Hello! I want to start with something honest: Fathom is a genuinely good product. If you run all your meetings on Zoom and just want clean, accurate notes and transcripts, it’s hard to beat, especially because the free tier for individual users is actually unlimited. That’s rare.
So why am I writing a comparison at all? Because I ran 14 meetings through both tools (6 Zoom calls, 4 Teams calls, 2 Google Meet calls, and 2 phone calls) and found a pretty meaningful difference in what “works” means for each of them.
The core difference, explained quickly
Fathom integrates natively with Zoom. It joins your Zoom meetings as a bot, captures everything, and produces excellent transcripts and AI summaries. On Teams and Google Meet it still works, but it uses a bot-style approach that some participants notice and some meeting policies block.
Craqly runs as a desktop overlay on top of whatever meeting application you’re in. It doesn’t join as a bot, it works more like screen-aware software that listens through your system audio. This means it doesn’t care whether you’re on Zoom, Teams, Meet, a phone call, or a platform I haven’t mentioned. In my 14-meeting test, I got consistent notes from all 14 with Craqly. With Fathom, I got excellent notes from the 6 Zoom sessions and mixed results on the others.
(Side note: one of the Teams meetings had a policy setting that blocked external bots. Craqly had no issue with that call. Fathom couldn’t join.)
Note quality: are they actually different?
On Zoom specifically, I thought Fathom’s summaries were slightly cleaner than Craqly’s. The formatting was better, the action items more clearly extracted, and the speaker attribution more accurate. If I had to grade the Zoom-only output: Fathom A-, Craqly B+. Not a huge gap, but real.
On Teams and Meet calls, Craqly was meaningfully better just because it was consistently capturing the audio. A B+ on a call you couldn’t otherwise record is better than an A- that only sometimes works.
The phone calls were the most interesting case. Fathom doesn’t really handle phone calls. Craqly captured them fine because it’s listening to system audio and doesn’t need to be “in” the meeting at all.
Real-time features
Fathom’s product is entirely post-meeting. You end the call, you get a transcript and summary. That’s the whole loop.
Craqly has live assist features that surface relevant context, talking points, or follow-up prompts during the call. Whether you want this depends on the meeting type. For a sales call or a job interview, having a real-time layer available is potentially useful. For a team standup or a routine vendor call, it adds noise you probably don’t need.
I actually don’t use the live assist for most internal meetings. I mostly use it for calls where I need to remember context from previous conversations or where I might get asked something that requires looking something up quickly. For those, it’s useful. For everything else, I have it running but don’t actively reference it.
Pricing: this is where Fathom wins
Fathom’s individual free tier is genuinely unlimited. Unlimited meetings, unlimited transcripts, no expiration on the storage. That’s an unusually strong free product and it’s worth acknowledging directly. Their team tier runs $32/user/month.
Craqly’s free tier is more limited, with a paid tier around $15/month. If you’re purely a Zoom user and the free tier covers your needs, Fathom is obviously the better value. The $15/month for Craqly makes sense if you need cross-platform support or the real-time features.
There’s also an ecosystem consideration. Fathom has strong integrations with HubSpot, Salesforce, and other CRMs, it can auto-populate call notes directly into deal records. According to Stack Overflow’s 2024 Developer Survey, CRM integration is one of the top-rated features for productivity tools among technical and sales professionals. If your team is Salesforce-heavy, Fathom’s native integration is a real advantage.
What I’d actually recommend
If your whole world is Zoom and you want the best possible notes at zero cost: Fathom. It’s not even close for that specific scenario.
If you’re on a mixed platform environment (Teams + Zoom + Meet + occasional phone), or if you do sales calls and interviews where live assist helps: Craqly covers those cases more consistently.
According to LinkedIn Economic Graph’s research on workplace productivity trends, meeting documentation and follow-up are consistently ranked among the highest time costs for knowledge workers. Both tools address that problem, just from different angles.
The thing I keep coming back to is that “best meeting notes tool” is the wrong frame. The right question is: where do your meetings actually happen, and what do you need from the notes afterward? Answer that and the choice becomes pretty obvious.