Fathom

Fathom built its reputation on a simple promise: high-quality AI meeting notes for free. In a market where most competitors charge $15 to $30 per month, offering its core product at no cost made Fathom one of the most popular meeting assistants for individuals and small teams. The product backs up the pitch. It generates clean, well-structured summaries that capture the substance of a meeting without the bloat.

The experience is deliberately streamlined. Install the app, connect your calendar, and Fathom joins your Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams calls automatically. The desktop app also supports bot-free capture, recording audio and transcript directly without a visible bot joining the call. After the meeting you get a recording, transcript, and AI summary within minutes. The summaries are genuinely good, concise enough to be useful and detailed enough to hold the nuance. You can highlight moments during a call, and Fathom links each highlight to the corresponding point in the recording.

The company has spent the past year pushing well beyond simple note-taking. A 2026 platform update rebuilt the Mac desktop app around real-time summaries that fill in as the conversation happens, alongside a scratchpad and a unified post-meeting workspace. Fathom also migrated from fathom.video to fathom.ai, a rebrand that tracks its shift toward being a data layer for AI agents rather than just a recorder.

Key Features

Fathom records and transcribes across Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams, and now captures Slack Huddles too. Capture comes in three modes: a bot that joins with full video and audio, bot-free capture of audio plus transcript, and a transcript-only mode, all with speaker attribution and all available on the free plan. The AI generates summaries in multiple formats, with more than fifteen expert templates on paid tiers covering sales calls, customer success, interviews, and more. Transcription spans roughly 25 to 38 languages depending on the source you trust.

The standout addition is Ask Fathom, a conversational assistant that searches across your calls. It started as a single-call feature and is now account-wide, so it can answer questions across every meeting you have access to, surface patterns across conversations, and run role-based prompts tuned for sales, customer success, product, and operations teams. On top of that, Fathom shipped a public API and Model Context Protocol (MCP) support, which lets you query your meetings from inside ChatGPT and Claude and use Fathom as a data source for custom agents and workflows. Integrations cover Slack, Notion, Asana, and CRM platforms like HubSpot and Salesforce.

Pricing

Fathom now publishes transparent, tiered pricing rather than the “available on request” pricing it once hid behind. The free plan remains genuinely generous: unlimited recording, transcription, and storage, plus instant AI summaries and limited single-call use of Ask Fathom. The catch is that advanced AI summaries are capped at your first five calls each month, after which only the General/Enhanced template is available; AI-generated action items, AI follow-up emails, custom summaries, and full Ask Fathom access all require a paid plan.

Above the free tier sit four options. Premium runs $20/mo, or $16/mo billed annually, and is the entry paid plan for individuals; it unlocks the advanced summary templates, action items, and all-call Ask Fathom. Team costs $19/user/mo, or $15 annually, with a two-seat minimum, and adds shared workspaces. Business is $34/user/mo, or $25 annually, with a two-seat minimum, and layers on a CRM deal view, coaching scorecards, and custom data retention. One independent source noted Premium rose from around $15 to its current rate, so expect the individual plan to keep landing near $20. For an individual who lives in the free tier, Fathom is still the obvious first choice; for teams that need action items and CRM tie-ins, the paid ladder is now easy to read.

Privacy & Security

Fathom processes all audio through its cloud infrastructure, so your recordings are uploaded to and handled on external servers. The company states it does not use customer data to train AI models and encrypts data in transit and at rest, and Business plans add custom data-retention controls for teams that need them. The core consideration stays the same: your conversations pass through third-party servers, and the expanded LLM integrations mean that querying your meetings through ChatGPT or Claude routes data accordingly. For casual notes where content sensitivity is low, that is usually fine. For confidential or regulated discussions, the cloud model introduces risk that controls can reduce but not eliminate, so review the privacy policy against your data-governance requirements.

Best For

Fathom is the ideal choice for individuals and small teams who want quality meeting notes without spending money, and the free tier is more than enough for many of them. Freelancers, founders, and anyone tired of writing recaps by hand will get real value out of it. The 2026 additions also make it a credible fit for revenue and operations teams that want to query their call history through Ask Fathom or wire meetings into agent workflows via the API and MCP. It is less suited for organizations with strict data-governance requirements, anyone who needs their assistant to work offline, or mobile-first users who need capture in their pocket, since the announced iOS app is not yet live.

How Fathom Compares to Hedy

Fathom’s biggest draw is price: free is hard to argue with, and the quality at that price point is impressive. Hedy offers a free tier as well, with the full experience on a subscription. The two tools have converged on some features that used to separate them. Fathom now offers bot-free capture and real-time summaries that update during the call, so the old “AI analysis is post-meeting only” criticism no longer holds, and its account-wide Ask Fathom plus API and MCP access make it a strong knowledge layer across past meetings.

Where Hedy keeps its edge is architecture. Hedy runs end-to-end on-device, with transcription, summaries, and real-time coaching all processed locally, so your audio never leaves your machine. Fathom, even in bot-free mode, sends everything to the cloud for processing. Hedy works offline; Fathom requires a connection. Hedy never puts a bot in the room and captures system audio across any platform, phone call, or in-person conversation, whereas Fathom’s capture, while broader than before with Slack Huddles and bot-free modes, is still oriented around scheduled video calls and has no shipped mobile app yet. If budget is your only constraint, Fathom is excellent. If on-device privacy, offline use, and local real-time intelligence matter, Hedy justifies its modest price difference.