Full disclosure up front: I make a meeting tool. It's called MeetingCoach, it costs $20 one time, and it does a different job than Granola. So I have a horse in this race — but it's a weird horse, which means I can be honest about everyone else's.
Here's why you're probably reading this: Granola is genuinely good, and their free Basic plan is genuinely free — but your note history caps at 25 meetings on a rolling window. If you take meetings for a living, you blow through that in two weeks. Then it's $14/user/month for Business, forever. That's when people start googling "free Granola alternative."
So let's do this properly. Here's every option worth your time, what it actually costs, and who it's actually for.
The quick comparison
| Tool | Free plan | Paid | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fathom | Unlimited recordings + summaries | Team from $19/user/mo | A bot joins your calls; your meetings live in their cloud |
| tl;dv | Unlimited recordings | Pro $29/mo | Free recordings auto-delete after 3 months |
| Fireflies | Unlimited recording, limited AI credits | Pro from $18/user/mo | Built for sales teams; overkill for most people |
| Otter | 300 minutes/month | Pro $16.99/mo | 300 minutes is about a week of real meetings |
| Granola (free) | Unlimited meetings | Business $14/user/mo | History capped at 25 notes |
| Voice memo + AI chat | Free | — | Manual, clunky, but $0 and it works |
| MeetingCoach | — | $20 once | Not a notetaker — it coaches you live. Mac only. |
1. Fathom — the best actually-free notetaker
If your only requirement is "free meeting notes, no games," stop reading and get Fathom. Unlimited recordings, AI summaries, action items — free, no monthly cap. I don't know how their unit economics work and honestly it's not my problem.
The trade: a Fathom bot joins your meetings, and everything gets recorded to their cloud. Some clients notice the bot and it changes the vibe of the call. If that doesn't bother you, this is the answer to the question you googled.
2. tl;dv — free, with a shot clock
Also free with unlimited recordings, and it's great at clipping moments from calls to share with your team. The catch is retention: free recordings delete after 3 months. It's a free tool with a built-in reason to upgrade, which — respect, that's good business. Just know what you're signing up for.
3. Fireflies — if you run a sales team
Fireflies is really a sales tool wearing a notetaker costume. CRM sync, talk-time analytics, coaching scorecards for managers. The free plan records unlimited meetings but meters the AI features. If you're an individual who just wants notes, this is a truck when you need a bicycle.
4. Otter — the OG, but the free plan is thin
Otter's been transcribing meetings since before it was cool, and the searchable archive is legitimately great. But 300 free minutes a month is roughly six hours — one busy Tuesday. It's a trial pretending to be a free plan. Pro is $16.99/month, which is more than Granola.
5. Granola's own free plan — don't sleep on it
Real talk: if you have fewer than ~25 meetings worth remembering at any given time, Granola's free plan might already be everything you need. It's bot-free, the notes are excellent, and it just works. The history cap is the whole business model. If you're under it, congrats, stop shopping.
6. The scrappy $0 option nobody writes about
Record the meeting with your phone's voice memo app (or QuickTime on your Mac), drop the file into ChatGPT or Claude, and say "summarize this with action items." That's it. That's the tool. It's manual and a little annoying, but it costs nothing, no bot joins your call, and you'd be shocked how good the output is. I did this for months before building anything.
7. MeetingCoach — the one I built (not free, and not a notetaker)
Here's my honest pitch, and then you can decide.
Every tool above tells you what happened after the meeting. Nobody reads those summaries. I know because I didn't read mine — I'd talk over people, ramble past the close, and then skim a recap that politely documented all of it. The problem was never remembering the meeting. It was behaving differently during it.
So I built MeetingCoach. It listens to your live meeting and puts short coaching cues in a tiny overlay — "you've been talking for two minutes," "that was a maybe, not a yes, pin it down." The overlay is invisible in screen shares. And everything — transcription and the AI — runs 100% on your Mac. Turn WiFi off and it keeps working. Nothing ever leaves your machine, which none of the cloud tools above can say.
It's $20, one time. No subscription, no account. That's cheaper than two months of any paid plan on this page. If it's not for you, email me within 30 days and I'll refund you.
So which one?
- You want free notes and don't mind a bot: Fathom.
- You want bot-free notes and have a light meeting load: Granola free.
- You run a sales team: Fireflies.
- You want $0 and don't mind manual: voice memos + an AI chat.
- You want to actually get better at meetings, privately: that's mine.
And here's the thing most comparison posts won't tell you: a notetaker and MeetingCoach aren't competitors. Run Fathom or Granola for the record, run MeetingCoach for the rep. They don't even know about each other.
Want the head-to-heads? I wrote them: vs Granola, vs Fathom, vs Otter, vs Fireflies, vs Poised.