Transcription is no longer the hard part. Every free plan below will produce a readable transcript of a normal meeting, and several will write a summary good enough to send. The constraint sits elsewhere: how long a single recording may run, how much of it you may keep, and whether you can get the file out at all.
That is not the comparison most “best free note taker” lists make. Below, five plans read off vendor pricing pages on 26 October 2026 — what the free tier actually gives you, and where it stops. For the broader picture of how capture, summaries and retention fit together, our AI meeting notes overview covers the category; this piece is the free-tier audit.
The five plans, judged on what they meter
Fathom is the outlier: unlimited recordings, unlimited transcription and instant AI summaries at $0, with bot-free capture available as a beta on Mac. Paywalls start at advanced summaries, action items and the in-call assistant — Premium is about $16 per user per month annually, $20 monthly. If you record your own calls solo, this is the most generous floor in the category — and the reason is commercial: Fathom wants your team’s CRM sync later.
Otter gives 300 minutes per user per month — a normal calendar, not a power user’s — but caps each conversation at 30 minutes, keeps only your 25 most recent conversations, allows three imported audio/video files for the account’s lifetime and five custom vocabulary terms. A 45-minute client call either gets cut or has to be split. Pro raises that to 1,200 minutes and unlimited history for roughly $17 a month (check the official site; billing terms move the figure).
Fireflies advertises unlimited transcription on the free plan, which reads as unlimited until you notice the 400 minutes of storage per team and the 20 AI credits. That is under seven hours of meetings, and a five-person team sharing it hits the limit in a week. Downloads are a Pro feature, so the free tier is a viewer, not an archive. Pro is about $10 per seat per month billed annually.
Granola takes the opposite approach — no bot joins the call, the app listens to your device — and its Basic plan is free with AI notes, cross-meeting chat and custom templates, but only a limited window of meeting history. Business, at $14 per user per month, is where history becomes unlimited along with advanced models and integrations. The capture experience is the best of the five; the free tier is a trial of the format, not a store for a year of work.
Notta looks competitive at 120 minutes a month until the per-conversation limit lands: three minutes. Fifty uploads, ten AI summaries, and export held back for Pro at around $8 a month billed annually. Three minutes is a voice memo, not a meeting — treat this free tier as a demo of the interface.
The hardware shortcut deserves one caveat: our Sony XM6 meeting-summary test found the built-in summary handled a mixed Chinese-English conversation accurately. It summarizes the conversation you are having; it does not archive it. The free plans above still own the retrieval job.
Notion’s AI workspace (image: Notion). Useful as the destination for a summary; its AI features are a separate credit-metered add-on, not a meeting recorder.
Three places the free tier quietly bills you
The per-conversation cap. Otter’s 30 minutes and Notta’s 3 are not billing units, they are truncation points. Nothing warns you at minute 29; you find out when the decision you needed fell in the unwritten part. Check this number first: 300 minutes with a 30-minute cap behaves very differently from 120 without one.
Storage dressed up as minutes. “Unlimited transcription” and “unlimited recording” are different promises. Fireflies transcribes forever but stores 400 minutes per team; once that fills, the unlimited part stops mattering. Ask what the retention number is in hours, not what the minute allowance is.
Retention and export, which are separate walls. Otter keeps 25 conversations, Granola keeps a limited history, Fireflies gates downloads behind Pro. Losing a meeting rarely happens at capture — it happens three months later when someone asks what was agreed, and the free account has already rotated it out. Whatever you choose, export the summary the same day to a notes app you actually own.
How to combine them without paying
A workable free stack, tested against the limits above: Fathom as the recorder, since it has no minute or storage wall, and bot-free capture for client calls where a visible recorder changes the room. Push each summary into a notes app you control — Notion, Joplin, plain Markdown — within the hour; that becomes your real archive, and the note taker is just the intake pipe. Keep Otter on a second account only for live captions in Google Meet, where the 30-minute cap is survivable because you read along in real time.
That combination costs nothing and loses nothing. What it does require is the one habit free plans do not automate: moving the output somewhere permanent before the vendor’s history window closes.
Plan details read from Otter, Fireflies, Granola, Fathom and Notta pricing pages on 26 October 2026; prices change, so confirm before subscribing. Related: Otter.ai alternatives.