Here is a thing I noticed after recording 32 meetings over about six weeks to test these tools: almost none of the errors happen during the recording itself. The transcription accuracy is high across most of the tools. The failures happen later, when the summary gets generated and it flattens a nuanced conversation into three bullet points, two of which are action items nobody actually committed to.
That is the problem worth solving. Not “can the tool capture the audio” but “does the summary you get afterward match what actually happened.”
Six tools, across four meeting types
I tested Craqly, Otter.ai, Fireflies.ai, Fathom, tl;dv, and Microsoft Copilot. The meeting types were sales calls, internal syncs, one-on-ones, and team standup variants. Speaker identification accuracy was my main evaluation axis for the transcription side. Summary usefulness was harder to score objectively but I tried to track how often I had to manually edit the output before it was sendable.
Quick notes on each:
Otter.ai gives you 300 free minutes per month, which is more generous than most. It sends a visible bot into your meetings, though, which some participants notice and occasionally object to. The accuracy is solid. The summaries are inconsistent, ranging from genuinely useful to almost comically incomplete. Paid plans start at $16.99/month.
Fireflies.ai also joins as a visible bot (there is a “NoBot” mode on paid plans). The free tier is more limited than Otter’s. The CRM integration is where it pulls ahead, especially if your team already uses HubSpot or Salesforce, because syncing call notes directly without copy-paste saves meaningful time. Paid plans start around $18/month.
Fathom has no visible bot for Zoom users, which is a meaningful advantage. The free tier is genuinely unlimited for Zoom meetings. The $32/user/month team plan is steep, but the individual free tier is probably the best free option in this list if you mostly run Zoom calls and want clean summaries without a bot joining.
tl;dv has an unlimited free tier and partial bot visibility depending on the platform. It is competent at summarization without being exceptional at anything. The interface is cleaner than some of the others.
Microsoft Copilot requires a Microsoft 365 subscription plus the Copilot add-on at $30/user/month. If your organization is already deep in the Microsoft stack, the native Teams integration is genuinely the cleanest experience in this comparison. If you are not already paying for 365, the per-user cost makes no sense.
Craqly handles meeting notes alongside its other conversation tools (interview assistance, sales coaching). For sales calls specifically, it logs summaries and talking points in a way that connects naturally to follow-up prep. The meeting notes feature is not its only job, which matters if you want one tool covering more than one use case.
Speaker identification: where most tools still struggle
Across the 32 meetings I tracked, speaker identification was correct and consistent in 28 of them. The four failures all involved meetings with more than four participants, where two or more people had similar vocal cadence or were in the same room sharing a microphone. This is a general transcription AI limitation, not a specific tool failure, though some tools handle it better than others when given prior meeting history to calibrate against.
Otter.ai’s speaker identification improved noticeably after the third or fourth meeting with the same participants, which suggests it is doing some per-speaker calibration over time. I do not have data on whether the other tools do the same thing, and none of them document this behavior clearly in their help centers.
The time savings math
If you save 15 minutes per meeting on notes and you have 10 meetings a week, that is 2.5 hours back per week, roughly 125 hours a year. At any professional hourly rate, the math justifies even the pricier options. The problem is that the 15-minute savings assumes the AI summary is good enough to use directly. In my testing, the “good enough to send directly” rate was about 65-70% across the tools. The rest required at least some manual editing, which reduces the actual time savings.
What I would recommend by use case
If you are on a tight budget and mostly run Zoom: Fathom free tier. It is the cleanest experience at zero cost for that specific scenario.
If you need CRM sync and are running sales calls: Fireflies.ai or Craqly, depending on whether you want the note-taking as a standalone tool or as part of a broader AI assistant setup that also covers your live sales coaching needs.
If your organization is on Microsoft 365 already: Copilot, because the integration quality justifies the cost in that specific context and probably nowhere else.
For everything else, Otter.ai’s free tier buys you enough time to figure out whether you actually need the paid version before committing.
One thing worth noting
The LinkedIn Economic Graph research has documented that meeting time for knowledge workers has increased substantially over the past five years, with much of that growth in the 2020-2023 period. AI note-taking tools are a real productivity response to a real structural problem. The question is not whether to use one. It is which one handles your specific meeting types without creating new overhead in the process of reducing existing overhead.
That is a harder question than most of the marketing suggests.