Best Free Meeting Notes App & Software (2026)

Most "best free meeting notes app" lists describe tools. This one gives you the number that decides it — what each free plan stops doing, and when.

Every figure below is from the provider's own pricing page, checked in August 2026. Where a free plan has no published limit, it says so rather than guessing.

The short answer

If a bot may join your calls: Fathom's free plan goes furthest — unlimited recordings and transcriptions with instant AI summaries.

If your company blocks meeting bots (many do, and this removes Otter, Fireflies and Fathom entirely regardless of price): use the transcription already included in Zoom, Teams or Google Meet, or transcribe your own recording.

If you mostly need a place to write things down: Google Docs, Notion, OneNote, Apple Notes and Evernote are all genuinely free and genuinely unlimited. They just will not summarise anything for you.

What each free plan actually caps

Three things in that table are worth more than the rest.

Fireflies' 400 minutes is per team, not per person. It divides as colleagues join rather than multiplying. A three-person team has the same six and a half hours one person had. It is also the limit people miss, because the headline says "unlimited transcription" and that part is true — you simply cannot keep much of it.

Fathom's free plan is unusually complete, and the gap is exactly where it matters. You get the recording, the transcript and a summary. What sits behind the $20 Premium tier is AI-generated action items — the part that turns a call into a list of things people owe each other.

Otter's free plan is the most restrictive of the three, on every axis: fewer minutes, a per-conversation cap, and only your 25 most recent conversations retained. It is the most polished product of the group and the least usable free plan.

Paid pricing, for when you outgrow free

Useful to know before you invest a workflow in something:

• Otter Pro $8.33/user/month annually, $16.99 monthly. Business $19.99 annually, $30 monthly.
• Fireflies Pro $18/mo or $10 annually (8,000 mins storage/seat). Business $29 or $19 annually, unlimited storage. Enterprise $39 annually.
• Fathom Premium $20/mo or $16 annually. Team from $19/user, $15 annually. Business $34 or $25.
• Microsoft Teams meeting recordings with transcripts start at Teams Essentials, $4.00/user/month.

One detail worth catching on Fireflies: Pro costs $10 per seat a month and includes exactly the same 20 AI credits as the free plan. What you buy at that tier is storage, not more AI processing. If credits were your wall, Pro changes nothing and you are looking at Business.

The question that removes most of these options

Will your organisation let a bot join the call?

Otter, Fireflies and Fathom all work the same way: they add a visible participant to your meeting that records it. A great many companies prohibit that — for confidentiality, because consent gets legally complicated when a vendor's software is party to the conversation, or because the security team has not reviewed that vendor.

Check this before the pricing page. It is the single most common reason a carefully chosen tool is adopted and then quietly abandoned, and no amount of free minutes survives a policy that says no.

If bots are blocked where you work, two options remain: the transcription built into the platform you already pay for, and transcribing recordings yourself.

What the platforms already give you

Zoom. Meeting summaries, transcription and call summaries are built into Zoom Workplace, and eligible paid plans include them at no extra cost. Zoom retired the "AI Companion" name in June 2026, so older guides describe it by a name that no longer exists. Free Workplace Basic gets a capped tier, and its group meetings stop at 40 minutes anyway.

Microsoft Teams. Recordings with transcripts start at Teams Essentials, $4.00 per user a month. Watch for the second obstacle: transcription is both a per-organiser and a per-user policy, so the button can be greyed out even on a paid licence. Detail in transcribing a Microsoft Teams meeting.

Google Meet. Transcripts require a paid Workspace edition — Business Standard or Plus, Enterprise Starter, Standard or Plus, Teaching and Learning Upgrade, Education Plus, or Workspace Individual. Nothing on a personal gmail.com account. Detail in transcribing a Google Meet call.

The manual tools, honestly

Notion, Google Docs, OneNote, Apple Notes and Evernote are all free, all unlimited, and all excellent at the thing they do. None of them transcribes anything or writes a summary.

That is not a criticism. If your meetings are short, internal, and your team already documents decisions properly, a shared doc is the correct answer and everything above is overhead. Google Docs in particular is hard to beat for a live shared agenda because everyone already knows how to use it.

The point at which they stop being enough is specific and recognisable: when you start rewriting notes after the call, searching for a decision from three weeks ago, or chasing people for commitments you are fairly sure they made.

Where Meetings Brief fits

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 the conversation is written out as it happens, then emailed to you as a summary with action items. Nobody in the call sees a participant called "Notetaker", because there isn't one.

Where Fathom and Fireflies still win: their bot can cover a call you are not attending, and it joins recurring meetings from your calendar on its own. This needs you in the call with the tab shared. If you want meetings captured while you are somewhere else, use one of them.

It also transcribes a recording you already have, in your browser — no account, no minute cap, no storage cap, and the file is never uploaded, because the speech model runs on your own machine. That last property is why it works for recordings you would not be permitted to send to a third party, and why it is unaffected by any bot policy.

Around 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

1. Bot policy. It removes options faster than price does.
2. Where your meetings happen. All on one platform, scattered across several, or not on a screen at all.
3. What runs out first. Minutes, storage, credits or seats — multiply by your real weekly load.
4. What you will 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 check which tier they sit in, because on more than one tool here they are the paid part.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best free app for meeting notes?

For recording live calls, Fathom's free plan goes furthest — unlimited recordings and transcriptions with AI summaries, though action items are a paid feature. For raw transcription volume, Fireflies, capped by 400 minutes of storage per team. If your company blocks meeting bots, none of those are available to you, and the answer is the transcription built into Zoom, Teams or Google Meet, or transcribing your own recordings.

Is there free meeting notes software with no limits at all?

For writing notes, yes — Notion, Google Docs, OneNote and Apple Notes are unlimited and free, and none of them transcribe or summarise. For transcription, browser-based processing has no minute or storage cap because nothing is stored on a server, and the audio never leaves your device.

What does Otter's free plan actually include?

300 transcription minutes a month, capped at 30 minutes per conversation, keeping only your 25 most recent conversations, with 3 file imports for the life of the account. Pro is $8.33 per user a month billed annually or $16.99 monthly.

Do free meeting note tools work on mobile?

Most are desktop-first with a mobile app that feels like an afterthought — worth testing on a phone before committing if you take meetings away from a desk. Browser-based transcription works on a phone, though a long recording will take a while on phone hardware.

Do these tools train AI on my meeting content?

Some do, and it is more common on free tiers than paid ones. Look in each privacy policy for wording about improving services using customer content. If the meetings are sensitive, the strongest position is not sending the audio anywhere at all.

Can I get meeting notes without recording the meeting?

Yes, and it is often the better habit. Speak a ninety-second recap immediately afterwards — what was decided, who owes what, by when — and have that transcribed and structured. It sidesteps every consent and bot-policy question, and it captures the part you actually need rather than 9,000 words you will never reread.