Fathom vs Fellow

Fathom is an AI meeting assistant founded by Richard White, who previously founded UserVoice. It joins Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams calls, records and transcribes them, and produces summaries with action items within seconds of the meeting ending. Its generous free plan made it one of the most widely used notetakers, especially among sales and customer success teams.

The free plan offers unlimited recording, transcription and storage for individuals, with a monthly cap on advanced AI summaries. Premium removes that cap and adds Ask Fathom, which answers questions across your meeting history. Team and Business plans add shared call libraries, automatic CRM sync to HubSpot and Salesforce, deal views and coaching features for sales managers. During calls you can highlight moments with one click, and afterwards create shareable clips, which is useful for product feedback and rep coaching.

Fathom fits individuals who want reliable free notes and sales teams that want call data flowing into the CRM without manual work. A bot visibly joins the call, which some participants dislike, and although Fathom transcribes dozens of languages, summary quality is strongest in English. Granola records without a bot for people who prefer a lighter footprint, Otter.ai and Fireflies.ai offer broader transcription and integrations, and Gong is the enterprise choice for revenue intelligence. For most people starting with AI notes, Fathom's free plan is the easiest place to begin.

Fellow is a meeting management platform made by a Canadian company headquartered in Ottawa. It covers the whole meeting cycle: collaborative agendas prepared before the call, notes and decisions captured during it, and action items and recaps followed up afterwards, with a strong focus on recurring one-on-ones and team meetings run by managers.

Agendas live in a shared notes document attached to each calendar event, with a template library for one-on-ones, stand-ups, retrospectives and board meetings. Fellow's AI notetaker joins Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams calls to record, transcribe and summarize, and privacy controls let organizations decide which meetings are recorded and who can see transcripts. Action items sync to tools such as Asana, Jira and Slack. There is a free plan with limits, then per-user Team and Business plans that unlock AI notes, longer history and admin controls, plus an Enterprise tier.

Fellow fits managers and organizations that want to improve meeting habits, not just capture transcripts. Solo users who only need a recorder get more for less from Otter, Fireflies or tl;dv, and teams already standardized on Notion or Confluence may find the agenda features overlap with what they have. Compared with Fathom or Fireflies, Fellow is stronger on pre-meeting preparation, one-on-one workflows and governance, while the pure notetakers are cheaper for transcription alone. Its value depends on the whole team adopting it, so rollout matters.