Best AI note taker for meetings and calls
Granola if you hate bots joining your calls. Otter if you want the most free minutes.
The short answer
For most people, Granola is the nicest AI note taker: no bot joins your call, it listens through your computer and turns your rough notes into clean ones. The catch is the free plan only keeps 30 days of history. If you want a free tool that joins Zoom, Teams or Google Meet for you, Otter gives you 300 minutes a month.
Why Granola is our pick
Most meeting AIs send a little bot into your call. Clients notice, and some find it creepy. Granola doesn’t. It records the audio on your own device, you jot a few words as you go, and afterwards it fills in the gaps with a proper summary. It works on Mac, Windows, iPhone and Android, and Granola says it deletes the audio after transcribing.
The free Basic plan gives you AI notes and chat across your meetings, but only 30 days of history. Business is $14 per person a month and keeps everything, plus follow-up emails and links to Notion, HubSpot and Zapier. If you run a small business on calls, that’s fair money. Do tell people you’re taking AI notes; it’s polite, and in some places it’s the law.
Otter: the generous free plan
Otter is the old hand here. Its free plan joins Zoom, Teams and Google Meet, transcribes live, labels who’s speaking, and gives you 300 transcription minutes a month. That’s about five hour-long calls. You only get 3 file uploads ever on free, though, so it’s not great for transcribing old recordings.
Pro is $16.99 a month, or $8.49 a month if you pay yearly, and bumps you to 1,200 minutes and meetings up to 90 minutes long. Not great for: people who dislike a bot showing up in the participant list.
Fireflies, for teams that live in a CRM
Fireflies is built more for sales and team use: searchable call libraries, topic tracking, talk-time stats and lots of integrations. It has a free tier, and it can also record from a Chrome extension without a bot. For one person who just wants notes, it’s more tool than you need.
Which one we’d start with
Freelancer or consultant on client calls: Granola. Student or someone on lots of free Zoom calls: Otter. A sales team that wants every call searchable: Fireflies. All three let you try before you pay, so run one real week of meetings through your pick before committing.
Tools in this take
Granola
Productivity · Free planA meeting notepad for your computer. You jot quick notes during a call and the AI turns them into clean notes. No bot joins the meeting.
Otter.ai
Productivity · Free planJoins your online meetings and writes down everything said, then gives you a summary.
Fireflies.ai
Productivity · Free planA meeting note-taker for teams, especially sales teams. Records calls and connects to your customer list.
Sources
Published October 14, 2026. This is ShipRadar’s editorial opinion. Claims are paraphrased from the sources above; we don’t invent quotes, ratings or numbers.