Fathom vs Otter.ai

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.

Otter.ai is an AI meeting assistant from a Mountain View, California company founded in 2016 by Sam Liang and Yun Fu. It records conversations, transcribes them live with speaker identification, and produces summaries, outlines and action items. It works through OtterPilot, a bot that joins Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams meetings from your calendar, and through mobile and web recording for in-person conversations, interviews and lectures.

Transcripts are searchable and shareable, slides shown during meetings are captured into the notes, and Otter AI Chat answers questions about a single meeting or across a whole workspace of past meetings. Business and Enterprise plans add admin controls, usage analytics, CRM sync and specialized agents, such as a sales agent that assists during calls and updates CRM records. Pricing is per user with monthly minute allowances and per-conversation length limits: a free Basic tier, then Pro, Business and Enterprise.

Otter suits English-speaking teams, journalists, researchers and students who value accurate live transcripts. Its language support is limited to a few languages: English, Spanish and French, plus Japanese since late 2025. Turkish is not supported, so it is a poor fit for multilingual teams. Fathom offers a generous free plan for recording and summaries, Fireflies and tl;dv support many more languages, and Granola captures notes from device audio without a bot joining the call, which some clients prefer.