Best Free AI Meeting Assistant: What Each Free Tier Actually Gives You (2026)

Every free tier below is described from the provider's own pricing page, and where a plan runs out, this says exactly what runs out. That is the only thing that matters when you are choosing a free tool, and it is the thing most comparison lists leave out.

One general warning before the detail: free tiers in this category change often, and they usually change by moving the limit rather than removing it. Two of the tools below quietly relocated their constraint from minutes to storage in the last year, and Zoom retired an entire brand name in June 2026. Check the current page before you commit a workflow to any of them.

What actually runs out

Every free plan has one binding constraint. Find it, multiply by your real weekly meeting load, and you will know in about thirty seconds whether the tool is a trial or a tool.

The constraint is almost never "features". It is one of these four:

Minutes. A monthly transcription allowance. The most visible limit and the easiest to plan around.

Storage or retention. You can transcribe freely but cannot keep much. This is the limit that catches people, because you discover it months later at the moment you need the old material.

Credits. A pool of AI operations — summaries, questions, extractions — separate from transcription. Runs out faster than people expect because every action spends from it.

Seats. Free for one person, paid the moment a colleague needs to see it.

The free tiers, side by side

Several of those rows need more than a line.

Fathom has the most generous free tier of the bot-based tools

Fathom's free plan lists unlimited recordings and transcriptions, a choice of bot-free capture (in beta) or a meeting bot, instant AI call summaries, and clips, playlists and search across calls. For a free plan, that is unusually complete, and it is why Fathom keeps appearing at the top of these lists.

The line to read carefully is what sits one tier up. AI-generated action items and advanced call summaries are Premium, at $20 a month, or $16 a month billed annually. So the free plan gives you the record and a summary; the part that turns a call into a list of things people owe each other is paid. Team plans start at $19 per user a month ($15 annually, minimum two users).

Whether that matters depends on what you were going to do with it. If you reread summaries yourself, free is genuinely enough. If you wanted the tool to hand you the follow-ups, that is the paid feature.

Fireflies moved its limit from minutes to storage

Fireflies advertises unlimited transcription on its free plan, which beats Otter's 300 minutes outright. The constraint moved somewhere less obvious: the free plan gives 400 minutes of storage per team, and 20 AI credits.

So you can transcribe as much as you like and keep very little of it. For someone who needs the transcript during and just after a call, that is a good deal. For anyone building a searchable record, it is the same wall as a retention limit wearing a different hat.

Paid tiers are $10 per seat a month annually for Pro (8,000 minutes of storage per seat), $19 for Business with unlimited storage, and $39 for Enterprise.

Otter's free plan is a trial, and that is fine

Otter's Basic plan includes 300 transcription minutes a month, capped at 30 minutes per conversation, keeps your 25 most recent conversations, and allows 3 file imports for the lifetime of the account.

Three hundred minutes is five half-hour meetings. If you have four calls on a Tuesday you are done for the week. Otter Pro is $8.33 per user a month billed annually, or $16.99 month to month; Business is $19.99 annually, $30 monthly.

None of that makes Otter a bad product — it is the most polished of the group. It means the free plan is there to show you the product, not to run your week on.

Zoom retired the AI Companion name in June 2026

If you are searching for "Zoom AI Companion free", the results you find are probably out of date. Zoom's own blog puts it plainly: the AI Companion name has been retired, in favour of Zoom AI for the features built into Zoom Workplace and ZoomMate for the newer agentic product.

The features themselves did not go anywhere. Meeting summaries, transcription, chat compose and call summaries are still built into Zoom Workplace and still included with eligible paid plans — they are now named for what they do rather than under one brand.

What is genuinely free: Zoom Workplace Basic includes a limited ZoomMate Basic tier — meeting summaries for 3 hosted meetings a month, in-meeting questions for 3 hosted meetings a month, AI note-taking for 3 uses a month, 20 AI queries a month, agentic search across 10 files and 3 meetings, and 10 workflow runs a month. ZoomMate itself is a separate paid add-on, sold per user per month with 2,200 AI credits included monthly.

Three summaries a month is enough to evaluate it. It is not enough to work on.

Google Meet and Microsoft Teams: nothing free

Both platforms have good built-in transcription and neither gives it away.

Google Meet transcripts require a paid Workspace edition — Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Starter, Standard or Plus, Teaching and Learning Upgrade, Education Plus, or Workspace Individual. On an ordinary gmail.com account the option is not there at all. The detail is in transcribing a Google Meet call.

Microsoft lists meeting recordings with transcripts from Teams Essentials at $4.00 per user a month upwards; the free Teams plan's feature list covers 60-minute meetings, 100 participants and 5 GB of storage, and does not include recording, transcription or captions. Teams also has a second trap — transcription is both a per-organiser and a per-user policy, so a licensed user can still find the button greyed out. That is covered in transcribing a Microsoft Teams meeting.

What Meetings Brief does, and what it does not

Being direct, because a comparison that oversells its own product is worthless.

No bot joins your calls — and it still transcribes them live. Share the meeting tab in Chrome or Edge on a desktop and Meetings Brief writes the conversation out as it happens, then emails the summary and action items. No extra participant appears in the call.

What Fathom and Fireflies still do that Meetings Brief does not: cover a call you are not in, and join recurring meetings from your calendar unattended. If you need that, use one of them.

It also transcribes a recording you already have, in your browser, with no account, no minute cap and no storage cap — and without uploading the file anywhere. The speech model is downloaded into the page and runs on your own machine, which is why it can be unlimited and free, and why it works for recordings you would not be allowed to upload to a third-party service.

That last point matters more than it sounds in a corporate setting: a great many organisations block third-party bots from joining meetings, which rules out the bot-based tools entirely regardless of their pricing. Transcribing a file adds no participant to the call.

Alongside that: voice capture in 13 languages, AI summaries in six formats, automatic action items, and semantic search across everything captured — free, without an account.

Choosing, in the order that matters

Where do your meetings happen? If they are all scheduled video calls on one platform, a bot-based tool is the natural fit and Fathom's free tier goes furthest. If they are scattered across platforms, phone calls and rooms, no single bot covers them.

Is your organisation going to allow it? Check the bot policy before the pricing page. This is the most common reason a carefully chosen tool never gets used.

What runs out first, and when? Minutes, storage, retained conversations, credits or seats. Multiply by your real load.

What happens to the old material? If the tool deletes or hides history, it is a live utility rather than a record. That is fine as long as you chose it knowingly.

What will you actually do with the output? An hour of conversation is around 9,000 words. Almost nobody rereads that. If what you want is decisions and commitments rather than a verbatim record, judge the summary and action-item features — and note which tier they sit in, because on more than one tool here they are the paid part.

The honest summary

For free live-call recording on a supported platform, Fathom's free tier is the strongest, with action items as the paid upsell to be aware of. For raw free transcription volume, Fireflies, with storage as the wall. Otter is the most polished product and the most restrictive free plan.

If bots are blocked where you work, or your meetings are not all on one platform, none of those apply and transcribing the recording afterwards is the route that always works.

And if the real problem is that decisions and follow-ups keep getting lost — rather than that you lack a transcript — the transcript may not be the thing worth optimising at all.

One factor decides this for many teams before any feature does: whether a bot may join the call at all, and who actually agreed to it. That is the subject of a meeting bot is a decision you make for everyone else.

Frequently asked questions

Is there a genuinely unlimited free AI meeting assistant?

Fathom's free plan lists unlimited recordings and transcriptions, and Fireflies offers unlimited transcription capped by 400 minutes of storage per team. Both are real, and both put the features that turn a transcript into action items behind a paid tier. Transcribing a recording in your browser is unlimited with no storage cap, because the processing happens on your own device rather than on someone's servers.

Is Zoom AI Companion still free?

The AI Companion name was retired in June 2026. The features moved into Zoom Workplace under plainer names and remain included with eligible paid Zoom Workplace plans at no additional cost, and the newer agentic product is called ZoomMate, a paid add-on sold per user per month with 2,200 AI credits included monthly. Zoom Workplace Basic includes a limited free tier: meeting summaries and in-meeting questions for 3 hosted meetings a month each, AI note-taking for 3 uses a month, and 20 AI queries a month.

Which free plan is best if my company blocks meeting bots?

None of the bot-based tools, whatever their pricing. Fathom, Fireflies and Otter all work by joining the call as a participant, which is exactly what those policies exist to prevent. Record the meeting with everyone's consent and transcribe the file afterwards instead — that adds no participant to the call.

Do free AI meeting tools use my recordings to train their models?

Some do, and it is more common on free tiers than paid ones. Look in the privacy policy for language about improving services using customer content. If the meetings are sensitive, prefer a tool with an explicit opt-out — or one that never receives the audio at all.

What is the catch with free transcription that runs in the browser?

The model has to download the first time, which is a one-off cost of tens of megabytes, and processing uses your own machine rather than a server, so a long recording takes longer on an old laptop. In exchange there is no account, no minute cap, no storage cap, and the audio never leaves the device.

Can I move my transcripts to another tool later?

Check the export formats before you commit. Lock-in is a real risk with services that keep everything in a proprietary store, and it is worth two minutes on the pricing page to confirm you can get plain text or PDF out.

Does a free plan for one person stay free for a team?

Usually not. Fathom's team plans start at two users, and Fireflies' free storage allowance of 400 minutes is per team rather than per person, so it divides rather than multiplies as people join. Seats are the limit that appears the moment a tool succeeds internally.