $15 annually, or $30 monthly, with Enterprise quoted on request. There is no permanent free tier, contrary to what several roundups state: what Krisp offers is a seven-day free trial with no credit card required.
On compliance, the page states Krisp is “certified for SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA, and adheres to PCI-DSS standards”, with BAA signing listed on the Enterprise plan and described as available for teams with 100 or more seats — so HIPAA coverage here is an enterprise arrangement, not something a two-person team switches on.
Its noise cancellation remains the reason many people install it, and the notes are a useful secondary benefit rather than the deepest implementation here. If your real problem is audio quality in a shared or noisy space, this solves two things at once.
Platform-native assistants
These two are not standalone products you can buy and point at any meeting. They are features of a platform you already run, and they should be evaluated on that basis.
6. Zoom Workplace AI
The AI built into Zoom Workplace produces meeting summaries, transcription, smart compose and call summaries, with no bot and no additional vendor, and Zoom states that eligible paid Workplace plans continue to include those core AI features at no additional cost. For a team already standardised on Zoom, this is the obvious first thing to switch on. ZoomMate, announced in June 2026, is the paid agentic layer above it rather than a replacement for it.
The limitation is scope. Visibility ends where Zoom does: once a meeting moves to Google Meet, Teams or email, this layer has no presence there, and search across past meetings is scoped primarily to Zoom data.
7. Microsoft Teams Copilot
Microsoft 365 Copilot brings meeting recap, action items and cross-Microsoft-365 context into Teams. It is Teams-only, and it is an add-on rather than an inclusion, published at $30.00 per user per month paid yearly on top of a qualifying Microsoft 365 licence.
One cheaper path exists inside Microsoft: Teams Premium at $10.00 per user per month paid yearly, which lists AI-powered intelligent recap, real-time notes and action items and live translation of captions and transcripts, without the full Copilot layer.
For organisations deep in Microsoft 365 the integration is genuinely valuable. For anyone else it is the most expensive way to get meeting notes on this page.
Comparison
Every figure below comes from the vendor’s own pricing page, linked in the sections above. Cells marked with a dash are details the vendor does not publish there. We would rather leave them blank than guess.
| Tool | Type | Free tier | Entry paid | Platforms | CRM sync |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fireflies | Bot-based | Unlimited transcription, 400 min team storage | $10/seat annual | Zoom, Meet, Teams and more | Yes, 100+ apps |
| Fathom | Bot-based | Unlimited recording and transcription; advanced AI from Premium | $16/mo annual | Zoom, Meet, Teams | Field sync at Business |
| tl;dv | Bot-based | Unlimited recording; 10 AI-note meetings, 10 Ask AI | $18/seat annual | Zoom, Meet, Teams | 5,000+ integrations from Pro |
| Avoma | Bot-based | None; 14-day trial | $19/user annual + add-ons | Zoom, Meet, Teams | Yes |
| Krisp | Botless | None; 7-day trial | $8/user annual | Any, via desktop app | — |
| Zoom Workplace AI | Platform-native | Basic: 3 summaries, 20 queries/mo | Included from Zoom Pro, $14.16 | Zoom only | — |
| Teams Copilot | Platform-native | — | $30/user add-on | Teams only | Microsoft 365 |
There is no accuracy column. Vendors publish accuracy percentages measured on their own material under conditions they do not disclose, and those figures do not predict performance on your audio, accents or terminology.
CRM and workflow integration
For sales and client-facing teams this is usually the whole point, and it is where the tools diverge most.
Fireflies advertises more than 100 app integrations, with Salesforce and HubSpot named among the CRM connectors, from its Pro tier at $10 per seat. Fathom offers CRM field sync but reserves it for its Business tier at $25 per seat annually, with CRM syncs on the tiers below capped at three users per domain — more than double Fireflies for a comparable job. tl;dv advertises over 5,000 integrations from Pro at $18 a seat. Avoma builds CRM automation into its higher tiers and add-ons alongside coaching.
Whichever you choose, check how it decides which meetings sync. An automated push with no rule about internal calls can put a private discussion into a customer timeline, and that is a configuration question rather than a feature one.
If CRM selection is the bigger decision, our guide to AI CRM tools covers that side.
Privacy, retention and compliance
Meeting recordings are among the most sensitive data a team generates, and the compliance features sit on higher tiers across the board.
HIPAA appears on three of the pricing pages read for this guide, and on none of them at entry level. Fireflies lists HIPAA compliance on Enterprise at $39 per seat. Fathom lists a signed HIPAA BAA on Enterprise. Krisp states SOC 2 Type II, GDPR and HIPAA certification, with BAA signing available for teams of 100 or more seats. tl;dv publishes GDPR, SOC2 and EU AI Act compliance but not HIPAA.
Retention controls generally arrive at enterprise level too — Fireflies places custom data retention on Enterprise, and Fathom lists custom data retention policies on Enterprise only.
Storage limits are not retention policies. A free plan that caps storage at 400 minutes across a team is a capacity limit, not a guarantee about how long data is held or how it is used. If retention matters for your work, confirm it in the vendor terms for the specific plan you hold rather than inferring it from the plan comparison.
How to choose
Check what you already own first. On paid Zoom, the core AI layer is included. Activating it costs nothing and may end the search.
Check your admin policy second. If external bots are blocked, your options are the platform-native assistant or botless capture.
If notes must reach a CRM, Fireflies at $10 per seat is the cheapest serious route; Fathom charges $25 a seat for the equivalent field sync.
If you are one person who wants free notes, Fathom’s free tier is the most generous on capture, with the advanced-summary layer starting at Premium as the thing to watch.
If a visible bot is a problem in client meetings, botless capture is the answer, with the disclosure duty on you — and note that Krisp has a trial rather than a free plan, so this route is not a zero-cost one.
If you are running sales coaching, Avoma earns its price, provided you budget for the intelligence add-ons rather than the plan header. If you are not, it will not.
Every option here has a free tier or a trial. Run one across a fortnight of real meetings, because transcription quality varies far more with your audio setup and accents than with any published figure.
Related guides
- Best AI Note Taking Apps in 2026
- Best AI Productivity Tools in 2026
- Best AI CRM Tools in 2026
- Best AI Chatbots in 2026
- Best AI Presentation Makers in 2026
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a separate tool if I already pay for Zoom?
Possibly not. Zoom states that eligible paid Zoom Workplace plans continue to include core AI features — summaries, transcription, smart compose — at no additional cost, under the Workplace name rather than the retired AI Companion one. Its limitation is that it only works inside Zoom, so teams meeting across several platforms still need something platform-agnostic.
Why does Microsoft charge extra when Zoom does not?
Different packaging. Zoom bundles core AI into paid Workplace plans, while Microsoft publishes Microsoft 365 Copilot at $30.00 per user per month paid yearly on top of a qualifying Microsoft 365 licence. Teams Premium offers a lighter recap layer at $10.00 per user per month paid yearly.
Can I record without a bot joining the meeting?
Yes, with botless capture through a desktop app, or with a platform-native assistant. Fathom also lists a bot-free capture mode, in beta on Mac. Bot-based tools join as a visible guest. If nothing announces the recording, telling participants becomes your responsibility.
Which has the most generous free plan?
Fathom, with unlimited recordings and transcriptions and instant AI call summaries free forever, though advanced summaries and AI action items start at Premium. Fireflies offers unlimited free transcription but limits storage to 400 minutes across the whole team. tl;dv offers unlimited free recording and transcription in 30-plus languages, capped at 10 meetings with AI notes and 10 Ask AI queries.
Is Zoom AI Companion still called that?
No. Zoom retired the AI Companion name in 2026; the capabilities are now presented as built into Zoom Workplace, and ZoomMate is a separate paid add-on above them. Guides still listing “AI Companion” as the current product name are working from older material.
Will my IT department allow these?
Not necessarily. Administrator settings may restrict or require approval for external bots joining meetings. Confirm your organisation policy before evaluating bot-based tools.
Which are HIPAA compliant?
Fireflies lists HIPAA compliance on its Enterprise tier, Fathom lists a signed HIPAA BAA on Enterprise, and Krisp states HIPAA certification with BAA signing available for teams of 100 or more seats. tl;dv publishes GDPR, SOC2 and EU AI Act compliance but not HIPAA. In every case it is an upper-tier arrangement rather than a default.
Conclusion
Start by checking whether your meeting platform already includes an assistant, because on paid Zoom it does and on Microsoft Teams it does not without a $30 add-on. That single check decides the budget more than any feature.
After that, the choice narrows quickly. Fireflies at $10 a seat if notes must reach a CRM. Fathom if you are one person who wants free capture. tl;dv for clips and sharing, remembering the free tier meters AI rather than recording. Avoma only if someone is genuinely running coaching, and only after adding the intelligence add-ons to the quote. Krisp if a visible bot is unwelcome or your audio is poor, on a trial rather than a free plan. And whichever you pick, confirm your admin allows it before you invest time in an evaluation.
