The AI notetaker market has gotten crowded enough that the real question for a growing business is not which tool is best. It is which one you are already paying for. Otter, Fathom, and Fireflies are strong stand-alone options priced between ten and twenty dollars a user a month. But if your team is already on Microsoft 365 or a paid Zoom plan, an AI recap feature may already be sitting in your bill, unused. Here is what five of the most common options actually cost, who each one fits, and the one legal question almost every business skips before turning one on.
Otter.ai: The Name Most People Already Know
Otter's free tier gives you 300 transcription minutes a month with a 30 minute cap per conversation and three lifetime file imports. The Business plan runs $19.99 per user per month billed annually, or $30 month to month, and includes unlimited meeting transcription, up to 6,000 imported file minutes per user, a four hour cap per conversation, and admin features like activity logs and usage analytics.
Best for a team that is not locked into one video platform. Otter works the same way whether the call happens on Zoom, Google Meet, or Teams. Worth knowing: the free tier's 30 minute cap per conversation is tighter than it looks. A single all-hands or client review can run past it, and the transcript just cuts off mid-sentence with no warning.
Fathom: The Free Tier That Is Actually Usable
Fathom's free plan is genuinely free, not a trial. It includes unlimited recordings and transcriptions across 38 languages, plus five advanced AI summaries a month before it drops back to a basic template. Premium runs about $19 a user a month and unlocks unlimited advanced summaries, AI generated action items, automatic follow up emails, and an "Ask Fathom" feature that searches across your call history like a chat window.
Best for a small team that wants to test whether AI notetaking is worth budget at all before committing to a paid tool. Worth knowing: five free advanced summaries a month works out to roughly one meeting a week. Every meeting after that reverts to a generic summary until the count resets.
Fireflies.ai: Built for Teams That Live in a CRM
Fireflies starts free with 800 minutes of storage, then moves to a Business plan at $19 per user per month billed annually, or $29 month to month. Business adds unlimited storage, full video recording, bi-directional Salesforce and HubSpot sync, and sentiment and topic tracking across calls.
Best for sales or client services teams that need call notes to land inside a CRM automatically instead of a separate app nobody opens. Worth knowing: the deeper AI features, like its AskFred assistant and custom summaries, draw from a separate credit pool on top of the seat price. A 10 person team on the Business plan runs about $190 a month before any credit top-ups.
Microsoft Teams Premium: Cheapest If You Are Already on Microsoft 365
Teams Premium costs $10 per user per month billed annually, added on top of an existing Teams license. It includes intelligent recap: an automatic written summary, chapter markers where the topic shifts, and AI suggested action items that show up in the calendar event once the call ends.
Best for any business already paying for Microsoft 365 that just wants meeting recaps without buying a separate app. Worth knowing: Microsoft 365 Copilot runs $30 a user a month and includes everything Teams Premium does, plus live question and answer during the meeting itself. That upgrade only pays for itself if the plan is to use Copilot across Word, Excel, and Outlook too. If meeting notes are the only reason Copilot is on the table, Teams Premium covers the same need for a third of the price.
Zoom AI Companion: Probably Already in Your Bill
AI Companion is included at no added cost with paid Zoom Workplace plans, which start around $14.16 a user a month billed annually, or it can be purchased on its own for about $8.33 a user a month annually if the business is not otherwise on a paid Zoom plan. It includes automatic meeting summaries and a notetaking feature that also works across Teams and Google Meet calls.
Best for any business already on a paid Zoom plan. Worth checking before signing up for anything else: it is a common pattern for a business to pay a separate $10 to $20 a month for a third party notetaker while a version of the same feature sits unused inside a Zoom bill they are already paying.
The Legal Question Most Businesses Skip
New Jersey and New York are both one-party consent states, so an AI bot silently joining an internal call between employees in Hoboken or Midtown is not a legal problem. That changes the moment someone on the call is in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Delaware, or one of the eleven other states that require every participant's consent before a conversation can be recorded. Pennsylvania has been especially active on this front. Its wiretap statute makes non-consensual recording a felony, and the state has seen real class action suits built on exactly this kind of gap.
If a business runs client calls, vendor calls, or interviews with anyone outside New York or New Jersey, the safer default is to keep the "this meeting is being recorded" notice visible and skip the bot-free or silent capture modes for anything involving outside parties. Justia's 50 state survey on recording laws has the state by state breakdown if a specific one needs checking.
This is exactly the kind of detail that belongs in an AI acceptable use policy instead of being decided by whichever employee signs up for a free trial first, and it is a smaller version of the same shadow AI risk that shows up whenever a new tool gets connected to business calls or inboxes without anyone checking the fine print.
Related reading: How to Set Up AI Email Triage for Your Growing Business walks through the same access and vendor vetting questions for AI tools connected to email instead of meetings.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which AI meeting notetaker is cheapest if my business already uses Microsoft 365?
Microsoft Teams Premium at $10 per user per month billed annually is the cheapest add-on, since it layers directly onto an existing Teams license and includes automatic recap, chapter markers, and AI suggested action items. Microsoft 365 Copilot adds live question and answer during meetings for $30 a user a month, but that price only makes sense if the plan is to use Copilot across the rest of Microsoft 365 too.
Is it legal to use an AI notetaker on a call with someone in Pennsylvania or Connecticut?
Only with that person's consent. New York and New Jersey are one-party consent states, but Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Delaware, and several other states require every participant on a call to consent before it can be recorded. The safer default for any call involving an outside party is to keep the recording notice visible and get consent before the AI notetaker starts capturing.
Do AI notetakers store the audio, or just a transcript?
It depends on the tool and plan. Most store the audio or video recording alongside the transcript by default, though several, including Otter and Fathom, let admins set retention limits or delete recordings once the transcript and summary are generated. Check the admin settings rather than assuming anything is deleted automatically.
Can an AI notetaker join a meeting without anyone seeing a bot?
Some can. A handful of tools offer a bot-free or browser based capture mode that records audio without a visible participant joining the call. That is worth avoiding on calls with outside parties, since a silent recording with no visible notice is a harder case to defend if consent ever gets questioned.
Do I need IT involved before rolling one of these out to my team?
It helps, especially past a handful of users. Someone still has to decide who gets admin access, whether recordings sync to a shared drive or stay in individual accounts, and how the tool fits into whatever AI acceptable use policy the business already has. Many growing businesses loop their managed IT provider in on that setup rather than leaving it to whoever signed up first.