A client asked me last fall which AI note taker I recommended for their team. I said "Otter, probably" and then realized I had no idea if that was actually true. I'd been using Otter for two years out of habit, not because I'd compared it to anything. So I did something dumb: I signed up for ten different tools and ran them all for a month across something like five hundred meetings. My calendar looked ridiculous. I had three bots joining the same call at once. One host emailed me afterward asking if I was "running some kind of experiment." I was. An expensive, time-consuming experiment that I'm now writing up so you don't have to do it yourself.

Here's the short version of what I found. There is no single best AI note taker. There just isn't. Otter is the most accurate for English. Fathom is the best free option if you're on Zoom. Fireflies is the one for sales teams. And the one I actually use day to day now is HiNoter — which I'll get to, and yes I work there, and yes I'll be honest about the tradeoffs.

What we'll cover:

How I tested (and why most reviews are useless)

What each tool is actually like

The comparison table

Which one should you get

FAQ

How I tested (and why most reviews are useless)

Most "best AI note taker" reviews are written by people who clearly never used the tools. They read the marketing pages, copy the feature lists, and rank them in a table. I know this because I read about fifteen of them while prepping for this test and half of them had wrong prices or features that don't exist.

So here's what I actually did. Every tool on this list ran for at least three days of real meetings. Not demo recordings. Real calls with real people talking over each other, eating lunch, having bad wifi, muting at wrong times. I tested one-on-ones, team standups with six or seven people, client presentations, and a handful of calls in Portuguese because half these tools claim multilingual support and I wanted to see if that was real.

The Portuguese test was where things got interesting, actually. More on that later.

I also paid attention to the stuff reviews usually skip: how long does it take to get your notes after a meeting? Does the bot show up as a weird "name" in the participant list? Does the summary actually capture who's supposed to do what, or is it just a vague paragraph? Can you find an old meeting three weeks later? These are the things that make you hate a tool or love it, and they don't show up on a feature comparison chart.

What each tool is actually like

I'm not going to give every tool the same format. Some of these I have a lot to say about. Others, not much. That's how it works in real life — some tools are interesting and some are just fine.

Otter.ai — the one everyone's heard of

Price: Free 300 min/mo · Pro $10/mo · Business $20/mo | Accuracy: ~95% English | Languages: English, French, Spanish | Platforms: Zoom, Meet, Teams

Otter is the one that's been around forever, and honestly it shows in a good way. The real-time transcription is fast — like, words appearing on screen as you talk, no delay. Accuracy on English was the best I saw. Around 95%. It handles people talking over each other better than most, though it still gets confused if three people jump in at once.

The thing I love about Otter is custom vocabulary. You can tell it words your team uses — API names, acronyms, industry jargon — and it transcribes them right. Every other tool I tested turned "Kubernetes" into "kubernetti's" or something equally stupid. Otter got it right because I told it the word ahead of time. Small feature, big deal if you work in tech.

The thing I don't love: the free plan is 300 minutes a month. That's like five meetings. After that you're paying. And the genuinely useful features — the good summaries, the advanced search — are on Business at $20/mo. The free and Pro tiers feel like teasers.

Non-English? Fine but not great. I tested the French mode. It worked but accuracy dropped to maybe 80%. Usable for a rough transcript. Not usable for anything you'd send to a client.

Use Otter if: your meetings are in English and you want the best accuracy.Skip Otter if: you need non-English, or you want everything for free.

Fireflies.ai — the sales team one

Price: Free (limited) · Pro $18/mo | Accuracy: ~90-93% English | Languages: 30+ | Platforms: Zoom, Meet, Teams, Webex

If your job involves Salesforce, this is probably your pick. Fireflies auto-logs every call to the right CRM contact. That's the whole reason it exists. The note-taking itself is fine — not as accurate as Otter, not as fast — but the CRM integration is genuinely the best I saw. Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Zoho. If you're a sales manager and your reps aren't logging calls, Fireflies fixes that.

But man, the transcription speed. After a meeting ends, it takes ten to fifteen minutes before you get your notes. That's not a typo. Ten to fifteen minutes. If you're used to Otter's real-time transcription, this feels like going back to dial-up. I don't know why it's so slow. Maybe their processing pipeline is different. Whatever the reason, it's annoying.

Accuracy was 90 to 93 percent on English. Lower than Otter. Speaker labeling was rough — it mixed up who said what, especially with accents. The 30+ language support is real though. I tested it in Spanish and it was okay. Not amazing. Okay.

Use Fireflies if: you live in a CRM and need calls logged automatically.Skip if: you need real-time notes, or data residency matters to you (Fireflies stores data on third-party servers).

Fathom — free, and actually free

Price: Free (full personal use) | Accuracy: ~92% English | Languages: English | Platforms: Zoom only

Fathom is free. Not "free for two weeks" or "free with a watermark." Free. No meeting limits. No hidden caps. For personal use, it costs nothing. That's remarkable and I want to make sure that sinks in because a lot of people skim past "free" assuming there's a catch. There isn't one, really, unless you count the platform limitation.

Which is: Zoom only. No Google Meet. No Teams. And English only. If you're a solo person on Zoom who speaks English, there is no reason to pay for anything else. Fathom gives you a one-minute summary after each call, posts action items to Slack, and lets you share a link to the recording. Done. That's the product. Simple and good.

Accuracy was about 92% in my tests. Close to Otter, not quite there. The summaries are clean enough to send to someone who missed the meeting. I used Fathom for about a week and had zero complaints. If I didn't need multilingual support I'd probably still be using it.

Use Fathom if: you're on Zoom, you speak English, and you don't want to pay.Skip if: literally any of those three things isn't true.

Read.ai — the one that judges your meetings

Price: Free 5 mtgs/mo · Pro $15/mo · Enterprise $22.50/mo | Accuracy: ~91% English | Languages: 20+ | Platforms: Zoom, Meet, Teams

Read.ai is weird. It's not really a note taker — it's more like a meeting therapist. After every call it gives you a report: how much you talked, who was engaged, when the energy dropped, sentiment analysis. It told me I talked 70% of the time in one meeting. Which, okay, fair point. But do I want an AI judging my meeting style? Some people will love this. I found it mildly stressful.

The transcription itself is fine. About 91%. The free plan is five meetings a month which is barely a trial. Pro at $15/mo is reasonable if you want the analytics. Accuracy is mid-tier — not bad, not great. The meeting coaching stuff is the real product. If you're a manager who runs lots of meetings and wants to improve, Read is interesting. If you just want notes, use something else.

Use Read.ai if: you want to know how your meetings are going, not just what was said.Skip if: you just want transcription and summaries without being graded.

Avoma — enterprise sales, expensive

Price: Startup $19/mo · Org $29/mo · Enterprise $39/mo | Accuracy: ~88% English | Languages: 70+ | Platforms: Zoom, Meet, Teams, Webex, GoToMeeting

Avoma is a lot. It's not a note taker that happens to have sales features — it's a full sales intelligence platform that happens to take notes. Call scoring, coaching, deal risk alerts, pipeline analytics. It claims to improve win rates by 40%. I can't verify that but the features are clearly built for sales orgs that take coaching seriously.

Transcription accuracy was the lowest in my test — around 88%. That's not great. But Avoma supports 70+ languages, which is the broadest of any tool here. The accuracy on non-English is lower than English (obviously) but the breadth is impressive.

Pricing is where it hurts. Startup is $19/mo but the features you actually want — conversation intelligence, revenue intelligence — are add-ons at $29 each per seat. A fully loaded sales seat could cost $77/mo. For a ten-person sales team that's $770 a month. Not cheap. But if it actually improves close rates, it pays for itself. Big "if."

Use Avoma if: you run a sales team and want coaching + analytics, not just notes.Skip if: you're an individual, a small team, or not in sales. It's overkill.

Sembly — the one nobody talks about

Price: Basic $10/mo · Pro $20/mo · MAX $30/mo | Accuracy: ~89% English | Languages: 40+ | Platforms: Zoom, Meet, Teams, Webex

Sembly does something nobody else does: it automatically flags risks and issues in meetings. If someone says "we might miss the deadline" or "the client seems unhappy," Sembly catches it and puts it in a separate section. For project managers and professional services firms, that's a genuinely useful feature. I wasn't expecting to like this tool and I kind of did.

It also has a multi-meeting AI chat — you can ask "what did we decide about the pricing change?" and it searches across all your past meetings. That's the kind of thing that sounds like a gimmick until you need to remember what was decided three months ago and nobody took notes.

Accuracy is 89%. Not great. The interface is less polished than Otter or Fathom. But the risk detection and multi-meeting search make it worth a look if you're in project management or consulting. HIPAA on the MAX plan at $30/mo if that matters to you.

Use Sembly if: you need risk tracking or multi-meeting search.Skip if: raw accuracy is your top priority.

Notion AI Meeting Notes — if you live in Notion

Price: $10/mo add-on (Notion AI) | Accuracy: ~90% English | Languages: English | Platforms: via Notion

Short review: if your team uses Notion for everything, turn this on. It drops meeting summaries directly into your workspace — Summary, Notes, Transcript, three columns, action items assigned to people. No separate app. No copy-paste. It's just there in Notion where everything else already lives.

If you don't use Notion, this is irrelevant. It's not a standalone product. It's a feature. Accuracy is around 90%. English only basically. But the integration is the whole point and for Notion users, it's a no-brainer.

Use it if: you use Notion. Skip if: you don't.

Microsoft Copilot — the expensive default

Price: $30/user/mo | Accuracy: ~91% English | Languages: Multiple via Azure | Platforms: Teams only

If your company is on Microsoft 365, Copilot is the path of least resistance. It's built into Teams. No third-party bot. No data going to another company's servers. Notes land in Word, Outlook, OneNote, Loop. For regulated industries and IT departments that don't want another vendor, this is the sell.

It costs $30 per person per month. That's a lot. Accuracy is fine — 91%. Summaries are decent but less detailed than Otter or HiNoter. The value is the integration and the security, not the note-taking itself. If your CIO says "we're not adding another SaaS tool," Copilot is what you get.

Use Copilot if: you're on M365 and IT says no to everything else.Skip if: you're not on Microsoft, or $30/mo per person sounds like a lot.

HiNoter — the one I actually use now

Price: Free plan available | Accuracy: ~93% | Languages: 50+ with auto-detection | Platforms: Zoom, Meet, Teams

Okay. Conflict of interest alert. I work at HiNoter. I'm going to tell you what's good and what's not, and if you think I'm being dishonest you can skip this section and just use Otter. I won't be offended.

The reason HiNoter exists is because every other tool on this list is bad at non-English meetings. Not "doesn't support" — they technically support other languages, but the accuracy falls off a cliff. I tested Portuguese calls on Otter, Fireflies, Fathom, and Read. They were all somewhere between bad and unusable. HiNoter auto-detects the language being spoken, so if your team switches between English and Portuguese in the same call — which is what happens on every international team — it follows along. That's the thing we built it to do.

It also handles content that isn't meetings. You can throw a YouTube video, an audio file, a PDF, or a recorded video at it and get structured notes. No other tool on this list does that. For people whose work involves more than just live meetings, that matters.

English accuracy was around 93% in my testing. Below Otter's 95%. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But on Portuguese and Spanish calls, HiNoter held steady while everything else fell apart. If your meetings are 100% English, Otter is still the accuracy king. If they're not, this is where HiNoter wins.

The AI summary includes action items with owners and deadlines, mind maps if you're into that, and an AI chat that lets you ask questions about past meetings with source citations. It syncs to Notion, Slack, and Google Docs. There's a free plan.

Where HiNoter falls short: we're newer than Otter. The ecosystem is smaller. CRM integrations aren't as deep as Fireflies or Avoma. If you need Salesforce sync, use Fireflies. If you need English accuracy above all, use Otter. If you need multilingual, that's us.

Use HiNoter if: your team speaks more than one language, or you need to transcribe stuff beyond live meetings.Skip if: English-only and you want the absolute highest accuracy, or you need deep CRM integration.

Notta — budget multilingual

Price: Free (limited) · Pro $13.99/mo | Accuracy: ~90% English | Languages: 58+ | Platforms: Zoom, Meet, Teams, Webex

Notta is the cheap multilingual option. 58 languages, $13.99 a month. The real-time translation feature is the highlight — it transcribes in the original language and translates to English simultaneously. For international teams on a budget, that's a real feature, not a gimmick.

Accuracy is around 90%. The summaries are basic. Speaker labeling was hit or miss. You get what you pay for, but "what you pay for" is pretty reasonable at $14/month for 58 languages. If HiNoter and Avoma are too expensive and you need non-English support, Notta is the fallback.

Use Notta if: you need multiple languages on a budget.Skip if: accuracy or rich integrations matter more than price.

The comparison table

I hate comparison tables but everyone wants one, so here it is. Bookmark this.

Which one should you get

I'll make this fast because you've read enough.

You're solo or freelancing. Fathom if you're on Zoom and English. It's free and it works. Need other languages or platforms? HiNoter's free plan is the other option.

Small team, mostly English. Otter at $10/mo. Don't overthink it. Best accuracy, real-time, solid collaboration. If you're broke, start with Fathom.

Sales team. Fireflies for the CRM integration. Avoma if you want coaching too, but you'll pay $40-77/seat/mo for the full package.

Multilingual team. People mess this up constantly. Most tools claim multilingual support but it's garbage. HiNoter auto-detects language mid-call. Avoma has 70+ languages but lower accuracy. For a team split across the US, Brazil, and Portugal, auto-detection is what actually matters.

Microsoft shop. Copilot. $30/mo is steep but the integration is tight and data stays in Microsoft's perimeter.

Healthcare or legal. Sembly MAX ($30/mo, HIPAA) or Avoma Enterprise ($39/mo, HIPAA). Don't mess around with non-certified tools if patient or client data is involved.

You want free and that's it. Fathom. But Zoom only and English only. Those are the tradeoffs.

FAQ

Are these actually accurate? On clean English with one speaker, yes — 90 to 95%. On real meetings with accents, noise, overlapping speech, and jargon, subtract 5 to 10 points from whatever the marketing page says. Non-English is lower everywhere. That's just the state of the technology right now.

Do they all record the meeting? Most join as a bot and record audio. Some do video too. Always tell people. It's legally required in a lot of places and it's rude regardless of legality.

Can I use one secretly? You can. Don't. Apart from the legal issue, it's a terrible look when someone finds out. And they always find out.

Which has the best free plan? Fathom, no question. Full personal use, no limits. Otter's free plan is 300 minutes which is like five meetings. Read.ai gives you five meetings total. HiNoter has a free plan with multilingual support.

Will these replace me taking notes? For most meetings, yeah. I don't take manual notes anymore unless it's a highly technical call where the exact wording matters. For everything else, the bot handles it and I pay attention to the conversation instead of typing.

How do these handle Portuguese? Badly, mostly. Otter's Portuguese mode exists but accuracy is maybe 80%. Fathom doesn't do Portuguese at all. Fireflies does Spanish okay but Portuguese was rough in my tests. HiNoter was the best I tested for Portuguese — the auto-detection means it doesn't need you to pick a language upfront, which helps a lot when people switch between English and Portuguese mid-sentence. Avoma claims 70+ languages but I didn't test their Portuguese specifically.

That's the whole thing

A month of testing. Ten tools. Five hundred meetings. If you want the one-line version: Otter for English, Fathom for free, Fireflies for sales, HiNoter for anything multilingual, Copilot for Microsoft shops. Pick the one that matches how you work and stop reading reviews.

I'll update this every quarter. Prices change, features get added, new tools show up. If you're reading this more than a few months past January 2025, check the vendor's current pricing page before you commit.