The best AI note takers for meetings, compared honestly.

A bot dials into your meeting as a participant. It shows up in the list with a name, everyone sees it, and on some platforms somebody has to admit it from the waiting room. A bot-free tool captures the audio your own computer already has, either from inside the browser tab or from your machine’s system audio, so nothing joins and nobody sees anything. Bots tend to be easier to set up across many platforms at once. Bot-free tends to feel better in client-facing and sensitive meetings.

No, and this is the most common misunderstanding in the category. Bot-free describes what the other people in the meeting see. It says nothing about where the audio goes afterwards. Most bot-free tools, Scribbl included, send audio to the cloud to transcribe it. If you need processing to happen entirely on your device, look at local-first tools such as Meetily or Hyprnote, and expect to trade some summary quality for it.

Nobody can honestly answer this yet, and you should be suspicious of any page that does. No vendor in this category, us included, publishes a word error rate against a stated test set with defined conditions: accents, overlapping speakers, jargon, poor audio. Until someone does, "most accurate" is a claim without evidence. What you can check quickly is how a tool handles your own meetings, so use the free tiers on a real call rather than trusting a table.

Yes. Recording laws vary by region, and a bot-free tool removes the visible signal that would otherwise tell people a recording is happening. That makes telling them more important, not less. Most tools here, ours included, have a setting to announce it in the chat.

Fathom lets you record and transcribe without limit on the free plan, but caps AI summaries at 5 a month, and on a note taker that is the limit that counts. Krisp offers unlimited free transcription with lighter summaries. Granola gives 25 meetings for the lifetime of the account, not per month, which is the most commonly misread number in this category. Ours is 10 meetings a month on Google Meet, and Zoom and Teams are a 7-day desktop trial rather than part of the free plan. Read the exact mechanic rather than the word "free": some caps are monthly, some are per conversation, and some are once ever.

Quite possibly, and you should check before you buy anything. Zoom AI Companion is included on most paid Zoom plans. Microsoft Teams Intelligent Recap needs a Teams Premium or Microsoft 365 Copilot licence. Google Meet can take notes for you on the higher Workspace tiers. If nearly all your meetings happen on one platform, the built-in option is free or already paid for, and it is the right answer. The reason people go looking for a third-party tool is usually that they work across two or three platforms, or that their Workspace edition does not include it.

If your Workspace edition includes "take notes for me", start there, because it is already paid for and the notes land in Google Docs. If it does not, or you are on a free personal Gmail account, the Chrome extensions are the lightest option: Scribbl and Tactiq both work from inside the browser tab with nothing joining the call. Granola and Fathom also cover Meet but need a desktop app.

Zoom AI Companion is included on most paid Zoom plans, so check that first. If you want notes that follow you off Zoom as well, Otter, Fireflies, Fathom and tl;dv all cover Zoom with a bot, and Granola, Krisp, Circleback and Scribbl cover it without one. Ours needs the desktop app for Zoom, which is Apple Silicon or 64-bit Windows only.

Teams Intelligent Recap is the natural answer if you already hold a Teams Premium or Microsoft 365 Copilot licence, and it will clear procurement without a conversation. Otherwise Otter, Fireflies, Fathom and tl;dv cover Teams with a bot. Worth knowing that Microsoft has been tightening what third-party bots may do in Teams, so bot-based tools are the ones most exposed to that changing.

This is increasingly common, and it is the case bot-free tools exist for. A tool that captures from inside your own browser tab or from your machine's system audio does not need to be admitted, because nothing joins. On this page that is Granola, Scribbl, Tactiq, Krisp, Jamie and Circleback. You still need to tell people you are recording.

Partly you should not, and we have tried to make that easy to act on. We have not ranked ourselves first, we have named the tools that beat us and where, and every factual claim here is something you can go and check against the vendor’s own page. The section on what we could not verify is there for the same reason. If you find something wrong, tell us and we will correct it.