The 5 best AI notetakers in 2026

01

Granola

★ Best overall

Captures the meeting without putting a bot in the room

It listens through your computer audio, so nothing called "AI Assistant" appears in the participant list. That is a bigger deal than it sounds when the person on the other end is a customer or a candidate. You type rough notes during the call and it tidies them up afterwards.

02

Fathom

Best free plan

Unlimited recordings and summaries on a free plan

The free plan is the outlier here: unlimited recordings and AI summaries, with no monthly minute cap. That is how it spread through sales teams by word of mouth. Paid tiers add CRM sync and coaching metrics.

03

Fireflies.ai

Best integrations

Pushes notes and action items into the tools you already use

Pick this one when the notes have to end up somewhere else without anyone copying them across: Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, Notion and a long tail beyond. Search across the whole call archive earns its keep once a few months have built up.

04

Otter.ai

Best for in-person

The strongest live transcript, and the best phone app

Still the best way to follow a transcript as it happens, or to capture a conversation across a table instead of a video call. The mobile app is the reason to pick it over anything else here.

05

tl;dv

Best for research

Clips and cross-meeting reports for product and research teams

The interesting part is what happens after the call: timestamped highlights, clips you can paste into Slack, and reports that answer one question across many meetings at once. Good for pulling patterns out of a month of customer conversations.